Whitewashing the South is a powerful exploration of how ordinary white southerners recall living through extraordinary racial times—the Jim Crow era, civil rights movement, and the post-civil rights era—highlighting tensions between memory and reality. Author Kristen Lavelle draws on interviews with the oldest living generation of white southerners to uncover uncomfortable memories of our racial past. The vivid interview excerpts show how these lifelong southerners reflect on race in the segregated South, the civil rights era, and more recent decades. The book illustrates a number of complexities—how these white southerners both acknowledged and downplayed Jim Crow racial oppression, how they both appreciated desegregation and criticized the civil rights movement, and how they both favorably assessed racial progress while resenting reminders of its unflattering past. Chapters take readers on a real-world look inside The Help and an exploration of the way the Greensboro sit-ins and school desegregation have been remembered, and forgotten. Digging into difficult memories and emotions, Whitewashing the South challenges our understandings of the realities of racial inequality.

By putting the language used in television, the radio, the internet and press, as well as that spoken by key leaders, under the spotlight, what is ultimately revealed is the existence of a 'white' language, both coded and overt. Taking specific examples and presenting new factual evidence, John Gabriel studies the racial politics that lie behind much of the communication in the public arena. Case studies draw on contemporary political controversies and are used to explore the relationship between racialised forms of media discourse and political and economic change.

Even before mass marketing, American consumers bought products that gentrified their households and broadcast their sense of "the good things in life." Bridging literary scholarship, archaeology, history, and art history, Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination explores how material goods shaped antebellum notions of race, class, gender, and purity. From the Revolutionary War until the Civil War, American consumers increasingly sought white-colored goods. Whites preferred mass-produced and specialized products, avoiding the former dark, coarse, low-quality products issued to slaves. White consumers knit around themselves refined domestic items, visual reminders of who they were, equating wealth, discipline, and purity with the racially "white." Clothing, paint, dinnerware, gravestones, and buildings staked a visual contrast, a portable, visible title and deed segregating upper-class whites from their lower-class neighbors and household servants. This book explores what it meant to be "white" by delving into the whiteness of dishes, gravestone art, and architecture, as well as women's clothing and corsets, cleanliness and dental care, and complexion. Early nineteenth-century authors participated in this material economy as well, building their literary landscapes in the same way their readers furnished their households and manipulating the understood meanings of things into political statements. Such writers as James Fenimore Cooper and John Pendleton Kennedy use setting descriptions to insist on segregation and hierarchy. Such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, struggled to negotiate messages of domesticity, body politics, and privilege according to complex agendas of their own. Challenging the popular notions, slave narrators such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs wielded white objects to reverse the perspective of their white readers and, at times, to mock their white middle-class pretensions.

Kathleen Paul challenges the usual explanation for the racism of post-war British policy. According to standard historiography, British public opinion forced the Conservative government to introduce legislation stemming the flow of dark-skinned immigrants and thereby altering an expansive nationality policy that had previously allowed all British subjects free entry into the United Kingdom. Paul's extensive archival research shows, however, that the racism of ministers and senior functionaries led rather than followed public opinion. In the late 1940s, the Labour government faced a birthrate perceived to be in decline, massive economic dislocations caused by the war, a huge national debt, severe labor shortages, and the prospective loss of international preeminence. Simultaneously, it subsidized the emigration of Britons to Australia, Canada, and other parts of the Empire, recruited Irish citizens and European refugees to work in Britain, and used regulatory changes to dissuade British subjects of color from coming to the United Kingdom. Paul contends post-war concepts of citizenship were based on a contradiction between the formal definition of who had the right to enter Britain and the informal notion of who was, or could become, really British. Whitewashing Britain extends this analysis to contemporary issues, such as the fierce engagement in the Falklands War and the curtailment of citizenship options for residents of Hong Kong. Paul finds the politics of citizenship in contemporary Britain still haunted by a mixture of imperial, economic, and demographic imperatives.

Sheds new light on the racial etiquette of the South after the Civil War, examining what factors contributed to the unwritten rules of individual behavior for both white and black children. Simultaneous.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History: a bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy “Stunning.”—Rebecca Onion, Slate “Makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present.”—Parul Sehgal, New York Times “Bracingly revisionist. . . . [A] startling corrective.”—Nicholas Guyatt, New York Review of Books Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave‑owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

Hope looms in a vast land wide open with possibilities... Dr. Sunny Rubenstein travels the night train through the black void of Africa to check out his 51st job prospect on the rich Cheetah Gold Mine. Along the way he hears that the mine might be running out. But the appendage to it, Umzimtuti, the smallest municipality in the world, could be big-even King George VI will stop off for tea on his Victory Tour on the Royal White Train. The mine's bonus is a free rambling house with the only indoor toilet in town. It's the perfect antidote to his wife Mavourneen's difficult war years with their ailing son, Douglas. Sunny cannot afford to lose a case in his first year to secure the post permanently. There's plenty to challenge him. Early morning sick parade under the shadeless blue gum trees is followed by surgery, then on to afternoon clinics ending with calls to far-away farms and mud huts. Umzimtuti's a town where poker stakes are high. Liquor flows freely at the Umzimtuti Hotel bar. Bullet holes in the wall attest to its wild past. Sunny will have to unseat the tight-fisted, short-sighted Mayor if Umzimtuti's ever going to put in street lights, get rid of bucket toilets and the honeysuckle brigade so the town can capture the new surge in post-war industry. Sunny's belief that competence, hope, hard work and idealism are enough will be sorely tested.