Making whiteness

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.

First Sentence

HOW CAN WE NARRATE the founding moment of emancipation, the achievement at long last by four million people of the ownership of their own mid-nineteenth-century selves?

Excerpt

HOW CAN WE NARRATE the founding moment of emancipation, the achievement at long last by four million people of the ownership of their own mid-nineteenth-century selves?

Subjects

Other Editions

• Making whiteness: the culture of segregation in the South, 1890-1940Pantheon Books1998-01-01
• Making WhitenessPaperbackVintage1999-06-01
• Making whitenessVintage