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2 opere 106 membri 6 recensioni

Sull'Autore

Elizabeth Gillespie McRae is Sossomon Associate Professor of History and director of graduate social science education programs at Western Carolina University.

Opere di Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

Etichette

Informazioni generali

Sesso
female
Nazione (per mappa)
USA

Utenti

Recensioni

This may be the most important book I have read this year. It is informative and shocking the way white women have long played victim for the sake of segregation and redlining.
 
Segnalato
DrFuriosa | 5 altre recensioni | Dec 4, 2020 |
Incredibly interesting, learn something new every day! Highly recommend
 
Segnalato
marshapetry | 5 altre recensioni | Oct 16, 2020 |
It's a well-researched, well-written, thoroughly depressing tale of how (white) women can also be gigantic assholes, we just didn't notice because we weren't paying attention to how that crap got done.
1 vota
Segnalato
Jon_Hansen | 5 altre recensioni | Jun 2, 2019 |
Depressing but important: white women did the day to day work of implementing and defending white supremacy throughout the 20th century. Initially, white women worked as registrars and social workers (classifying people by race and denying whiteness and other benefits to the undeserving) and teachers (ensuring that children learned the naturalness of white supremacy and the tragic consequences of northern intervention into the South’s peculiar institution). They implemented segregation and white supremacy at the local level, even if we mostly remember the male politicians who purported to lead the charge.

Later, when desegregation became a legal mandate, white women worked on electoral politics and popular culture to fight back. Southerners made white allies all over the country, building the foundations for a larger movement of white backlash that would use deracialized language to fight government “overreach.” Claiming the special right to defend domesticity and intimacy—especially against interracial sex—white women insisted that they were working for the good of (white) children, thus justifying their public participation. When Eleanor Roosevelt visited North Carolina in 1942 and lunched with black men and women, rather than just sweeping in and out of a black college like a benevolent better, no white woman would host her overnight: she was an existential threat. White motherhood required policing against interracial sex, which was inherently suggested by interracial dining. They also blamed Eleanor Roosevelt for rumors about how WWII would get black women out of white women’s kitchens and force white women to be subordinate to black women. In a standard move, they made her an outside agitator: “By naming these underground activities ‘Eleanor Clubs,’ white southern women were able to recast what was black women’s rising labor independence and more generally an emerging, powerful civil rights campaign as the work of a white female authority figure.”

White segregationist women led the charge to leave the Democratic party because, unlike white men, they didn’t have “party perks and election deals” to lose when charging it had betrayed its racist ideals. They adopted a domestic anti-communism linking segregation, anti-United Nations activism, oversight of white children’s education, “and the policing of seemingly benign outsiders polluting communities with incindiary ideas.” Of course, anything homegrown, like student activists at UNC, was misguided and misled—turns out those attacks on UNC for liberalism go a ways back (“North Carolinians never intended to pay taxes ‘on a nest for Muscovite fledglings’”) though they’ve recently undergone a resurgence. And in the end, the protection of white children/white womanhood was about sex: one of McRae’s central subjects, a political activist/newspaper writer, ends up screaming at her slightly more liberal editor, “I hope all your daughters have n---- babies,” which is pretty much what the segregationist position reduced to. McRae points out that white women spent less time on scaremongering about rape than white men did—they were more concerned about consensual interracial sex. Segregation was always about the fear that intimacy would be unencumbered by racial hierarchy: “When Pat Watters’s lone black second grade student stood in line for his hug on the last day of school, Watters remembered being stunned that a black seven-year-old would expect a hug just like his white classmates.”

The lessons of massive resistance also point to the limited potential of compromise: a number of McRae’s subjects started out as Southern white “liberals” in the sense that they condemned lynching and advocated for limited amounts of equality, for example in improving black schools. But after Brown declared desegregation to be the law of the land, they stopped their protectiveness, refusing to condemn the murder of Emmett Till. And when parents kept their children out of school or closed down schools, they taught their children “that preserving whiteness and racial segregation mattered more to their parents than a high school diploma, a college scholarship, or even Friday night football.” And, McRae notes, white children “who heard the shouts of ‘school choice’ in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s became the parents on the left and the right who witnessed and supported the rise of ‘school choice’ in the 1990s.”
… (altro)
1 vota
Segnalato
rivkat | 5 altre recensioni | May 15, 2018 |

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Statistiche

Opere
2
Utenti
106
Popolarità
#181,887
Voto
½ 4.5
Recensioni
6
ISBN
9

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