Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940

by Grace Elizabeth Hale

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.  In intricately textured detail and with passionately mastered analysis, Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how, when faced with the active citizenship of their ex-slaves after the Civil War, white southerners re-established their dominance through a cultural system based on violence and physical separation.  And in a bold and transformative 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.

By showing the very recent historical "making" of contemporary American whiteness and by examining how the culture of segregation, in all its murderous contradictions, was lived, Hale makes it possible to imagine a future outside it. Her vision holds out the difficult promise of a truly democratic American identity whose possibilities are no longer limited and disfigured by race.

Genres: History, Race, Nonfiction, American History, Sociology, Politics, Academic

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an excellent book about the movement from an integrated south based on slavery to one that promoted white superiority through segregation. It’s just written very awkwardly and is a bit repetitive sometimes. The information and perspective is vital.

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

In attempting to analyze the tragedy of white racism in American history, Hale reduces it to the clinical. Certainly, there are insights to be gained from her reading of systematic racist oppression, but I wonder if the practical outworkings of these systems were quite so monolithic as she implies - not that I think some areas of contemporary white culture were somehow immune to racialism, but rather that individuals acted out of their own personal prejudices as much as societal pressures. In the same way, her clinical sterility has the effect of transmuting human victims into case studies, reducing them to merely what they signifed to the broader black and white communities at large. This reductionist approach serves to effectively illustrate general attitudes and trends, but gives no explanation as to why these attitudes and trends existed in the first place. An interesting study, as well as a haunting narrative, but a counter-corrective analysis from a more individual standpoint would be appreciated.

[Kristi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hale’s discussion of racial construction and segregation in the American South centers on the ambiguities caused by racial sharing of public spaces and mass consumer culture during the late nineteenth century and first-half of the twentieth century. Nostalgic advertising, “Old South” tourism, and minstrelsy, were among the the more benign forms of commoditization of the black body that aimed at restoring white cultural supremacy during this period. Horrific lynchings, in which black people were tortured, murdered, and then divided into souvenirs by the witnessing white mob, constituted the malignant, darker-side of racial “othering.” Hale argues that mass culture nationalized the horrors of segregation, as well as the more restrained forms of racial subordination, beyond the regional experience of southern America.

[James Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is in my top 5 of all time; it is absolutely incredible. Hale covers the history of segregation from a cultural perspective. What she describes as the 'culture of segregation', 'whiteness' is an ideology that white southerners adopted as a reaction to the rising black middle class after Reconstruction. It is one thing to have segregation be a law, but it is another to have its meaning spread through major symbols of Southern culture. The significant effects of culture on Southern society are horrific. Everything from literature to lynchings contribute to this 'culture of segregation'. This book has challenged me to think about contemporary issues of race and has made me truly believe we do not live in a post-racial age. This 'whiteness' still exists, and that is a terrifying thought.

[Rick Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, a native Southerner, Hale's findings opened my eyes to the way the generations preceding me in the deep South constructed the segregated society in which I grew up. What had seemed to me "the way the world was" had been painstakingly assembled, not "in the wake of the War," but after a generation of living with something different. The color line and its specific meannesses had their own cruel history, yet one full of contradictions.

[Dennis Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hale does everything right that you can do right with such a study. She looks at one specific thing and she looks at it in a very specific timeframe and place. She can therefore look at it from various perspectives. Just a good text

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is really interesting. Hale takes the period from 1890-1940 and discusses how whites in the South created a culture of segregation. She uses advertisements, memory, and even the violence of spectacle lynching to discuss how whites created their whiteness, and then desperately tried to hang on to it.

Her arguments were clear and concise; she gets a little wordy sometimes, and I would have to go back and read sentences or whole paragraphs two or three times before I would understand what she was saying. Hale also totally omitted the Ku Klux Klan in this period; except for a few mentions, they do not have a place, which I think was a big hole in her arguments. All in all, an excellent description of white thought and culture in the South during that time.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astonishing read from cover to cover about staging racial difference in an America undergoing socioeconomic change. It took a lot out of me and isn’t something to be read lightly. Hale suggests the nationalization of segregation, and the performance of racial difference and enaction of white supremacy, as a means for the South to be as distinctive as the ‘Old South’ but also allow for a North-South reconciliation, ‘dealing with’ an emerging Black middle class and increasing social mobility by imposing the unfixed, stone-like category of race. This is explored in full awareness of the sense of loss the South experienced, and how an emerging segregation system would ‘heal’ that loss and provide the South with a culture to move forward, inflicting bodily harm upon Black citizens as they tried to claim their social and economic rights.

