Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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In my opinion we cannot begin at the top to build a race, any more than we can begin at the top to build a house. If we try to do this, we shall reap in the end the fruits of our folly. (29-30)

As Washington’s words suggest here, his ultimate goal with his educational system was to “build a race,” to put together a version of blackness that would challenge, and in time dismantle, the prevailing version of whiteness that was being constructed in the post-Civil War white South. In Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940, Grace Elizabeth Hale examines the means by which the complex dynamics of racial segregation were fabricated, cementing in place a social system founded upon absolute and essential racial difference. While Emancipation might have seemed to open up for southern blacks a world of boundless promise, the system of segregation instead restricted blacks within a tightly contained world, limiting opportunities for self-improvement and restricting mobility, both literal and social. If the southern system sought to obscure and deny the dangerous middle ground of racial hybridity, which stood as a challenge to racial essentialism and the visibility of racial categories, so too did the system seek to keep another middle ground—the middle class—entirely white. “Racial essentialism, the conception of sets of personal characteristics as biological determined racial identities,” Hale writes, “grew in popularity among whites in tandem with the rise of the new black middle class and its increasing visibility” (21).