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Grace Elizabeth Hale

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Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 Paperback – June 1, 1999

by Grace Elizabeth Hale (Author)

4.1 47 ratings

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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.

Print length

448 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

June 1, 1999
Dimensions

5.2 x 1 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0679776206
ISBN-13

978-0679776208
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A delightfully provocative book -- the most nuanced picture yet of the world view of segregationists." -- Austin Chronicle

From the Inside Flap

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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (June 1, 1999)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679776206
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679776208
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 1 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #624,115 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,078 in Discrimination & Racism
- #2,309 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)
- #2,425 in African American Demographic Studies (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.1 47 ratings

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Grace Elizabeth Hale

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Grace Elizabeth Hale is the Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia. An award-winning historian and internationally recognized expert on modern American culture and the regional culture of the U.S. South, she has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, The American Scholar, and CNN’s website, and has appeared as an expert on southern history on CNN, C-Span, and PBS. A recent Carnegie Fellow, she has also received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and the National Humanities Center. She lives in Charlottesville, VA.

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4.1 out of 5

47 global ratings

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N. Serrano

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2018

Verified Purchase

Great book, can be read in parts. Very important, surprisingly not read more.

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Fred132

Essential to understand the causes and consequences of segregation in the South.

Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2018

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Insightful, provocative and convincing book. The prose is rich and very academic, but totally understandable.

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zaakira

I don't like the fact that I can't read my book without leaving a stupid comment. I shouldn't be forced to do this.

Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2015

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Really, I don't like doing this and shouldn't be forced to do it. This is ridiculous if you ask me.

One person found this helpful

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Ruston Hill

Gratuitous axioms, non sequiturs, and a fantastic hegemonic imagination give birth to a new way of hating white southerners

Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2016

Verified Purchase

I read this book as part of a graduate class at the University of Virginia taught by Dr. Hale, herself. It is entirely reminiscent of another book by Emily Townes (a self-titled "black womanist ethicist") I read in graduate school entitled Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, in which she cites the "fantastic hegemonic imagination" of white men in the 20th and 21st Centuries that, sua sponte, created racial stereotypes. However, the irony is lost on elitist members of the American academic hegemony (Townes is the Dean of Vanderbilt University's divinity school) in their participation in the promulgation of their own fantastic hegemonic imagination. Dr. Hale makes her own contribution to race baiting fantastic hegemonic imagination in this work which propelled her into a tenured professorship at the University of Virginia. In keeping with the tradition of the 21st Century American Academy, she breaks new ground in the promulgation of racism and militant feminism from the elite left, delivered to her millennial generation students who don't have the sense to see the obvious logical fallacies in her arguments. However, this seems to be standard practice for the elites of the American academy. Dr. Hale, herself in her mid 50s, has not been out of a classroom since she was in kindergarten, and neither have her millennial generation grad students who lap up this rhetoric like it was the nectar of the gods in pursuit of their PhD. Approaching this course in general, and this book in particular, from the context of the only non-millennial generation student in her class, having spent 21 years as an officer in the Army dealing practically with the issues of race on virtually every continent of the globe, I was grossly disappointed with the racist rhetoric of this book, directed with the full force and fury of the left wing Academy at southern white people. But more disappointing than that was the completely gratuitous and faulty axioms upon which she bases her arguments.

She expertly hides a litany of carefully placed non sequiturs in extremely verbose and academic prose (in one sentence in the book I counted 55 words, many of which she must have made up herself) which reveals to the prudent lay person that, while she has an incredibly brilliant vocabulary, she has zero life experience outside the walls of a university. After 21 years as an attorney and an Army officer (with seven years of post-graduate education), I could barely understand what she was trying to say other than white people in America are the singular cause of racial discord. If wide numbers of average people actually read this book, were able to understand her doctoral verbosity, and failed to recognize her ad hominems and non sequiturs, it would result in a racial polarization of this country that would probably take decades to heal. Thankfully, the only people who will read this book and remotely understand it are her left-leaning peers in the Academy and a minority of doctoral candidates who will praise her work for its leftist ideology. Equally relieving is the fact that the only other people who will read this book are millennial generation undergraduate history majors who accidentally took her class to fill their schedule, who will never understand her 55 word sentences chock full of million dollar words and phrases. The influence of her work on them will be relatively nil. That being said, one can be hopeful that this book will have as much influence on the popular level of American society as Dr. Hale has real-world experience outside the sterile walls of the American academy.

10 people found this helpful

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Lionel S. Taylor

An Interesting Book That Examines the Connection of the Creation of Race Through Consumer Culture

Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2013

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There has been a lot of ink spilled on examining the nature of race and race relations in the south. The subject has been approached at every possible angle. That being said Hale's book stands out in that it is both well written in a clear and understandable manner and looks at race and how it has been defined from the perspective of how whiteness is defined and the role consumer culture has played in this. The book presents race not so much as a class based category or but more as a product that can be consumed and is defined by the use of consumer products. Hale state that while the races had to associate with each other in close quarters due to the nature of life in the south and that class boundaries were sometime transcended by well to do blacks the nature of consumption was still used as a demarcation line for determining race with the public consumption of goods and services such as public transportation serving as a tool to make the boundary of race. The chapter on the spectacle of lynching was an especially interesting ( and very hard to read) part where the author approaches the issue from a very different perspective that most others. The book argues that the definition of lynching and the spectacle it presented was contested and that what was once a tool of cementing southern white solidarity would eventually be turned into a tool of alienation and used against the very Jim Crow culture that once celebrated it. This is by no means a cheerful book and straddles the line between academic book and one written for popular audiences. But I do recommend it for anyone interested in the history of the South and race in general.

10 people found this helpful

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Roger E. Borg

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2016

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A very thoughtful analysis of life in the South before the Civil Rights era.

Helpful

Walter Stepp

Best on Racial Bias I Know