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Whitewashing the South is a powerful exploration of how ordinary white southerners recall living through extraordinary racial times-the Jim Crow era, civil rights movement, and the post-civil rights era-highlighting tensions between memory and reality.
Author Kristen Lavelle draws on interviews with the oldest living generation of white southerners to uncover uncomfortable memories of our racial past. The vivid interview excerpts show how these lifelong southerners reflect on race in the segregated South, the civil rights era, and more recent decades. The book illustrates a number of complexities-how these white southerners both acknowledged and downplayed Jim Crow racial oppression, how they both appreciated desegregation and criticized the civil rights movement, and how they both favorably assessed racial progress while resenting reminders of its unflattering past. Chapters take readers on a real-world look inside The Help and an exploration of the way the Greensboro sit-ins and school desegregation have been remembered, and forgotten.
Digging into difficult memories and emotions, Whitewashing the South challenges our understandings of the realities of racial inequality.
List of contents
1: "Our Generation Had Nothing to Do with Discrimination"
2: "Only Love under Our Roof": Jim Crow at Home
3: "Just the Way It Was": Jim Crow in Public
4: Distancing and Rejection: The Civil Rights Movement at Arm's Length
5: White Victims: Trials and Tribulations of School Desegregation
6: Reflecting on a Lifetime: Views of the Post-Civil Rights Era
7: Memory and White Moral Identity
Appendix
Researching Elder White Southerners
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
About the author
Kristen Lavelle is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She has published in the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies and is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Race and Racism and International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.
Summary
Whitewashing the South is a powerful exploration of how ordinary white southerners recall living through extraordinary racial times-Jim Crow, civil rights, and post-civil rights. Drawing on interviews with the oldest living generation of white southerners, the book uncovers uncomfortable racial realities of the past and present.
