How race is made
Subtitle: slavery, segregation, and the senses
By: by Mark M. Smith.
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 200
ISBN-13: 9780807830024
Subjects: Racism -- Southern States -- History; African Americans -- Segregation; African Americans -- History -- 1877-1964; Senses and sensation -- Southern States -- History; Stereotype (Psychology) -- Southern States -- History; Southern States -- Race relations -- History
Description: "Based on painstaking research, how Race Is Made is a highly original, always frank, and often disturbing book. After enslaved Africans were initially brought to America, the offspring of black and white sexual relationships (consensual and forced) complicated the purely visual sense of racial typing. As mixed-race people became more and more common and as antebellum race-based slavery and then postbellum racial segregation became central to southern society, white southerners asserted that they could rely on their other senses - touch, smell, sound, and taste - to identify who was "white" and who was not. Sensory racial stereotypes were invented and irrational, but at every turn, Smith shows, these constructions of race, immune to logic, signified difference and perpetuated inequality."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : making sense of race; title: Learning to make sense; title: Fooling senses, calming crisis; title: Senses reconstructed, nonsense redeemed; title: Finding Homer Plessy, fixing race; title: The Black mind of the South; title: The Brown concertina.