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

By Grace Elizabeth Hale

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679776206
• ISBN13: 9780679776208
• Release Date: June 1999
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Segregation Artfully Explained

Lately, I find myself rereading books that challenge my understanding (not to mention my preconceived notions) of race history, but none more than Grace Elizabeth Hale's "Making Whiteness." This gem of a book ultimately defines the construction of race in the early 20th Century South and is written in a style reminiscent of Du Bois and Langston Hughes. It is an intelligent and informative examination of "class exploitation, disempowerment and racial privilege" that dares to reimagine the concept of racial integration. To quote from the book: "We need to remember that difference is created within, not before, our communities; that difference is created within, and not before, our histories; that difference is created within, and not before, ourselves." Over the past few months, I have amassed several books on race, segregation, Reconstruction, lynchings, Jim Crow, etc., and I consider "Making Whiteness" a cornerstone in my library.

A poigant study of the human construction of racism.

Dr. Hale has written an excellent work that treats the psycho-social construction of racial predjudice in America. This work is must reading for all those interested in riding their minds, and by association, our nation of the politics of racial pollerization. Her vivid treatment of barbarious lynching will leave the reader either profoundly angry or demonstratively abashed about what horror we are capable of her in the United States. The President's national commission on race would do well to read and openly discuss this grounbreaking and poignant volume.