For at least two centuries, argues Mark Smith, white southerners
used all of their senses--not just their eyes--to construct racial
difference and define race. His provocative analysis, extending
from the colonial period to the mid-twentieth century, shows how
whites of all classes used the artificial binary of "black" and
"white" to justify slavery and erect the political, legal, and
social structure of segregation.
Based on painstaking research,
How Race Is Made is a highly
original, always frank, and often disturbing book. After enslaved
Africans were initially brought to America, the offspring of black
and white sexual relationships (consensual and forced) complicated
the purely visual sense of racial typing. As mixed-race people
became more and more common and as antebellum race-based slavery
and then postbellum racial segregation became central to southern
society, white southerners asserted that they could rely on their
other senses--touch, smell, sound, and taste--to identify who was
"white" and who was not. Sensory racial stereotypes were invented
and irrational, but at every turn, Smith shows, these constructions
of race, immune to logic, signified difference and perpetuated
inequality.
Smith argues that the history of southern race relations and the
construction of racial difference on which that history is built
cannot be understood fully on the basis of sight alone. In order to
come to terms with the South's past and present, Smith says, we
must explore the sensory dynamics underpinning the deeply emotional
construction of race.
How Race Is Made takes a bold step
toward that understanding.