How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, And the Senses

by Mark M. Smith

For at least two centuries, argues Mark Smith, white southerners used all of their senses--not just their eyes--to construct racial difference and define race. His provocative analysis, extending from the colonial period to the mid-twentieth century, shows how whites of all classes used the artificial binary of "black" and "white" to justify slavery and erect the political, legal, and social structure of segregation.

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.

Smith argues that the history of southern race relations and the construction of racial difference on which that history is built cannot be understood fully on the basis of sight alone. In order to come to terms with the South's past and present, Smith says, we must explore the sensory dynamics underpinning the deeply emotional construction of race. How Race Is Made takes a bold step toward that understanding.

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For at least two centuries, argues Mark Smith, white southerners used all of their senses--not just their eyes--to construct racial difference and define race. His provocative analysis, extending from the colonial period to the mid-twentieth century, shows how whites of all classes used the artificial binary of "black" and "white" to justify slavery and erect the political, legal, and social structure of segregation.

Based on painstaking research, How Race Is Made is a highly original, always frank, and often disturbing book. 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. In order to come to terms with the South's past and present, Smith says, we must explore the sensory dynamics underpinning the deeply emotional construction of race. How Race Is Made takes a bold step toward that understanding.
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Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Race, Academic, Sociology

200 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2006

Reviews

[Teri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark M. Smith covers a fascinating topic of how the senses play a large part in racial stereotyping. Covering the colonial era and slavery through the mid-20th century, just after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Smith discusses how all of the senses played a part in segregationist's views and prejudices. For many whites at the time, seeing sometimes failed to distinguish black and white, as mixed race descendants blurred the line of racial separation. Even if sight could distinguish between the races, sound and more especially smell gave the segregationist reason for continued division. They reasoned that blacks were inferior because they smelled and sounded different. Further, they believed blacks were more sexual and to be feared because of their inferiority. Smith showed how sensory racial stereotyping led to irrational fears in politics, religion, everyday life, and of course, in the fight for integration and civil rights.

Although this book covers the ideology of generations past, the theme still resonates today. How often do we use all of our senses to make snap decisions and form opinions today? If someone speaks differently than ourselves, do we make certain assumptions about that person? If we meet a stranger with sweaty body odor, do we assume they are dirty people or do we consider that they just finished some grueling physical work? Do those assumptions play into our prejudice of just that one person or on a broader scale of "people like them?"

This book really makes you think about your own thoughts about other people, your own prejudices, as well as giving the reader new insights into the racial prejudices of a different era and how we went from slavery to civil rights and beyond. This should be required reading, especially for the student of southern history and civil rights.

[Kidada · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent overview of the ways the 5 senses informed the development of American racecraft via histories of slavery and its aftermaths.

[Mel Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has a lot of interesting themes and pulls from a variety of sources, but its writing is so disorganized that the arguments become less persuasive over time.

[David Bates · Rating 3 out of 5]

In How Race is Made Mark Smith examines the role of the senses in the construction of African American racial identity, with a primary focus on the transformations which occurred from the end of the American Revolution to the end of the segregated South. Smith argues that ideas about how the senses reacted to African slaves, and ideas about how slaves sensed, were an important element in constructing an otherness profound enough to justify racial servitude. More than justifying racial hierarchy however, by placing a heavy emphasis on sensations of difference, in day to day life white Southerners could avoid thinking about difference very deeply. Conditioned sense perceptions “facilitated the rule of feeling” wherein sensory stereotypes about African-Americans “shellacked the white southern mind, holding reason hostage,” drowning qualms and confusion beneath visceral experience.

While a certain amount of sensory stereotyping had supported colonial slavery, mainly by associating slaves senses with those of animals or asserting that their experiences of pain and temperature were different than those of whites, Smith finds turning points at those moments where race and socio-economic status became mismatched in difficult ways. The private emancipations which swelled the ranks of free blacks in the upper South after the Revolutionary War and the lightening color of the enslaved population as the generations passed after the end of the African Slave Trade were both moments of frenzied sensory construction. White southerners professed the ability to hear and smell blackness, and to see it in minute details of the hands or feet, elaborating conflicting theories like dowsers after water as it became more difficult to sort people by color into freedom or slavery. The demise of slavery with the Civil War only heightened the importance of being able to detect, and express the inferiority of, African-Americans through the senses.

