Making Whiteness

Making Whiteness PDF Author: Grace Elizabeth Hale
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307487938
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book 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. 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.

Making Whiteness

Making Whiteness PDF Author: Grace Elizabeth Hale
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307487938
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book

Book 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. 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.

The Making of American Whiteness

The Making of American Whiteness PDF Author: Carmen P. Thompson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666923222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
The Making of American Whiteness: The Formation of Race in Seventeenth-Century Virginia changes the narrative about the origins of race and Whiteness in America. With an exhaustive array of archival documents, Carmen P. Thompson demonstrates not only that Whiteness predates European expansion to the Americas as evidenced in their participation in the transatlantic slave trade since the fifteenth century, but more importantly that it was the principal dynamic in the settlement of Virginia, the first colony in what would become the United States of America. And just as the system of White supremacy was the principal framework that fueled the transatlantic slave trade, it likewise was the framework that drove the organization of civil society in Virginia, including the organization and structure of the colony’s laws, social, political, and economic policies as well as its system of governance. The book shows what Whiteness looked like in everyday life in the early seventeenth century, in a way eerily prescient to Whiteness today.

The Wages of Whiteness

The Wages of Whiteness PDF Author: David R. Roediger
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839768304
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger’s widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply with reference to economic advantage; rather, white working-class racism is underpinned by a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks.

Making the White Man's West

Making the White Man's West PDF Author: Jason E. Pierce
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607323966
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The West, especially the Intermountain states, ranks among the whitest places in America, but this fact obscures the more complicated history of racial diversity in the region. In Making the White Man’s West, author Jason E. Pierce argues that since the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the American West has been a racially contested space. Using a nuanced theory of historical “whiteness,” he examines why and how Anglo-Americans dominated the region for a 120-year period. In the early nineteenth century, critics like Zebulon Pike and Washington Irving viewed the West as a “dumping ground” for free blacks and Native Americans, a place where they could be segregated from the white communities east of the Mississippi River. But as immigrant populations and industrialization took hold in the East, white Americans began to view the West as a “refuge for real whites.” The West had the most diverse population in the nation with substantial numbers of American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians, but Anglo-Americans could control these mostly disenfranchised peoples and enjoy the privileges of power while celebrating their presence as providing a unique regional character. From this came the belief in a White Man’s West, a place ideally suited for “real” Americans in the face of changing world. The first comprehensive study to examine the construction of white racial identity in the West, Making the White Man’s West shows how these two visions of the West—as a racially diverse holding cell and a white refuge—shaped the history of the region and influenced a variety of contemporary social issues in the West today.

Working Toward Whiteness

Working Toward Whiteness PDF Author: David R. Roediger
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 078672210X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
How did immigrants to the United States come to see themselves as white? David R. Roediger has been in the vanguard of the study of race and labor in American history for decades. He first came to prominence as the author of The Wages of Whiteness, a classic study of racism in the development of a white working class in nineteenth-century America. In Working Toward Whiteness, Roediger continues that history into the twentieth century. He recounts how ethnic groups considered white today-including Jewish-, Italian-, and Polish-Americans-were once viewed as undesirables by the WASP establishment in the United States. They eventually became part of white America, through the nascent labor movement, New Deal reforms, and a rise in home-buying. Once assimilated as fully white, many of them adopted the racism of those whites who formerly looked down on them as inferior. From ethnic slurs to racially restrictive covenants-the real estate agreements that ensured all-white neighborhoods-Roediger explores the mechanisms by which immigrants came to enjoy the privileges of being white in America. A disturbing, necessary, masterful history, Working Toward Whiteness uses the past to illuminate the present. In an Introduction to the 2018 edition, Roediger considers the resonance of the book in the age of Trump, showing how Working Toward Whiteness remains as relevant as ever even though most migrants today are not from Europe.

The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness

The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness PDF Author: Birgit Brander Rasmussen
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822327406
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
A collection of new essays in race theory, drawn from the 4/97 Berkeley conference.

Dying of Whiteness

Dying of Whiteness PDF Author: Jonathan M. Metzl
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541644964
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
A physician's "provocative" (Boston Globe) and "timely" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times Book Review) account of how right-wing backlash policies have deadly consequences -- even for the white voters they promise to help. In election after election, conservative white Americans have embraced politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as physician Jonathan M. Metzl shows in Dying of Whiteness, the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, Metzl examines how racial resentment has fueled progun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. He shows these policies' costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates. Now updated with a new afterword, Dying of Whiteness demonstrates how much white America would benefit by emphasizing cooperation rather than chasing false promises of supremacy. Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award

Whiteness in America

Whiteness in America PDF Author: Monica McDermott
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509531181
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
When Americans think about race, “white” is often the furthest thing from their minds. Yet whiteness colors so much of social life in the United States, from the organization and maintenance of social structures to an individual’s sense of self. White has long been the invisible default category against which other racial and ethnic groups are silently compared and marked out as “different.” At the same time, whiteness is itself an active marker that many bitterly fight to keep distinctive, and the shifting boundaries of whiteness reflect the nation’s history of race relations, right back to the earliest period of European colonization. One thing that has remained consistent is that whiteness is a definitive mark of privilege. Yet, this privilege is differentially experienced across a broad and eclectic spectrum, as is white identity itself. In order to uncover the ways in which its rigid structures and complicated understandings permeate American life, this book examines some of the many varieties of what it means to be white – across geography, class, and social context – and the culture, social movements, and changing demographics of whiteness in America.

Not My Idea

Not My Idea PDF Author: Anastasia Higginbotham
Publisher: Ordinary Terrible Things
ISBN: 9781948340007
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
People of color are eager for white people to deal with their racial ignorance. White people are desperate for an affirmative role in racial justice. Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness helps with conversations the nation is, just now, finally starting to have.

Whiteness Visible

Whiteness Visible PDF Author: Valerie M. Babb
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814713122
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Babb (English, Georgetown U.) discusses theories of racial formation, the depiction of white identity in American literature, an instance in Moby Dick where white identity is deconstructed, and early 20th century immigrant autobiography as a guide to exploring some of the cultural agents--world's fairs, settlement houses, public schooling, and etiquette books--that codified representations of an ideal white identity. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR