Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 - Hardcover

Hale, Grace Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679442634 ISBN 13: 9780679442639

Publisher: Pantheon, 1998

Synopsis

Making Whiteness is a profoundly important work that explains how and why whiteness came to be such a crucial, embattled--and distorting--component of twentieth-century American identity.  In intricately textured detail and with passionately mastered analysis, Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how, when faced with the active citizenship of their ex-slaves after the Civil War, white southerners re-established their dominance through a cultural system based on violence and physical separation.  And in a bold and transformative analysis of the meaning of segregation for the nation as a whole, she explains how white southerners' creation of modern "whiteness" was, beginning in the 1920s, taken up by the rest of the nation as a way of enforcing a new social hierarchy while at the same time creating the illusion of a national, egalitarian, consumerist democracy.

By showing the very recent historical "making" of contemporary American whiteness and by examining how the culture of segregation, in all its murderous contradictions, was lived, Hale makes it possible to imagine a future outside it. Her vision holds out the difficult promise of a truly democratic American identity whose possibilities are no longer limited and disfigured by race.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Scholarship, even when thorough, doesn't always enlighten. For that one needs the kind of surgical insight Grace Hale has applied to her impeccable research. Making Whiteness is both brilliant and essential."

--Toni Morrison

"Making Whiteness shows us that the racism we think is timeless is a modern creation for which not only the South but the entire nation is responsible. This brilliant study also tells us how we may begin to reimagine integration, not as an elusive dream but as an everyday practice."

--Jan Lewis, author of Pursuit of Happiness: Families and Values in Jefferson's Virginia

"Grace Elizabeth Hale's brilliant and original analysis of our post-slavery concept of race just might be the richly hued book that will point the way out of the white-black wilderness in which we need not be trapped."
--William S. McFeely, author of Frederick Douglass

About the Author:

Grace Elizabeth Hale is an assistant professor of American history at the University of Virginia.  She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679442634
• ISBN 13: 9780679442639
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 427