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AGAINST WHITENESS: RACE AND PSYCHOLOGY IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2010
Extract
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 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.
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References
1 For a lucid overview of the topic of damage see Daryl Scott, Michael, Contempt and Pity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Eric Voegelin, “The Growth of the Race Idea,” Review of Politics, July 1940, 283–317; Du Bois, W. E. B., Dusk of Dawn: The Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Schocken Books, 1968)Google Scholar.
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.
4 Smith, How Race Is Made, 39.
5 Ibid., 49, 56–7.
6 Smith, How Race Is Made, 116. For an exploration of the racial dimensions of the polio scare see Rogers, Naomi, “Race and the Politics of Polio: Warm Springs, Tuskegee and the March of Dimes,” American Journal of Public Health 97/5 (May 2007), 784–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Smith, How Race Is Made, 82.
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 Kovel, Joel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Pantheon, 1970)Google Scholar.
9 “An Interview with Mark M. Smith,” www.ibiblio.org/uncp/media/msmith.
10 Smith, How Race Is Made, 4.
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.
14 Smith, How Race Is Made, 139.
15 Rose, Psychology and Selfhood, 3–4.
16 Ibid., 98.
17 Ibid., 98–101.
18 Ibid., 106, 115.
19 Ibid., 43.
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.