The Strange Career of Whiteness: Miscegenation, Assimilation, Abdication

Abstract

The title of this chapter is taken from the title of a book written in 1955 by C. Vann Woodward, a renowned historian of race from the United States. Woodward’s book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, appeared just one year after the Supreme Court’s famous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared unconstitutional the principle of separate but equal that underlay segregation ever since the court’s upholding ofthat principle in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Woodward, in tracing the history of racial segregation in the South, was especially taken with the various ironies in this history. Although most Americans—then and now—associated Jim Crow laws with the South, Woodward pointed out that it was a system that had first emerged in northern states in the antebellum period and was only infused into southern law several decades after the end of the Civil War (not immediately afterward as many believed). Woodward also took comfort in the fact that Jim Crow seemed to be an overlay onto southern culture, not something intrinsic to the region’s history or deeply embedded in southern social custom. In other words, Woodward argued that Jim Crow as a social, political, and legal institution was of very recent vintage and from the vantage point of 1955, was vulner able and under attack.KeywordsWhite WomanEuropean SettlerWhite PeopleEuropean WomanInterracial MarriageThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.