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Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940
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, whi...more
Paperback, 448 pages
Published
August 25th 2010
by Vintage
(first published 1998)
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In attempting to analyze the tragedy of white racism in American history, Hale reduces it to the clinical. Certainly, there are insights to be gained from her reading of systematic racist oppression, but I wonder if the practical outworkings of these systems were quite so monolithic as she implies - not that I think some areas of contemporary white culture were somehow immune to racialism, but rather that individuals acted out of their own personal prejudices as much as societal pressures. In th...more
The long chapter on lyching balanced and amplified Orlando Patterson's discussions. Hale's careful construction and defense of her concept of the "spectacle lynching" as a phenomenon of 20th century consumer culture, specifically a product of the combined influence of the railroad, telephone, and newspapers is convincing. Calls into question Patterson's somewhat mystical concept of lynching as a modern manifestation of something ancient. Hale's discussion and appreciation of W.J. Cash'...more
Re-read this extraordinary cultural history of segregation this week. I love Grace Hale's writing, her sharp analysis of Southern culture and found her discussion of lynchings, the significance of the Stone Mountain monument and GWTW to be particularly compelling and insightful. As with most cultural histories, however, I found myself searching for a more firm grounding in political, economic and social trends, but perhaps that's expecting too much.
For me, a native Southerner, Hale's findings opened my eyes to the way the generations preceding me in the deep South constructed the segregated society in which I grew up. What had seemed to me "the way the world was" had been painstakingly assembled, not "in the wake of the War," but after a generation of living with something different. The color line and its specific meannesses had their own cruel history, yet one full of contradictions.
This is a well written book that I think would appeal to a wide range of people. Hale uses cultural artifacts (books, movies, advertisements etc.) to explain the construction of whiteness.
Really a 4.5. One of the best books on the culture of white supremacy in the early (and later) 20th century. It is also a very accessible historical work.
Grisly. Could not read anything beyond my assigned chapter on lynching.
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