As Jim Crow laws were put in place in state after state across the South in the decades before and after the turn of the 20th century this process peaked in an expansive array of stereotypes. Not only did black people have a negative smell, but the black side of town was often described as unpleasantly loud, and assumptions about touching had been laced with explosive tripwires which promised torture and death to transgressors. A kind of existential impurity seemed, to white Southerners, to inhere in Blackness itself, making it necessary to throw away clothes tried on in stores but not purchased by people of color, to avoid eating or drinking in proximity and to fear swimming in the same water. The sensory level of this racial construction allowed white southerners to vigorously assert their superior position without having to justify it, or even to address the obvious contradictions of requiring rigid apartness from the people who so often worked with them, cooked and served their food, washed their clothes, and cared for their children and their homes. This thesis, to Smith’s mind, helps to illuminate the almost incomprehensible contradictions of Southern society in the era of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the ferocious but often politically inept resistance of Segregationists.

[Mija · Rating 3 out of 5]

Between 3 and 4 stars.

It was well written and drove its point home for sure. It was seriously repetitive in doing so, however. To the extreme.

It was a little difficult to follow considering my extreme lack of knowledge in these apparently key points in American history. There were so many specific terms that confused me, but I do feel I have a better grasp of them now.

I liked its use of all the senses, particularly the lesser focus on that of sight. I also appreciated its use of varied sources and it's evaluation of them as such. The subject matter was full of contradictions and the author jumped at the opportunity to point it out - which really showed complexities.

I don't know why I reviewed it here when I now have to go review it again but academically. Sigh~

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good book, but the last chapter on Brown V. BOE seemed to drone on and die out without any sort of satisfactory conclusion for both the book or the issues surrounding Brown.

Still, a very good book for extending the understanding of race and racism in the past as more than just something visual, but rather something that could be determined by all senses and had effects on all aspects of life.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The critical analysis of the book is fantastic - the sensory construction of race and its developments throughout American history. The approach is solid, the historical examples are well-placed and helpful. My only critique is that the later chapters lose some of their interpretive punch. They feel a little bit like rehashes of the earlier chapters without a meaningful look into why those ideas did or didn't change.

[Brian Elswick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting. Thought provoking. Definitely recommended.

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this intellectual and creative book. Smith made his points about the continuing sensory stereotypes and the visceral and emotional foundations of segregation very well.

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

As other books on race in America have discussed (Steven Talty's Mulatto Nation, for instance), by the 1800s the growing number of slave/white relations made it increasingly difficult to distinguish slaves from masters by skin color. Smith shows the South developed lots of coping mechanisms such as relying on smell (blacks supposedly having an innate, ineradicable stench) to identify Negro blood no matter how light the skin. The book traces this kind of thinking into the segregation era, when it helped prop up separation of the races despite critics showing it was nonsense (the stink that supposedly required blacks keep out of white railway carriages wasn't a problem when black maids and cooks worked in white homes). Good.

[Lisa Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smith's book is a useful examination of the historiography of sensory perceptions vis-a-vis race in the southern United States. I find his examination of the language surrounding race as it pertains to sensory acuity particularly compelling. His historical research is generously footnoted for those who wish to seek additional information. His in-text citation method was a bit unorthodox, but nonetheless traceable.

[Mark Cheathem · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are not an academic and you want to read one book on race, this is it. Smith makes accessible the way that not only sight but the other four senses have affected black-white relations in the U.S.

[Nadia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked the eye opening take on racial constructions. Mark Smith focuses on the intersectional creation of race by using a lens of sensory anthropology, which makes for a powerfully honest read. My only issue was that his examples and assertions tend to become repetitive.

[Rachel · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's finally finished. So boring.