Making whiteness : the culture of segregation in the South, 1890-1940 / Grace Elizabeth Hale.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hale, Grace Elizabeth.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Segregation.

History.

Southern States--Race relations.

Southern States.

Race relations.

Southern States--Social conditions--1865-1945.

Social conditions.

African Americans--Segregation--Southern States--History.

African Americans.

White people--Race identity--Southern States.

White people.

White people--Race identity.

Physical Description:

xii, 427 pages, 8 unnumbered pages : illustrations ; 21 cm

Edition:

First Vintage Books edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Vintage Books, 1999.

Summary:

In this brilliant and indispensable study of the making of segregationist culture, Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how what W. E. B. Du Bois called the "color line" came to define American identity itself: whiteness became the standard, desirable image of aspiring middle-class life while blackness was consigned to the margins, to the back of the bus, and became a marker, for a white majority, of social pathology. Nowhere was the identification of blackness with inferiority more obsessively enforced than in the South, where the law cast a blind eye on lynching as public entertainment and where white children were taught that Negroes "must be kept in their place."

Drawing on a fascinating and often disturbing array of cultural artifacts and events, Making Whiteness shatters the habitual assumption that racism is an unfortunate fact of human nature, and points the way toward a truly egalitarian and integrated society.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [381]-408) and index.

ISBN:

0679776206

9780679776208

OCLC:

41887792