Introductory description

In this Advanced Option module, students will critically engage with the concept of “whiteness” in the United States from theoretical, social, and cultural perspectives.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Term One

Introductions
Week 1: Why Studying Whiteness Matters - Whiteness in contemporary America: e.g. the “alt-right”; populism and the 2016 election; immigration debates; All Lives Matter; #OscarsSoWhite
Week 2: What is Whiteness? - Theoretical perspectives on the constructions of whiteness, white supremacy, white nationalism and white privilege

Block A: Creating Whiteness: The White Working Class
Week 3: The Wages of Whiteness - Class and race in the 19th century, working class culture, minstrelsy
Week 4: Poor White Trash - race and class in antebellum South; lived experience of poor whites; relationships with slaves and slaveholders
Week 5: Whiteness of a Different Colour - immigration and “ethnic” whiteness, Jewish Americans, Eastern Europeans, Irish Americans
Week 6: Reading Week

Block B: Maintaining Whiteness: Violence and Terror
Week 7: Segregation, North and South - how segregation developed differently in North and South; voter suppression, redlining, etc. Everyday violence as underpinning political and legal strategies of oppression
Week 8: The Ku Klux Klan(s) - Development of four main phases of the KKK and 100% Americanism, their role in politics, violence, segregation.
Week 9: Lynching - Community building role, economic and racial motivations; photography
Week 10: Church Bombings and Burnings - Church targeted as site of black resistance in 1960s and 1990s; whiteness and religion

Term Two

Block C: Defending Whiteness: White Womanhood
Week 1: All the Women are White - suffrage movement and exclusion; Whiteness and 2nd wave feminism
Week 2: Women of the Klan - History of WKKK and womens’ role as defenders of white supremacy – UDC and maintenance of Jim Crow
Week 3: Rape and the Rape Myth - how rape myth was constructed to control white women while rape used to control black women; history of fear of miscegenation
Week 4: Student Presentations (formative assignment 2)
Week 5: Student Presentations (formative assignment 2)
Week 6: Reading Week

Block D: Imagining Whiteness: Whiteness in American culture
Week 7: Representing Whiteness - whiteness in literature, art and culture
Week 8: Screen Saviours - whiteness in historical film, e.g. Birth of a Nation, Amistad, Mississippi Burning, The Help
Week 9: The White Image in the Black Mind - black perspectives on whiteness (Morrison, Baldwin, Yancy, etc.)
Week 10: Conclusions & Comparative Perspectives - global context, especially UK, South Africa, Latin America, as well as revisiting broader themes

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a systematic knowledge and understanding of the history of the social construction of whiteness in the United States
• Critically analyse and evaluate a broad range of primary sources relating to whiteness as both a personal identity and a socio-political force
• Effectively communicate ideas, and make informed, coherent and persuasive arguments, relating to the history of whiteness in the United States
• Critically review and consolidate theoretical, methodological, and historiographical ideas relating to whiteness and its role in American history and society
• Take responsibility to identify, design, and produce a coherent project on whiteness, white supremacy, white nationalism and/or white privilege

Indicative reading list

Primary Sources:

• Key Online Collections:
• WPA Interviews with former slaves (1930s)
• After Slavery: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Emancipation Carolinas
• Materials online at Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia
• Documenting the American South
• Southern Poverty Law Center ‘Intelligence Files’

Key Texts (all available online):

• Edward Isham, The Confessions of Edward Isham: A Poor White Life of the Old South (1859)
• ‘Organization and Principles of the Ku Klux Klan’ (1868)
• ‘Report of the Joint select committee appointed to inquire into the condition of affairs in the late insurrectionary states, so far as regards the execution of laws, and the safety of the lives and property of the citizens of the United States and Testimony taken’ (1872)
• Ida B Wells, The Red Record (1895)
• Frederick L. Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896)
• R. W. Shufeldt, The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization (1907)
• Winfield Collins, The Truth about Lynching and the Negro in the South (1918)
• William J. Simmons, Constitution and Laws of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Inc. (1921)
• Henry P. Fry, The Modern Ku Klux Klan (1922)
• Hiram Wesley Evans, The Klan’s Fight for Americanism (1926)
• Women of the KKK, ‘Ideals of the Women of the KKK’ (192-?)
• ‘The Southern Manifesto’ (1956)
• William Bradford Huie, ‘The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi’, Look (1956)
• Earl Lively Jr., The Invasion of Mississippi (1963)
• The Kloran of the White Knights of the KKK, Realm of Mississippi (196-?)
• Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism (1995)
• David Duke, ‘America at the Crossroads’ (1997)

Secondary Sources:

• Allen, Theodore, The invention of the white race: Vols 1& 2
• Bay, Mia, The White Image in the Black Mind
• Blee, Kathleen M., Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s
• Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era
• Bonnett, Alastair, White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives
• Brown, David, and Webb, Clive, Race in the American South from Slavery to Civil Rights
• Brundage, William Fitzhugh (ed.) Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South
• Carrigan, William D., The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-
• 1916
• Burlein, Ann, Lift High the Cross: Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Converge
• Cash, W. J., The Mind of the South
• Cell, John W., The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South
• Chalmers, David M., Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan
• Cobb, James C., Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity
• Daniels, Jesse, White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse
• Dailey, Jane, et al. (eds), Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights
• Dyer, Richard, White
• Ferber, Abby L., White Man Falling: Gender, Race and White Supremacy
• Frankenberg, Ruth, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness
• Fredrickson, George M., White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History
• Fredrickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914
• Gilmore, Glenda E., Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina 1896-1920
• Hale, Grace Elizabeth, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940
• Harris, Trudier, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals
• Hodes, Martha (ed.), Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History
• Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color
• Kantrowitz, Stephen, Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy
• Kovel, Joel, White Racism: A Psychohistory
• Lewis, George, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement
• MacLean, Nancy, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan
• Merritt, Keri Leigh, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South
• Morrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the American Literary Imagination
• Painter, Nell, The History of White People
• Ridgeway, James, Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skin-heads and the Rise of a New White Culture
• Roediger, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
• Roediger, David, Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White
• Stokes, Mason, The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality and the Fictions of White Supremacy
• Trelease, Allen W., White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction
• Waldrep, Christopher, The Many Face of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America
• Ware, Vron, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History
• Webb, Clive, Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era
• Williamson, Joel, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation
• Wray, Matt, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness
• Yancy, George, Look, A White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.