Making whiteness
Subtitle: the culture of segregation in the South, 1890-1940
By: Grace Elizabeth Hale.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 427
Subjects: African Americans -- Segregation -- Southern States -- History; Whites -- Race identity -- Southern States; Southern States -- Race relations; Southern States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1945
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. Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how, when faced with the active citizenship of their ex-slaves after the Civil War, white southerners reestablished their dominance through a cultural system based on violence and physical separation.

And in 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [381]-408) and index.