Untimely Subjects

White Trash and the Making of Racial Innocence in the Postwar South

Dados Bibliográficos

ID9449780
AutoresKirstine Taylor (0000-0001-6559-6413, autor correspondente)
Ano2015
Volume67
Fascículo1
Páginas55-79
Data de publicação2015-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAmerican Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490
EditoraProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/aq.2015.0014
OpenAlexW2145993746
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas7
Referências citadas34

This article analyzes the role that categories of racial transgression—specifically, the reviled “white trash” of the rural South—play in the historical construction of racial innocence in America. Writing in 1963, James Baldwin diagnosed innocence as the alchemy by which white Americans turn otherwise visible racial inequality into stories of redemption, virtue, and progress. In this article, I use shifting historical constructions of white trash from the Progressive Era to the post–World War II era to unearth the relationship between transgression and innocence. Beginning in the 1940s, white trash underwent a significant transformation that smoothed the reentrenchment of racial innocence during the era of Cold War liberalism and civil rights. Once figures of suspect racial “purity,” white trash in the postwar period operated as a repository of intractable antiblack violence, mobism, and retrogression. Their movement from racial contaminant to guilty white, I argue, brings into sharp relief the class-inflected transformation of racial innocence during the critical civil rights years: the New South’s commitment to “color-blind” law-and-order and economic progress were together formative of the protection of emergent white middle-class interests in the postwar South and a new kind of racial innocence that has since settled into contemporary national discourses on race

Criminology · Innocence · Making-of · Political science · Racism · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Virtue · White (mutation · White supremacy · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Gender Studies · History · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Race, History, and American Society