Title: Making whiteness
First published: 1998
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.
Subjects: African Americans, History, Race identity, Race relations, Segregation, Social conditions, Whites, Southern states, race relations, Southern states, social conditions, African americans, segregation, Race discrimination, White people, 15.85 history of America, Segregatie, Noirs américains, Ségrégation, Histoire, Blancs, Identité collective, Relations interethniques, Conditions sociales
Places: Southern States
Time periods: 1865-1945
LC classification: F215 .H18 1998