Against Whiteness Race and Psychology in The American South PDF

Modern Intellectual History, 7, 1 (2010), pp.
197–208
C Cambridge University Press 2010
doi:10.1017/S1479244309990321
against whiteness: race

and psychology in the
american south
richard h. king
American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham
E-mail: richard.king@nottingham.ac.uk
Anne C. Rose, Psychology and Selfhood in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe;
nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh
and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind . . . Nor is my
invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility
to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I
come in contact.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
In all parts of the country, in the East and the North with its host of nationalities no less than
in the more homogeneous South, the Negroes stand out because of their “visibility.” . . . In
this respect, they somewhat resemble new immigrants, who invariably constitute the most
“audible” of all minorities and therefore are always the most likely to arouse xenophobic
sentiments . . . [but] the Negroes’ visibility is unalterable and permanent.
Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959)
It is tempting to think that we have heard just about all we want or need to
know about race. As the above quotes indicate, modern notions of race have
always revolved around the faculty of vision, with supplementary contributions
from other senses such as hearing, as Arendt notes in a tacit allusion to one mark
of Jewish difference—the way they sounded when concentrated in urban settings.
Yet two very recent works—Mark M. Smith’s How Race Is Made and Anne C.
Rose’s Psychology and Selfhood in the Segregated South—have much to teach us
about how race has “worked”, particularly in the twentieth-century South but
197
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198 richard h. king
also, by implication, in the United States in general. Both works assume that,
historically, race is no mere add-on to the self, a kind of externality that, once
detected, can be relatively easily excised. Rather, it stands right at the heart of
personal and group identity in a nation where race and ethnicity continue to
assume surprising new shapes and forms.
Both books devote greater attention to racial consciousness among white
than black southerners. Specifically Smith’s book concentrates on the way that
race became an integral part of white southern consciousness in slavery times,
a story he brings down to around 1960 through anecdotes, explanatory events
(for instance, segregation as an indication of a loss of confidence in the ability to
tell who was who racially) and narrative sketches (the effect of the 1954 Brown
v. Board of Education decision on white racial attitudes). Along the way, he
devotes a chapter to how black southerners “viewed” whites and analyses the
way better-off blacks internalized the negative racial views whites had of blacks
and then applied those negative judgements to less well-off members of the
black community. Rose’s thesis is that institutional segregation and white racism
blocked the discipline of psychology from adequately assessing racism’s negative
impact on white childhood development. This is particularly interesting, since
there is a controversial sociological tradition of analysing the “damage” incurred
by African Americans in the South and then as they made their way northwards as
part of the Great Migration. From E. Franklin Frazier’s work on the black family
in America in the late 1930s to Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s studies of the effects of
segregation on the self-image of black children, from Stanley Elkins’s controversial
Slavery (1959) to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for
National Action (1965), the lasting effects of oppression and discrimination on
African Americans was a major concern among sociologists, social psychologists
and historians until it met resolute political opposition in the second half of
the 1960s. The explicit or implicit application of the damage thesis to white
