Status
Available
Collection
Publication
New York : Pantheon Books, c1998.
Description
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.nbsp;nbsp;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.nbsp;nbsp;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.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member DarthDeverell
In Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890 – 1940, Grace Elizabeth Hale argues, “Former Confederates, a growing working class, embattled farmers, western settlers, a defensive northeastern elite, women’s rights advocates, an increasingly powerful scientific community,
Hale writes, “Whites created the culture of segregation in large part to counter black success, to make a myth of absolute racial difference, to stop the rising” (pg. 21). Further, “Racial essentialism, the conception of sets of personal characteristics as biologically determined racial identities, grew in popularity among whites in tandem with the rise of the new black middle class and its increasing visibility, especially in cities” (pg. 21). She continues, “By the dawning of the twentieth century in the South and by the 1910s across the nation, racial essentialism dominated white thinking, dividing the world into black and white” (pg. 22). Examining the memory of the Civil War, Hale writes, “The rise of racial thinking and white supremacist ideology throughout late nineteenth-century American culture had in part been an attempt to ground this feared mutability of identity in the seeming concreteness of blood, science, and the body. The modernity of racial ‘science,’ then, could satisfy forward-looking white northerners while backward-facing white southerners could find assurance in resurrected and reconditioned pro-slavery polemics” (pg. 47-48). Furthermore, “Sectional reconciliation within a common whiteness, then, provided a common grounding for late nineteenth-century activism, from the suffrage and labor movements to progressive reform and the expansion of American imperialism” (pg. 68).
Turning to the role of white women, Hale writes, “Based in the new white home, imaginatively as well as physically supported by the domestic labor of African American women, white southern ‘ladies’ exerted a powerful influence on an emerging culture of segregation and the meaning of whiteness in this new southern world” (pg. 88). She continues, “An emerging southern middle class, then, created the culture of segregation in part by fusing the northern middle-class antebellum precedent of posing the ‘home’ as a symbolic counterweight to the expanding role of the market with a white southern sense of the inviolability of white supremacy. To the segregation of home and work, middle-class southern whites added, drawing upon the traditions of an antebellum nonslaveholding class, the segregation of white and black” (pg. 93).
Turning to consumerism, Hale writes, “Far from a racial utopia and less often the subject of literary celebration, the multiplying spaces of consumption within the growing towns and cities of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South became key sites for the white southern middle class’s creation of and African American resistance to the culture of segregation” (pg. 123). More importantly, “Beneath white concern about racial disorder in a changing southern society lay a fear of the increasing possibility of making a mistake in identifying strangers. The more varied ingredients of white racial anxiety simmered in a stock of white concerns about racial purity” (pg. 129). Hale continues, “Segregation, then, could never reattach racial and class identities, could not make middle-class blacks poorly clothed, poorly educated, and poorly spoken and thus more easily identified by whites of all classes as inferior. Instead, systemized racial separation on railroads and streetcars worked to create and extend white supremacy in other ways” (pg. 131). In this system, “African Americans came to symbolize not just slavery, the opposite of white freedom, but also the more rural, premodern innocence whites had left behind. Minstrelsy entertained not just through ridicule but also through nostalgia” (pg. 153). While “storekeepers to a large degree controlled what African American southerners bought with their limited credit and rarer cash,” the “country stores were places of racial mixing, and southern African Americans faced less discrimination there than at the courthouse or polling place” (pg. 172-173).
Turning to lynching, Hale describes the acts of lynching as, “Communal spectacles of torture that helped ease white fears of a raceless consumer society even as they helped structure segregation, the policy that would regulate this new southern world. Publicly resolving the race, gender, and class ambiguities at the very center of the culture of segregation, spectacle lynchings brutally conjured a collective, all-powerful whiteness even as they made the color line seem modern, civilized, and sane” (pg. 203). Hale concludes, “These grisly rituals ensured that the whiteness segregation created remained unbroken within by gender and class divisions and unchallenged without by a black autonomy nurtured on the ground of separation” (pg. 238).
Returning to class, Hale writes, “For this white southern middle class, especially the generation born around 1900, southern whiteness was less an identity to create and empower within an internal dynamic of white versus black and an external dialect of southern versus northern. The solidification of the culture of segregation, in fact, created the space, narrow at first and yet widening under the pressure of national depression in the next decade, within which middle-class whites could begin to disagree about the nature of their regional identity” (pg. 243). Having secured a definition of whiteness through North/South reconciliation, the various groups could now focus on their local cultures.
Hale concludes that, between 1890 and 1940, “the culture of segregation turned the entire South into a racial theater of racial difference, a minstrel show writ large upon the land” (pg. 284). Fearing a rising black middle class, whites turned to “enactment of racial difference” (pg. 284). Finally, “segregation, in turn, helped middle-class white southerners at least mediate the effects of the incorporation of the southern economy into America’s expansive and modernizing capitalism” (pg. 284).
