sniper-at-the-gates-of-heaven: Good white women, and especially good white mothers, “married g
sniper-at-the-gates-of-heaven:Good white women, and especially good white mothers, “married gender roles [with a] devotion to racial segregation.” They had a special obligation to police the color line where public and private life intersected: Midwives classified the race of the babies they helped bring into the world; public school teachers plucked students suspected of being mixed-race from their classrooms. Some educated women nourished the illusion of a more “affectionate segregation,” in columns containing fond tales of their housemaids and childhood mammies. White women’s work to maintain a segregated America extended much further than we tend to believe, in both time and space. That work wasn’t confined to the years between Brown v. Board of Education and the Voting Rights Act; rather, McRae argues that it started in the 1920s, when white women employed as teachers, registrars, social workers, and midwives began to engage in the waged labor of racial classification, and it continues today.Massive resistance—the wave of legislative, legal, and public protests against integration—is usually seen as a Southern project. Not true, McRae counters: In fact, white segregationist women in the South built alliances and shared strategies with women from California to Michigan who were also seeking to maintain white supremacy in their communities.As McRae demonstrates persuasively, white women’s efforts accounted for the “endurance and shape-shifting capabilities of white resistance,” which kept segregation in place even as judicial and legislative victories seemingly cleared the way for racial equality.McRae’s book is an excellent history of white women’s politics generally, but it’s especially strong as a history of white women acting to protect “their” public schools. The women McRae writes about insisted that their concerns about integration were not racist. Instead, they invoked their identity as mothers to elevate their supposedly moral opposition to integration, and to distinguish themselves from open bigots. Some of them used baby strollers to block buses that were meant to take children to integrated schools.a new book about the roles of white women in maintaining white supremacy. https://psmag.com/social-justice/segregations-constant-gardeners -- source link
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