Owning Up: Revisiting Property, Education, and Race in the South

Abstract

Though the 2008 election of Barack Obama supposedly marked the beginning of America's post-racial era, a quick look at polls across southern states shows that race remains a troubling and significant problem below the Mason-Dixon line. Indeed, the history of the South 's problematic relationship with race has long been a defining feature of southern studies. Historians and critics frequently approached the South's perspective on race as monolithic and insular; such scholars often ignored the interconnectivity of southern culture's engagement with race, approaching literature, art, law, and history as separate disciplines with unique languages and rubrics for investigation. However, recent work now suggests that the near-decade-old turn to new southern