Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South
Kristina DuRocher
Abstract
White southerners recognized that the perpetuation of segregation required whites of all ages to uphold a strict social order — especially the young members of the next generation. White children rested at the core of the system of segregation between 1890 and 1939 because their participation was crucial to ensuring the future of white supremacy. Their socialization in the segregated South offers an examination of white supremacy from the inside, showcasing the culture's efforts to preserve itself by teaching its beliefs to the next generation. This book reveals how white adults in the late ni ... More
White southerners recognized that the perpetuation of segregation required whites of all ages to uphold a strict social order — especially the young members of the next generation. White children rested at the core of the system of segregation between 1890 and 1939 because their participation was crucial to ensuring the future of white supremacy. Their socialization in the segregated South offers an examination of white supremacy from the inside, showcasing the culture's efforts to preserve itself by teaching its beliefs to the next generation. This book reveals how white adults in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continually reinforced race and gender roles to maintain white supremacy. The book examines the practices, mores, and traditions that trained white children to fear, dehumanize, and disdain their black neighbors. This book combines an analysis of the remembered experiences of a racist society, how that society influenced children, and, most important, how racial violence and brutality shaped growing up in the early-twentieth-century South.
Keywords:
segregation,
South,
white supremacy,
white adults,
race roles,
gender roles,
racist society
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780813130019 |
| Published to Kentucky Scholarship Online: September 2011 |
DOI:10.5810/kentucky/9780813130019.001.0001 |
