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Peculiar Whiteness: Racial Anxiety and Poor Whites in Southern Literature, 1900–1965 argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such experiences have been. While the history of prejudice against this group is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against people of color in America, individuals regarded as “white trash” have suffered a dehumanizing process in the writings of various white authors. Poor white characters are frequently maligned as grotesque and anxiety inducing, especially when they are aligned in close proximity to blacks or to people with disabilities. Thus, as a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various iterations of the label (e.g., “white trash,” tenant farmers, or even people with a little less money than average) have been subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear, and anxiety. Peculiar Whiteness engages key issues in contemporary critical race studies, whiteness studies, and southern studies, both literary and historical. Through discussions of authors including Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Sutton Griggs, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor, we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their status, often by finding ways to recategorize and marginalize people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the auspices or boundaries of “white trash.”
Peculiar Whiteness: Racial Anxiety and Poor Whites in Southern Literature, 1900–1965 argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such experiences have been. While the history of prejudice against this group is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against people of color in America, individuals regarded as “white trash” have suffered a dehumanizing process in the writings of various white authors. Poor white characters are frequently maligned as grotesque and anxiety inducing, especially when they are aligned in close proximity to blacks or to people with disabilities. Thus, as a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various iterations of the label (e.g., “white trash,” tenant farmers, or even people with a little less money than average) have been subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear, and anxiety. Peculiar Whiteness engages key issues in contemporary critical race studies, whiteness studies, and southern studies, both literary and historical. Through discussions of authors including Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Sutton Griggs, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor, we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their status, often by finding ways to recategorize and marginalize people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the auspices or boundaries of “white trash.”
This edited volume connects the origins of US higher education during the Colonial Era with current systemic characteristics that maintain white supremacist structures and devalue students and faculty of color, as well as areas of study that interrogate Whiteness. The authors examine power structures within the academy that scaffold Whiteness and promote inequality at all levels by maintaining a two-tier faculty system and a dearth of Faculty and Administrators of Color. Finally, contributors offer systemic and collective solutions toward a more equitable redistribution of power, primarily among faculty and administration, through which other inequities may be identified and more easily addressed.
The past quarter century has born witness to a vast critical output in the field of whiteness studies, as multiple scholars in disparate fields have analyzed the ways in which whiteness operates as a systematic power structure that, for centuries, has created and upheld an uneven relationship between whites and non-whites, granting the former tangible benefits in political, socioeconomic, and moral power. That many scholars working on whiteness have located the importance of examining southern literature through the focused lens of critical race analysis should come as no surprise. From the decades before the Civil War, when the idea of a literature that was at least partially distinct from a larger sense of American literature arose, southern literature has had racial concerns staunchly at its front and center. What is perhaps less readily apparent is the number of similarities found in analytic works in the fields of whiteness studies and southern studies. Chief among these is the insistence and move toward a less homogeneous, totalizing view of the terms "white(s)," "whiteness," "South(s)" and "southern." Southern literature has long been a record of the experiences of both the region's white and black residents. While literary criticism has taken into account the ways in which authors have depicted the South's particular racial concerns, considering the framework provided by whiteness studies scholars opens broader avenues for critical exploration. Specifically, I investigate the ways in which both black and white authors from the post Reconstruction period through the Civil Rights era depicted white racial anxiety. White anxiety is a central tenet of the South's peculiar brand of racism. What makes southern white anxiety different from 'normal' or 'normative' white anxiety is this weight of being southern; in addition to nostalgia associated with the Lost Cause mentality, the southerner is faced with generations of being viewed as and viewing others as being somehow separate from America at large, a nation within a nation, to echo W. J. Cash. Over the course of my introduction and six chapters I interrogate a multitude of depictions of 'normative' whiteness: after a contextual introduction, my first chapter joins recent critical conversations on plantation literature, specifically elements of nostalgia in works by Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page, contrasting their work with that of Charles Chesnutt's conjure stories. In Chapter 2, I discuss the race-baiting Thomas Dixon and Sutton Griggs, whose novel The Hindered Hand is a direct response to Dixon. In my third and fourth chapters, I discuss the important of 'white trash': first in William Faulkner's Snopes Trilogy, then in the work of Erskine Caldwell, especially his photojournalist work You Have Seen Their Faces. Chapter 5 discusses various southern memoirs, juxtaposing the conservative Lanterns on the Levee by William Alexander Percy and Richard Wright's famed Black Boy and Killers of the Dream by Lillian Smith, a scathing indictment of segregation. The final chapter discusses elements of foreignness and disability in the works of Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers, specifically the former's short story "Good Country People" and the latter's novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. My conclusion offers a case study in popular music with emphasis on The Clash and Lynyrd Skynyrd, before turning toward recent southern literature, specifically the works of Randall Kenan and Monique Truong, to emphasize that white anxiety is an ever prevalent concern in southern letters for a broad spectrum of authors writing about vastly disparate cultural experiences.
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.