southerners in particular is one thing that makes both books under review here
of particular interest.1
Intellectual history can treat race in several ways. One is to trace the various
ways that race has been theorized as a biological entity, as a natural kind not
a historical construct. A landmark book adopting this approach is biologist
Stephen J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981), a work that sought to assess the
scientific validity of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biological racism.
A second approach is for intellectual historians to study race as it has functioned
historically as a symbolic entity (Eric Voegelin’s term) in a particular historical
context. In this approach it is not race’s scientific status but its political, social and
1
For a lucid overview of the topic of damage see Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
against whiteness 199
cultural impact, not its truth-value but its use-value, that commands attention.
For instance, W. E. B. Du Bois’ ideas on race are of interest not for their scientific
value but for how Du Bois used race as the central concept in his thought and
life as he explained in his Dusk of Dawn (1940).2
Smith’s book exemplifies a third way of treating race—as an experience before
it was, and is, a concept. For instance, very few individual planters or yeoman
farmers in eighteenth-century Virginia studied race as a scientific concept or
operated with a coherent notion of race as a symbolic ideology.3 People who
belonged to them, labored for them, and looked different to them—that is,
slaves—were an integral part of their experience. Over time, the southern (and
American) idea of the Negro as a different sort of (human) being emerged in part
from their status as slaves and in part from their manifest (and hidden) sensory
differences. In general, the latter were used to justify enslavement of people of
African descent and then later to segregate them, except in those aspects of life
where their proximity was required. That the experience of racial difference was
reenforced by those simulacra of experience we refer to as literature, music, and
the visual arts and crafts, and later by photographs and films, is something to
which Smith might have paid more attention than he does.
In particular, Smith contends that race became a composite concept, put
together from the input of all the senses, although, historically, visual appearance,
preeminently color, was considered the most important marker of race. (Whether
he could find similar evidence from the Caribbean and Latin America is another
matter.) Smith describes the way that early contact with slaves led to the idea
that they smelled different—that is, worse—than did white people. By way of
contrast, he also notes that no class-linked claims about the way poor whites
smelled ever really developed. In addition, how Africans sounded in their native
tongues, their accents and eccentric English syntax and, of course, their music,
along with the belief that their skin was rougher and their hair coarser, meant
that not just the evidence of sight but also of all the other senses played a part in
establishing what being a “Negro” and therefore being “white” entailed.
Specifically, there were two periods when the problematic status of sight in
determining race became particularly clear. In the 1850s the senses other than
2
Eric Voegelin, “The Growth of the Race Idea,” Review of Politics, July 1940, 283–317;
W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: The Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York:
Schocken Books, 1968).
3
Of course, Jefferson was one person who did worry enough about race to write about it in
his Notes on Virginia, while Winthrop Jordan’s classic White over Black: American Attitudes
toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1968) focuses on white racial
thinking in the Old South. But my point is that few white people really had (or have) fully
worked-out views on race.
200 richard h. king
sight were emphasized because “slavery was becoming whiter.”4 As miscegenation