She handles the topic sensitively and thoroughly, with an emphasis on cultural analysis and particularly literary sources, photos, advertising ephemera, and the stone statues and monuments that survive today. It’s also a hopeful book and looks to the then-future and the potentialities involved in looking to how American conceptions of self are still bearing the legacies of the Jim Crow era – and what can be done to overcome them.

”It was racial identity that became the paramount spatial mediation of modernity within the newly reunited nation.”

[James Steichen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book to get historical background on how white identity has been constructed in America and found a lot of good food for thought. While it is focused on the South, the book shows how the history and culture of the South were responsible for shaping white identity throughout the country.

Hale examines topics including railroad travel, general stores and catalogs, the figure of the “mammy,” as well as literature by Faulkner and the book and movie versions of Gone with the Wind. She also delves into to the economic and physical violence that was used against African Americans after emancipation in order to maintain racial hierarchies.

This is not an easygoing read but worth the time and I appreciated the variety of phenomena it drew together into one narrative. It’s also remarkable that this book came out in the late 1990s since it’s making arguments that are very commonplace today but were not as mainstream twenty five years ago.

[Jim Gulley · Rating 2 out of 5]

The antebellum South was an integrated society of free people and enslaved people. The Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction radically changed the region’s economic and social order. The New South emerged as a segregated society, dictated by Jim Crow laws and customs. Hale argued that the racial identities of whiteness and, by implication, blackness were social constructs created to facilitate segregation so that the Southern elite could reestablish its hegemony.

Hale supports her argument by synthesizing the New South historiography and drawing analogies from popular literature and other media. Her writing style is dense, and she makes frequent use of academic jargon. The disparate parts of the book are compelling, but she fails to bring them together in a coherent manner.

[Scallopwag · Rating 5 out of 5]

By the end, I was impressed with how Hale interpreted the ahistorical construction of the "Old South," the Dunning school image of Reconstruction, mass production of racist media, rising consumer culture, general modernization, and racial violence into one cohesive argument on the construction and contradictions of "the culture of segregation." A brilliant work of cultural history. I am particularly impressed by how Hale dissects the importance of spectacle lynchings in the culture of segregation and how Black "counter-performance" challenged its foundations. Chapter 5, on the lynchings, and the epilogue are important and I will use Hale's framework in the future without a doubt. The epilogue made clear the importance of every chapter in the construction of her argument and it was executed amazingly.

[Erika · Rating 4 out of 5]

MAKING WHITENESS: 4/5 Stars

I enjoyed Making Whiteness and especially liked the deep-dive it did into certain cultural pieces, such as Gone with the Wind and Stone Mountain. As a white person raised in the wealthy South, it's fascinating to see the things that are supposed to be innocuous today exposed as being built on racism and the ways in which white people distinguished themselves and forced Black folks into certain stereotypical roles. Economic coercion is a huge and invisible force, and I loved the way that this book tried to put signs of economic coercion of racism and white supremacy in clear terms.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

While somewhat academic in its reading, Making Whiteness is a good primer on the social and political mechanisms southern whites used post-reconstruction to reassert their dominance. This social hierarchy was then taken up by the rest of the country, providing us with the racial framework we live with today. An important contribution to understanding systemic racism.

[RoxchelKnightly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great example of an historiography.

[Lucas Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has sat on my bookshelf for a couple of years. It takes a critical approach to exploring the creation, meaning and maintenance of segregation in the South. It feels like cultural history, there is a distinct feeling of theory underlying each of the chapters. The organization of the book eschews a strict chronological approach which is engaging in the short term, but can make the book feel as if it is not moving forward at other times. It was often interesting, but also often difficult to have real long sustained readings.

Hale's methodology gives the book an impersonal feel. Even the chapter that describes three lynchings in painful detail, the people feel more like symbols than characters, and the discussion remains remote from the human side of these often tragic stories. I actually found this element of the work interesting, but this was definitely a function of having read much more history that is narrative driven. After Race and Reunion, which has a similar approach to being theory or thematically driven, Making Whiteness didn't feel wooden. The author brings a sense of urgency to the writing that provides the humanity often intellectualized in the text. The final chapter and epilogue bring this forward effectively. The last few pages are part conclusion, part plea, and part call to action.

Lynchings, advertisement, consumer culture, minstrelsy, lots of topics that seem specialized are rendered as tools all utilized towards one goal, creating and maintaining a new culture of segregation in the South. The late chapter that deals with Margaret Mitchell and Lillian Smith shows the inherent contradictions of the culture as well as its sturdiness in American Life.