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and others, simultaneously but for different reasons, found race useful in creating new collective identities to replace older, more individual, and local groundings of self. As important, these mass racial meanings were made and marked at a time when technological change made the cheap production of visual imagery possible and the development of a mass market provided a financial incentive – selling through advertising – to circulate the imagery” (pg. 7). Her argument moves roughly chronologically, invoking topics such as memory and consumerism as she examines the intertwined roles of race and gender.Hale writes, “Whites created the culture of segregation in large part to counter black success, to make a myth of absolute racial difference, to stop the rising” (pg. 21). Further, “Racial essentialism, the conception of sets of personal characteristics as biologically determined racial identities, grew in popularity among whites in tandem with the rise of the new black middle class and its increasing visibility, especially in cities” (pg. 21). She continues, “By the dawning of the twentieth century in the South and by the 1910s across the nation, racial essentialism dominated white thinking, dividing the world into black and white” (pg. 22). Examining the memory of the Civil War, Hale writes, “The rise of racial thinking and white supremacist ideology throughout late nineteenth-century American culture had in part been an attempt to ground this feared mutability of identity in the seeming concreteness of blood, science, and the body. The modernity of racial ‘science,’ then, could satisfy forward-looking white northerners while backward-facing white southerners could find assurance in resurrected and reconditioned pro-slavery polemics” (pg. 47-48). Furthermore, “Sectional reconciliation within a common whiteness, then, provided a common grounding for late nineteenth-century activism, from the suffrage and labor movements to progressive reform and the expansion of American imperialism” (pg. 68).
Turning to the role of white women, Hale writes, “Based in the new white home, imaginatively as well as physically supported by the domestic labor of African American women, white southern ‘ladies’ exerted a powerful influence on an emerging culture of segregation and the meaning of whiteness in this new southern world” (pg. 88). She continues, “An emerging southern middle class, then, created the culture of segregation in part by fusing the northern middle-class antebellum precedent of posing the ‘home’ as a symbolic counterweight to the expanding role of the market with a white southern sense of the inviolability of white supremacy. To the segregation of home and work, middle-class southern whites added, drawing upon the traditions of an antebellum nonslaveholding class, the segregation of white and black” (pg. 93).
Turning to consumerism, Hale writes, “Far from a racial utopia and less often the subject of literary celebration, the multiplying spaces of consumption within the growing towns and cities of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South became key sites for the white southern middle class’s creation of and African American resistance to the culture of segregation” (pg. 123). More importantly, “Beneath white concern about racial disorder in a changing southern society lay a fear of the increasing possibility of making a mistake in identifying strangers. The more varied ingredients of white racial anxiety simmered in a stock of white concerns about racial purity” (pg. 129). Hale continues, “Segregation, then, could never reattach racial and class identities, could not make middle-class blacks poorly clothed, poorly educated, and poorly spoken and thus more easily identified by whites of all classes as inferior. Instead, systemized racial separation on railroads and streetcars worked to create and extend white supremacy in other ways” (pg. 131). In this system, “African Americans came to symbolize not just slavery, the opposite of white freedom, but also the more rural, premodern innocence whites had left behind. Minstrelsy entertained not just through ridicule but also through nostalgia” (pg. 153). While “storekeepers to a large degree controlled what African American southerners bought with their limited credit and rarer cash,” the “country stores were places of racial mixing, and southern African Americans faced less discrimination there than at the courthouse or polling place” (pg. 172-173).
Turning to lynching, Hale describes the acts of lynching as, “Communal spectacles of torture that helped ease white fears of a raceless consumer society even as they helped structure segregation, the policy that would regulate this new southern world. Publicly resolving the race, gender, and class ambiguities at the very center of the culture of segregation, spectacle lynchings brutally conjured a collective, all-powerful whiteness even as they made the color line seem modern, civilized, and sane” (pg. 203). Hale concludes, “These grisly rituals ensured that the whiteness segregation created remained unbroken within by gender and class divisions and unchallenged without by a black autonomy nurtured on the ground of separation” (pg. 238).
Returning to class, Hale writes, “For this white southern middle class, especially the generation born around 1900, southern whiteness was less an identity to create and empower within an internal dynamic of white versus black and an external dialect of southern versus northern. The solidification of the culture of segregation, in fact, created the space, narrow at first and yet widening under the pressure of national depression in the next decade, within which middle-class whites could begin to disagree about the nature of their regional identity” (pg. 243). Having secured a definition of whiteness through North/South reconciliation, the various groups could now focus on their local cultures.
Hale concludes that, between 1890 and 1940, “the culture of segregation turned the entire South into a racial theater of racial difference, a minstrel show writ large upon the land” (pg. 284). Fearing a rising black middle class, whites turned to “enactment of racial difference” (pg. 284). Finally, “segregation, in turn, helped middle-class white southerners at least mediate the effects of the incorporation of the southern economy into America’s expansive and modernizing capitalism” (pg. 284).
