The Burning House

In The Burning House Anders Walker examines the literary and legal roots of an understanding of “diversity” that was advocated by black and white writers during the period of Jim Crow and influenced U.S. Supreme Court judges Lewis Powell and Clarence Thomas, but that has often been dismissed by scholars. In this conception of diversity, separate racial cultural traditions were to be valued, and racial integration was seen as problematic or not prioritized. Walker argues that this alternative understanding of diversity fostered in the Jim Crow South has been far more foundational in American thought and jurisprudence than previously realized—“an important, if counterintuitive chorus to the epic saga of civil rights at the time, which focused on desegregating public accommodations and schools” (p. 3). Much of the book traces this understanding of diversity in the writings of black and white intellectuals during the Jim Crow era and in succeeding years. Through a close reading of literary works, Walker shows how some twentieth-century black and white southern writers turned away from ideas of integration and instead saw benefits in the separation of white and black communities. White southern writers ranging from Robert Penn Warren to Flannery O'Connor to Harper Lee argued that segregation enriched southern culture, creating a racial pluralism that allowed separate black and white cultural traditions to flourish. At the same time, black writers such as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker drew on elements of these ideas, valuing separate societies in their literary works. Some black writers saw white society as a “burning house” that must be escaped; in other instances, black intellectuals also saw the civil rights movement's push for integration as devaluing black achievement and found arguments about the psychological damage of segregation to be deeply flawed

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Culture of the United States · Desegregation · Diversity (politics · Flannery · Literature · Political science · Sociology · Theology · White (mutation · Wright · Anthropology · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society

• Norm-based leadership and the challenge of democratically elected authoritarians

  Open Access•Bert Spector•Leadership•2020

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