This book is aimed at a more academic audience. I wish I would have been aware of it five years ago, when I read more academic history. It is still engaging, however. If you like historiography pick it up. Recommended.

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

In order to justify a segregated society, the American South constructed whiteness as the norm and relegated blackness to the perimeter of mainstream culture. Hale’s insightful study of white Southerners’ methods of distancing and identity construction is carefully laid out in Making Whiteness. She deftly charts the construction of the institution of segregation from the end of Reconstruction to what is arguably the beginning of black civil rights consciousness during World War II. The dialectic construction of black identity based on paternal fantasies and fear is described as occurring concurrently with the creation of the Lost Cause and Old South myths in the late nineteenth century—thereby creating whiteness and its other, blackness. Hale then recounts two cultural revolutions that occurred at the turn of the century and grew to complicate and eventually undermine white identity as separate from black: the domestic shift from plantation life to the white middle class, and the development of modern consumerism in the southern United States. Both changes, one private and one public, necessitated the need for southern whites to create public and powerful means to reestablish their primacy in the face of ambiguous racial relationships in the home and in the store—Hale suggests that spectacle lynchings and public monuments served this purpose. Her conclusions indicate that southern violence towards blacks inevitably caused larger American sentiment to wane in support of white supremacy as it manifested itself in the South. In addition, the interaction between blacks and whites in consumerism and domestic service served to undermine the separation that occurred in other public spaces causing African-Americans in the region to begin boldly demanding equal rights in all spheres of society.

In spite of the ambitious nature of her project, Hale does a remarkable job of illustrating the construction of segregation and its inherent tenuousness. She draws from remarkable sources, including local newspapers from small southern towns boasting of mobs torturing black men in the defense of southern womanhood, as well as the work of scholars from historical, literary, sociological, and political backgrounds. Comparative literary analysis of divergent works like Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and Smith’s Strange Fruit is coupled with photographic analysis of blacks and whites shopping side by side in the early twentieth century, providing the reader, no matter what discipline, some point of engagement with her research. Well organized and well executed, Making Whiteness provides a unique insight into the justifications and social strategies of southern whites to maintain power over their former slaves, as well as black responses and resistance to those efforts by the likes of early activists Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. DuBois.

One of the more interesting parts of the book occurs in the epilogue, in which Hale traces out the subsequent historical changes that eventually took place after the developments detailed in the body of her work. The final two pages of her book warn that the social implications of her work are still relevant today, optimistically calling for a restoration of faith in “humanity’s ability to effect progressive change." Scholarship as overt activism does cause one to pause and wonder if a political agenda may have affected Hale’s work. While the politics are fairly broad and non-offensive, she obviously sees her work as part of a process of instigating and perpetuating social change in racial relations. Reservations only occur to the extent that political bias might have directed what was included and what may have been left out of her research. Hale’s wealth of sources and extensive endnotes indicate that concern is most likely unmerited.

Making Whiteness implies the possible changes that can be made to avoid the illogical justifications of segregation from ever occurring again. Racism is not inherent to the human condition, according to Hale, but is created from within cultures and societies. Therefore, it can be unmade.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

The long chapter on lyching balanced and amplified Orlando Patterson's discussions. Hale's careful construction and defense of her concept of the "spectacle lynching" as a phenomenon of 20th century consumer culture, specifically a product of the combined influence of the railroad, telephone, and newspapers is convincing. Calls into question Patterson's somewhat mystical concept of lynching as a modern manifestation of something ancient. Hale's discussion and appreciation of W.J. Cash's Mind of the South made me want to go back and re-read him.

[Stacey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-read this extraordinary cultural history of segregation this week. I love Grace Hale's writing, her sharp analysis of Southern culture and found her discussion of lynchings, the significance of the Stone Mountain monument and GWTW to be particularly compelling and insightful. As with most cultural histories, however, I found myself searching for a more firm grounding in political, economic and social trends, but perhaps that's expecting too much.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really a 4.5. One of the best books on the culture of white supremacy in the early (and later) 20th century. It is also a very accessible historical work.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well written book that I think would appeal to a wide range of people. Hale uses cultural artifacts (books, movies, advertisements etc.) to explain the construction of whiteness.

[Ben Jaques-Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most personally important books that I've ever read. It made me think of race in a completely different and complex way. Everyone should read this book.

[Doris Raines · Rating 1 out of 5]

This. Book. I. Rate. It. Zero

[Mari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Grisly. Could not read anything beyond my assigned chapter on lynching.