proliferated, white southerners grew afraid that, without the testimony of all the
senses, whites would not be able to say with any certainty who was white and
who was not. A sense of encroaching danger reappeared in the period roughly
between 1880 and the mid-1920s as the decline of rural and small-town life and
the growth of cities and an industrial economy worked a deep change in race
relations in the South—and for the worse. Not surprisingly the “racial sensory
construction” of African Americans in the turn-of-the-century South had a
“ferocity” and “frequency” that was missing during slavery. White suspicion and
hatred of African Americans were supplemented by a new kind of loathing.5 No
longer did white people know their neighbors, much less what color they were.
What they did know, or at least had heard about, was that some black people were
passing for white, itself a way for individuals to subvert the system of segregation
by exploiting the racist terms in which it understood itself.
Another important response to this growing racial indeterminacy was the
solidification of the “one-drop rule” as the legal basis for racial identity, another
sign of waning confidence that race was a visual phenomenon primarily. The
conclusion Smith helps us draw from all this is that the human sensorium not
only can be easily fooled but also insists on the truth of sense impressions long
after those truths have been rationally discredited. But noting the importance of
habit (or what might be named “sensory inertia”) implies something relatively
superficial and Smith misses a chance to strengthen his thesis by noting that this
sensory defamation of black southerners carried a heavy “phobic” charge that
went beyond the merely habitual and the empirical. If the dominant image of
black slaves was that they were “childlike,” by the early twentieth century they were
also suspected of carrying infections. The tuberculosis bacillus was discovered
in 1882 and was often associated with African Americans. Smith also uses works
such as Otto Klineberg’s Race Differences (1935) and John Dollard’s better-known
Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937) to provide evidence of how whites
continued to stress the way blacks smelled in order to justify segregation and
subordination on into the middle of the century in the South.
Yet a weakness of Smith’s generally fascinating study is his failure to explore
the complexities of sensory-based racism in the post-1945 world. That era
saw southern whites almost unanimously resisting the desegregation of public
swimming pools in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. Black children continued to
be seen as potential carriers of disease and were feared as polluters of the water in
swimming pools. In many, even most, cases, municipal pools in the South were
drained and shut down. To be sure, tuberculosis was still not all that unusual and
4
Smith, How Race Is Made, 39.
5
Ibid., 49, 56–7.
the idea of catching syphilis from toilet seats was a constant fear. But the great
fear of polio dominated the late 1940s and 1950s and it too contributed to the
fear of mixed swimming. Not surprisingly, efforts at improving public health by
wiping out infectious “social” diseases were often linked to attempts to eradicate
“racial” diseases. Such evidence would seem to amply support Smith’s general
argument, though the existence of “unseen germs” does not really fit the model
of the sensorium that he largely depends on. Fear of infection does not work
in terms of immediately discernible smell, taste, or touch, not to mention sight.
Again, if Smith had made use of a psychoanalytically derived notion of a phobic
dimension to white fears, the fear of infection and pollution so central to the
resistance to desegregated swimming might be more comprehensible. As it is,
Smith mainly emphasizes that “the sensory dimension . . . gave a gut-wrenching
quality to white reaction over Brown, a quality that far outweighed the intellectual
component of massive resistance.”6
Indeed, Smith has perhaps overemphasized the lasting power of the contact
senses (smell, taste, touch) in “making” race, as the South grew more prosperous
and “cleaner.” Personal hygiene and emphasis upon cleanliness and table and
toilet manners improved among the classes and races in the years after World
War II as the standard of living rose in the South. At the same, however gradually,
there was a lessening of white racial prejudice. The “racialized nature of the
senses” seems to have become less potent.7 Despite Smith’s evocation of the “gut-
wrenching” resistance to desegregation, racial contact of a previously feared or
taboo sort seems to have become a bit less scary for most whites. This is not to
deny that white racism was still firmly entrenched in the 1960s, but for many
people racial contact no longer automatically triggered fear and loathing.8
If we try to construct the model of mind that informs How Race Is Made, we
find that Smith denies that there is a hierarchy of the senses, but assumes that most
whites in the antebellum South believed that there was—the more a sense worked
at a distance, the more worthy or noble it was.9 Thus while sight and sound were
felt to be superior to smell, touch, and taste, Smith himself does privilege human
reason, a capacity which calls the testimony of the senses into question and
offers a critical check to “white conceits about blackness.”10 At the same time, he
6
Smith, How Race Is Made, 116. For an exploration of the racial dimensions of the polio
scare see Naomi Rogers, “Race and the Politics of Polio: Warm Springs, Tuskegee and the
March of Dimes,” American Journal of Public Health 97/5 (May 2007), 784–95.
7
8
The white fear of infection by African Americans may belong to the next stage beyond
sensory racism, what Kovel once called “aversive” racism. See Joel Kovel, White Racism: A
Psychohistory (New York: Pantheon, 1970).
9
“An Interview with Mark M. Smith,” www.ibiblio.org/uncp/media/msmith.
10
202 richard h. king
assumes that the five senses overpower reason relatively easily and often. Thus,
