Grace Elizabeth Hale > Quotes

“Slavery, in other words, founded and fixed the meaning of blackness more than any transparent and transhistorical meaning of black skin founded the category of slavery.”
― Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940

“The key characteristic was not how the victims died. Hangings and shootings and burnings could all be lynchings. What made a murder a lynching was not the manner of death but the intentions of the killers and the fact that they acted as a group....Lynching became a more communal affair.”
― Grace Elizabeth Hale, In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning

“Minstrelsy and its descendants gave its white and black performers and fans lessons in how to act black by defining what blackness looked and sounded like onstage. And it taught them why to act black. Blackness could be anything. Blackness could be everything. African Americans might be enslaved, Jim Crowed, disfranchised, lynched, raped, abused, cheated, and discriminated against, but the minstrel show made “blackness” into a medium of transformation and transcendence so powerful that at times, within limits, it even worked for black people.”
― Grace Elizabeth Hale, A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America

“culture—in the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. Homer Plessy, a very light-skinned, racially mixed man, had made a planned attempt to challenge Louisiana’s 1890 law requiring segregated streetcars. His lawyer, Albion Tourgee, a northern white Reconstruction official and popular novelist, had argued the case on the grounds that the government did not have the right to determine the racial identities of its citizens. But the Supreme Court decided”
― Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940

“CENTRAL TO THE MEANING of whiteness is a broad, collective American silence. The denial of white as a racial identity, the denial that whiteness has a history, allows the quiet, the blankness, to stand as the norm. This erasure enables many to fuse their absence of racial being with the nation, making whiteness their unspoken but deepest sense of what it means to be an American. And despite, and paradoxically because of, their treasured and cultivated distinctiveness, southern whites are central to this nationalism of denial. On the brink of the civil rights”
― Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940

“Making whiteness American culture, the nation has forgone other possibilities. The hybridity that could have been our greatest strength has been made into a means of playing across the color line, with its rotting distance of voyeurism and partisanship, a confirmation of social and psychological division.”
― Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940

“Yet it was racial identity that became the paramount spatial mediation of modernity within the newly reunited nation. Not self-evidently more meaningful, not more real or natural than other markings, race nevertheless became the crucial means of ordering the newly enlarged meaning of America. This happened because former Confederates, a growing working class, embattled farmers, western settlers, a defensive northeastern elite, women’s rights advocates, an”
― Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940

“The implication of “making whiteness,” of course, is that whiteness can be unmade, so that other, more democratic grounds of coherence can be established and lived.”
― Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940