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LibraryThing member drbrand
In order to justify a segregated society, the American South constructed whiteness as the norm and relegated blackness to the perimeter of mainstream culture. Hale’s insightful study of white Southerners’ methods of distancing and identity construction is carefully laid out in Making Whiteness.
In spite of the ambitious nature of her project, Hale does a remarkable job of illustrating the construction of segregation and its inherent tenuousness. She draws from remarkable sources, including local newspapers from small southern towns boasting of mobs torturing black men in the defense of southern womanhood, as well as the work of scholars from historical, literary, sociological, and political backgrounds. Comparative literary analysis of divergent works like Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and Smith’s Strange Fruit is coupled with photographic analysis of blacks and whites shopping side by side in the early twentieth century, providing the reader, no matter what discipline, some point of engagement with her research. Well organized and well executed, Making Whiteness provides a unique insight into the justifications and social strategies of southern whites to maintain power over their former slaves, as well as black responses and resistance to those efforts by the likes of early activists Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. DuBois.
One of the more interesting parts of the book occurs in the epilogue, in which Hale traces out the subsequent historical changes that eventually took place after the developments detailed in the body of her work. The final two pages of her book warn that the social implications of her work are still relevant today, optimistically calling for a restoration of faith in “humanity’s ability to effect progressive change." Scholarship as overt activism does cause one to pause and wonder if a political agenda may have affected Hale’s work. While the politics are fairly broad and non-offensive, she obviously sees her work as part of a process of instigating and perpetuating social change in racial relations. Reservations only occur to the extent that political bias might have directed what was included and what may have been left out of her research. Hale’s wealth of sources and extensive endnotes indicate that concern is most likely unmerited.
Making Whiteness implies the possible changes that can be made to avoid the illogical justifications of segregation from ever occurring again. Racism is not inherent to the human condition, according to Hale, but is created from within cultures and societies. Therefore, it can be unmade.
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She deftly charts the construction of the institution of segregation from the end of Reconstruction to what is arguably the beginning of black civil rights consciousness during World War II. The dialectic construction of black identity based on paternal fantasies and fear is described as occurring concurrently with the creation of the Lost Cause and Old South myths in the late nineteenth century—thereby creating whiteness and its other, blackness. Hale then recounts two cultural revolutions that occurred at the turn of the century and grew to complicate and eventually undermine white identity as separate from black: the domestic shift from plantation life to the white middle class, and the development of modern consumerism in the southern United States. Both changes, one private and one public, necessitated the need for southern whites to create public and powerful means to reestablish their primacy in the face of ambiguous racial relationships in the home and in the store—Hale suggests that spectacle lynchings and public monuments served this purpose. Her conclusions indicate that southern violence towards blacks inevitably caused larger American sentiment to wane in support of white supremacy as it manifested itself in the South. In addition, the interaction between blacks and whites in consumerism and domestic service served to undermine the separation that occurred in other public spaces causing African-Americans in the region to begin boldly demanding equal rights in all spheres of society.In spite of the ambitious nature of her project, Hale does a remarkable job of illustrating the construction of segregation and its inherent tenuousness. She draws from remarkable sources, including local newspapers from small southern towns boasting of mobs torturing black men in the defense of southern womanhood, as well as the work of scholars from historical, literary, sociological, and political backgrounds. Comparative literary analysis of divergent works like Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and Smith’s Strange Fruit is coupled with photographic analysis of blacks and whites shopping side by side in the early twentieth century, providing the reader, no matter what discipline, some point of engagement with her research. Well organized and well executed, Making Whiteness provides a unique insight into the justifications and social strategies of southern whites to maintain power over their former slaves, as well as black responses and resistance to those efforts by the likes of early activists Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. DuBois.
One of the more interesting parts of the book occurs in the epilogue, in which Hale traces out the subsequent historical changes that eventually took place after the developments detailed in the body of her work. The final two pages of her book warn that the social implications of her work are still relevant today, optimistically calling for a restoration of faith in “humanity’s ability to effect progressive change." Scholarship as overt activism does cause one to pause and wonder if a political agenda may have affected Hale’s work. While the politics are fairly broad and non-offensive, she obviously sees her work as part of a process of instigating and perpetuating social change in racial relations. Reservations only occur to the extent that political bias might have directed what was included and what may have been left out of her research. Hale’s wealth of sources and extensive endnotes indicate that concern is most likely unmerited.
Making Whiteness implies the possible changes that can be made to avoid the illogical justifications of segregation from ever occurring again. Racism is not inherent to the human condition, according to Hale, but is created from within cultures and societies. Therefore, it can be unmade.
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Subjects
Language
Physical description
xii, 427 p.; 25 cm
ISBN
0679442634 / 9780679442639