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

About the Author

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

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

From the Inside Flap

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 h

Reviews

For those who can get through the verbiage, there is a wealth of detail about how whites developed, maintained and refined this "culture of segregation" in the face of significant economic and technological change.

First-timer Hale's impressive examination of the Jim Crow Southan erudite intellectual survey of the sweeping social, historical, and economic trends that shaped white racial identity in opposition to blacknessis obscured by deadly academic jargon. The central myth Hale debunks is that whiteness is an organic, rather than manufactured, racial identitythat it is, somehow, the American norm. She identifies several large cultural forces that influenced white racial identity. The replacement of local merchandise with a national mass market, for example, gave rise to advertising (much of it created in the North) that manipulated southerners' nostalgic remembrance of loyal, subservient slaves by using African-American icons like Aunt Jemima to sell goods to a nationwide audiencepresumed to be entirely white. Advances in printing technology made it easier to distribute demeaning images of African-Americans, reinforcing negative stereotypes. Just as black racial identity was largely defined in relation to whiteness after Reconstruction, Hale asserts, whiteness was defined by blackness. Analyzing how whites of different economic and educational backgrounds shared a unified sense of supremacy, she fleshes out Ralph Ellison's famous declaration: ``Southern whites cannot walk, talk, sing, conceive of laws or justice, think of sex, love, the family or freedom without responding to the presence of Negroes.'' But in place of Ellison's simple eloquence, Hale raises an impenetrable thicket of theoretical jargon (terms like transhistorical, isomorphic, and dialectics rain like candy from a Mardi Gras float). She glosses the Civil War's outcome thus: ``Union victory delegitimated that nascent nationalist collectivity, the Confederacy.'' Furthermore, her contention that ``this corresponding depth of racial obsession occurred only with passing'' for African-Americans spectacularly understates the totality with which whites controlled black life during Jim Crow's dark reign. One senses in Hale's (American History/Univ. Of Virginia) cogent, encyclopedic scholarship the debut of an important new intellectual voiceall the more reason to regret the cloaking of provocative thinking in the fusty duds of academic prose. (8 pages b&w photos) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Confronted with losing the distinction between free and slave, rebel Southerners created a common whiteness to solve their post-Civil War-era problems, argues Hale (history, Univ. of Virginia). They built a nationalism of denial, a world of white and black, of power and fear. In literature, the marketplace, and public spectacle, they crafted a collectivity based on segregation as a culture, making whiteness a racial identity and the American norm even while asserting that it was natural and not the product of human choice. And as Hale shows in this absorbing cultural history of racial construction, it wasn't just white Southerners who embraced the individual and collective identity of superiority but Northerners as well. Her thesis on the evolution of racial identity in this country is not entirely new but is greatly enhanced by her fine literary and cultural detail. This work complements Ian Haney-Lopez's White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (LJ 12/95) and David Theo Goldberg's Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Blackwell, 1993) and his more recent Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (Routledge, 1997). Recommended for collections on the South and U.S. culture, history, or society.AThomas Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

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