Grace Elizabeth Hale is an assistant professor of American history at the University of Virginia. She lives in
Charlottesville, Virginia.
Summary
Making Whiteness is a profoundly important work that explains how and why whiteness came to be such a
crucial, embattled--and distorting--component of twentieth-century American identity. In intricately textured detail
and with passionately mastered analysis, Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how, when faced with the active citizenship
of their ex-slaves after the Civil War, white southerners re-established their dominance through a cultural system
based on violence and physical separation. And in a bold and transformative analysis of the meaning of segregation
for the nation as a whole, she explains how white southerners' creation of modern "whiteness" was, beginning
in the 1920s, taken up by the rest of the nation as a way of enforcing a new social hierarchy while at the same
time creating the illusion of a national, egalitarian, consumerist democracy.
By showing the very recent historical "making" of contemporary American whiteness and by examining how
the culture of segregation, in all its murderous contradictions, was lived, Hale makes it possible to imagine a
future outside it. Her vision holds out the difficult promise of a truly democratic American identity whose possibilities
are no longer limited and disfigured by race.
