Whitewashing the South White Memories of Segregation and Civil Rights [Hardcover]

Attempting to clarify the persistence of black-white racism in the South by examining white attitudes, sociologist Lavelle uses a commonsense approach: she interviewed 44 Greensboro, NC, white elders (33 women, 11 men) to document their memories of growing up in the Jim Crow, civil rights, and postcivil rights eras. Lavelle records her interviewees stories, denials, justifications, and glosses while assessing their words within a sociological theoretical framework. This is ostensibly an academic and objective inquiry, but one wonders how objective the study can be when the author premises that the narrators' families comprised part of a white southern culture whose ingrained racism maintained 'race ... [as] the key boundary that structured the Jim Crow South....' Creating a book readers will either hate or love, with few finding a middle ground, Lavelle examines white perception and comprehension of black lives both in the private/domestic and public spheres, which illustrates her genuine effort to conduct viable research. Ultimately, any evaluation of the book must rest on the degree to which her 20072009 study provides an enriched understanding of the Jim Crow South through an accurate representation and subsequent analysis of typical white attitudes. Sure to launch discussion. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries.An illuminating, nuanced, and powerful portrayal of how Southern whites ?have managed to ignore the degree to which racism has shaped their history, instead seeing the 1940s and 50s as decades of peace and harmony.Lavelle expertly analyzes how older white Southerners construct a non-racial narrative of their experiences during the Jim Crow era and the civil rights movement. We see that history is reconstructed, not only by historians, but in the memories of those who lived through it. Whitewashing the South is an important contribution to our understanding of whiteness and race in the United States.In this groundbreaking study, Kristen LavelÓ!