because the senses were effective in “holding reason hostage,”11 irrational (white)
fear of the (black) other grew. Whether such a neat split between mind and body
is plausible, whether the senses vary in strength among themselves, and whether
all are stronger than reason is something else again. Indeed, that reason is a kind
of moral capacity is doubtful in itself, since racist theorists deployed reason to
formulate supposedly scientific theories of permanent racial superiority. Overall,
then, Smith’s concept of the mind tends to be a fairly thin one. Specifically, it fails
to include any sort of unconscious mechanism that would explain the persistence
and power of fantasies against the evidence of the senses of most people.12 As
a result, he can only resort to an appeal to habit to explain the persistence of
sensory racism.
Conceptually, what Smith’s stimulating and often convincing discussion
suggests is that what white southerners took as the immediate reports of the senses
were really tropes and simulacra of that experience. But surprisingly, Smith fails
to discuss how “blood,” one of the most important tropes of racial identity, fits
into his analysis. Blood smells and looks the same across racial lines, though blood
donors and recipients were classified by race well into the 1960s. Nor, for that
matter, does he explore the sense in which Ralph Ellison and/or we understand
the concept of black “invisibility” to refer to the capacity visual evidence has to
hide rather than reveal the other, though it would have enriched his analysis had
he done so. Also, as Matthew Mason has pointed out, Smith fails to devote enough
attention to one of our other important capacities—“imagination.”13 Not only
do our senses permeate our conscious attitudes but our attitudes (expectations,
presuppositions, prejudices, and fantasies) inflect and structure those allegedly
immediate sensory reports. Thus an interactive rather than hierarchical model
for understanding the relationship among senses, reason, and imagination might
have been more profitable for Smith to have adopted.
The partial inadequacy of Smith’s model of mind also becomes clear when
the question of whether and how white racism in the South has diminished
over time is raised. The enlightened liberal assumption, which Anne Rose tells
us belongs to a certain conception of psychology, is that people, particularly
children, are weaned from prejudice through appeals to reason and moral values.
11
Ibid., p. 4.
12
In general, Smith’s conceptualization of sensory racism would have profited by consulting
psychoanalytical and sociological typologies of racism.
13
Matthew E. Mason, review of Smith, Mark M., How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and
the Senses and White, Shane; White, Graham, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African
American History through Songs, Sermons and Speech. H-South, H-Net Reviews, Jan. 2007,
4, available at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id+12772.
But if Smith’s contention that white racism was grounded in all the senses is
correct, then conscious moralizing and appeals to reason will quickly reach the
limits of their effectiveness, since they leave the other senses untouched. What
will change the latter is not clear. Smith himself is agnostic on the question
whether “Brown initiated long-term change in sensory stereotypes.”14 But he
clearly doubts it. Indeed, the central point of his last chapter is that the post-
Brown era witnessed, if anything, a hardening of white racial attitudes. And yet,
as already mentioned, something also lessened white southern racial prejudice
in the first three decades after Brown. The problem is that we cannot go to Smith
to find out what it was. Put another way, the more convincing Smith makes his
case for the sensory basis of white racism, the harder it is for him to explain why
segregation did not maintain itself in the South. In this, he shares something
with the “whiteness studies” approach, which assumes the permanence of what
it sets out to prove—the all-pervasive and indestructible quality of white racial
prejudice.
Anne Rose’s Psychology and Selfhood focuses less on race per se than on
the mutual entanglement of race and psychology up to roughly 1960. It is the
kind of intellectual history that pays more attention to institutional factors and
historical forces as they affect the spread of an idea or theory than to theoretical
arguments or concepts as such. In this sense, Psychology and Selfhood is about
the historical and psychological function of race, not about race as a set of
theoretical propositions concerning group difference. It is deeply considered,
written with subtlety and nuance, but also sometimes oblique in its formulations
and conclusions. For Rose, psychology, which emerged as a new discipline around
the turn of the twentieth century, had the chance to prove itself, as it were, in the
South, which was “an essential place for an investigation of how the psychological
sciences responded to racial identities and injustices.” Rose’s conclusions about
the efficacy of psychology are clear-sighted, for she argues that “segregation was
responsible for blocking the development of psychological commentary on racial
relations . . . Southerners equipped with psychological knowledge backed away
from this mission when the subject bordered on racial mores.”15
That said, it is hard to imagine that the intellectual and moral failure of
psychology came as much of a surprise to her. In contrast with sociology, which
has always been a major tool for analyzing the South, there have been few, if
any, books or courses in psychology departments on the “psychology of the
South.” Though sociologists were far from free of racism—Rose is particularly
hard on UNC sociologist Howard Odum’s retrograde racial views—sociology
found it easier, somehow, to escape biological concepts of race and to confront
14
15
Rose, Psychology and Selfhood, 3–4.
204 richard h. king
the environmental effects of racism on southerners of both races. Even then, it

was primarily outsiders—that is, northerners and even Europeans—who brought
fresh ideas and perspectives to the study of race in the South. Some of them, such
as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and William McDougall’s
work at Duke, were themselves racist to the core. On the other hand, challenges
to racism came from Ernst Borinski, a German Jewish refugee at Tugaloo College,
and Harry Stack Sullivan, who helped with some of the caste-and-class studies
of the 1930s. A few southerners such as Merrill Moore left the region to set
up as psychiatrists in the North, while black psychiatrists were concentrated in
institutions like Nashville’s Meharry Medical College and rarely treated white
patients. They were living in a South within the South.
Perhaps the most forthright confrontation of southern racial realities in a
psychoanalytically oriented study that Rose examines is John Dollard’s Caste
and Class in a Southern Town (1937), a book which thoroughly deserves the
kind of attention to which Smith and Rose have subjected it. As she neatly
sums it up, his book made clear that “segregation was not peaceful, that both
races were psychologically damaged, and that psychoanalysis claimed the status
of science.”16 Predictably, one of the Vanderbilt Agrarians, Donald Davidson,
savaged it for raising the matter of sex and race, while sociologist E. Franklin
Frazier thought Dollard’s study should have provided tools for intervention.17 No
one, Rose notes, was very comfortable with the truths psychoanalytically oriented
work proposed. For instance, Dollard talked of the psychic gains and losses of
segregation for both races and thereby suggested that everyone had been warped
in their affective and moral lives by segregation. Still, when desegregation of the
public schools later got under way, Rose observes that “southern white scholars
had collected [so] little data about the influence of segregation on young people
of their own race” and had little knowledge of “how the thoughts and motives
of white individuals were shaped by their race.”18 Rose also pays close attention
to the work of Harvard’s Robert Coles, whose three-volume Children of Crisis
(1967–71) explored the experience of white and black children in the racial crises
of the late 1950s and the 1960s. But her main point remains: attention to how
white children respond to school desegregation remained the exception rather
than the rule.
On such matters, I cannot help feeling that Rose might have made better use
of works such W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South (1941), Lillian Smith’s Killers of
the Dream (1951) or even Margaret Anderson’s Children of the South (1966). Such
books revealed, then as well as now, something essential about the tangle of racial
16
Ibid., 98.
17
Ibid., 98–101.
18
Ibid., 106, 115.
and sexual pathology that enmeshed southerners of both races and the difficulties
of dismantling psychological as well as institutional segregation. Through fiction,
history, and autobiography/memoirs, southerners of both races were able to
discover plenty about each other as racial subjects and how historical crises have
impacted on their individual lives. The southern autobiography as a genre of self-
exploration covers much the same territory as Dollard did, but sometimes with
greater nuance and always with greater impact. The very lifeblood of southern
fiction during the 1930–1970 period, from William Faulkner through to William
Styron, from Richard Wright through to Alice Walker, was the exploration of the
dark places of white and black consciousness taken separately and together. It
is too bad that because such works do not fit into the category of disciplinary
psychology, they do not come under Rose’s chosen purview.
Ironically, Rose does scrutinize the lives of Cash and Smith, along with those
of minor Agrarian John Gould Fletcher and Robert Burgess Johnson, the son of
Fisk University president and sociologist Charles Johnson, to drive home the way
each failed to fully avail themselves of psychotherapy, even though they had read
widely in psychoanalytical literature. In the case of Cash and Fletcher, their lives
ended in suicide. But hers is strange construal of their lives, since all them had
been in some form of therapy. Indeed, the central role of psychoanalysis in their
intellectual and emotional lives makes one wonders if the unhappy outcome of
their lives does not indicate the therapeutic limits of self-oriented psychology
rather than the missed opportunities the South suffered in stifling it. Whatever
the case, Rose contends, “Although each had a role in bringing new ideas to the
region, the difference between what they said and how they lived is a reminder
of how slowly southerners changed.”19
There are also conceptual difficulties threading through Rose’s rich and often
provocative book. One is the ambiguity in the term “psychology,” which can refer
either to the characteristic ways of thinking and feeling of an individual or group—
for instance, the way the term “mind” is used in the title of Cash’s classic text—or
to an academic discipline, which is made up of a set of problems, methodological
concerns, internal theoretical differences, and institutional expressions. Rose
focuses mainly on the second usage of psychology, as I have already tried
to indicate. Psychology as a discipline was ensconced in educational research
projects in southern universities and colleges, mental hospitals, and medical
schools, and in projects funded largely by northern philanthropic foundations.
The chief institutions Rose focuses on are medical schools at (white) Vanderbilt
and (black) Meharry in Nashville, along with developments at (white) Duke
in Durham. Later in the 1950s, the University of Virginia in Charlottesville
19
Ibid., 43.
206 richard h. king
became something of a center for academic opponents of racial equality and

desegregation. The Rockefeller-funded General Education Board sought to
improve southern education for both races, with childhood development a central
concern of educational psychology. Though few, if any, lances were broken by
white institutions or academics trying to undermine racial segregation, there was
some informal faculty contact across racial lines, for instance, among Vanderbilt,
Fisk University, and Meharry Medical School in Nashville. Interestingly, Rose also
notes that the fact of racial segregation failed to generate two separate accounts
of development according to race: “a child was just a child.”20
But there is another, more interesting ambiguity in Rose’s discussions of
psychology in the South and that is the split within the discipline of psychology.
When she is concerned with the links between psychology, education, and race,
Rose seems to be referring to psychology as it is concerned with what helps and
hinders learning, including the development of cognitive capacities as the child
matures. Historically, a focus on comparative racial intelligence was also found
in this approach to cognitive development. The assumption behind cognitive
psychology was that individuals had a normal course of development which was
biologically predetermined. With black children, the assumption was that those
capacities were less. On the other hand, Rose uses the term “psychology” in much
of the book to refer to the analysis (and treatment) of the affective development
of individuals and the impact of environmental factors (e.g. child-rearing) on
their achievement of emotional maturity— that is, adulthood in a normative
sense. The basic assumption here is that mental illness or psychological distress
is corrigible, often through a combination of therapy, drugs, and mechanical
means such as electric shock.
Of course the distinction between these two types of psychology is sometimes
hard to make. For instance, since the 1960s, autism has migrated from being an
affective to a cognitive disorder and from being environmentally to genetically
caused. Still, few think that someone with limited mental capacities would be
helped by psychoanalysis, while the high IQ of a borderline psychotic is only
of minor importance to his or her treatment. Overall, the focus on cognitive
capabilities tends to stress inherent capacities and fixed patterns of development,
while affective psychology tends to search for the ways that behavior and feelings
can be transformed.21 The reason I emphasize this conceptual split in the
20
Ibid., 67.
21
A full discussion of this issue would focus on the interaction and relative importance of
three pairs of variables: the individual–group, affective–cognitive, and environmental–
genetic. Of course, the work of Erik Erikson, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Carol Gilligan
has sought to bring together the cognitive and affective realms in their study of human
development.
discipline of psychology is that it is not entirely clear whether Rose thinks that
the great promise of psychology fell in the cognitive or the affective realms.
Did the South need better-trained teachers and better-funded schools or did it
need more therapists and mental institutions? Or was it that black southerners
primarily needed more of the former, while white southerners needed more of
the latter?
In her last chapter, “The Southern Background in the War for Human
Nature,” Rose focuses, as does Mark Smith, on the resurgence of racial–biological
explanations for differences in so-called native intelligence in the 1950s and
1960s. It was then that the South became a haven for a neo-racist academic
cognitive psychology, where figures such as Wesley Frank George, Henry Garrett,
R. Travis Osborne and independent scholar Carleton Putnam set up outposts
of academic resistance to racial egalitarianism. For instance, Osborne at the
University of Georgia claimed to show that blacks were inferior in mathematics.
These figures, notes Rose, tended to neglect regional dimensions in their analysis
of race, though their work was obviously of use by opponents of desegregation
in the South. Data was derived from experiments rather than, for instance,
from such participant observation of actual social settings as Dollard and
Allison Davis had carried out in the 1930s. The South as a place and as an
experience dropped away within their studies. Race became an independent
variable, the same everywhere. However, Coles and Alvin Poussaint, who were
sympathetic to the efforts at racial transformation, sought to understand the
psychological stress that the besieged position of the civil rights workers of both
races entailed. Again, it is important to note that the main figures on both
sides of the debate tended to be northerners rather than southerners. Thus not
only did the South have a neocolonial relationship with the rest of the country
economically, it was also an intellectual captive of the outside world in remaining
an experimental site or proving ground for diverse psychological and sociological
theories.
Finally, the work of Mark Smith and Anne Rose raises important questions.
For instance, does a purely regional analysis of white racial attitudes make much
sense, if it ever did? One omission by both authors, but particularly by Rose, is
particularly striking—the neglect of the historical role of religion in the South
both in blocking a nonracial, secular understanding of the self and in encouraging
a certain moral concern with doing right by others. Rose’s most interesting
point remains her claim that how the South’s white citizens have reacted to,
become further entrenched in, or even overcome older racial attitudes and self-
conceptions has been largely missing from a general understanding of the South.
But while Rose and Smith are excellent guides to our understanding of the
rocky, often treacherous, terrain of the past and of what went wrong in the lives
of black and white southerners, they fall short in helping us understand how
208 richard h. king
many white southerners have learned a kind of acceptance, even affirmation,

of a radical change in their sense of themselves, their region, and their race.
Just as race relations have changed radically since the end of World War II, so
the self-consciousness of both races must have shifted too. It is perhaps time
for intellectual historians of race in the South (and the nation) to begin to
focus on how (white) racial consciousness has moved toward a belief in equality
rather than continuing to retell the old story of how racism came to define the
South.

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Modern Intellectual History, 7, 1 (2010), pp.

against whiteness: race

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959)

sight were emphasized because “slavery was becoming whiter.”4 As miscegenation

the environmental effects of racism on southerners of both races. Even then, it

became something of a center for academic opponents of racial equality and

many white southerners have learned a kind of acceptance, even affirmation,

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