White fright : the sexual panic at the heart of America's racist history

Author

Jane Elizabeth Dailey

Call Number

• 306.845 D1331 (CEN)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York : Basic Books, 2020.

Physical Description

v, 361 pages ; 24 cm

Summary

"In White Fright, acclaimed historian Jane Dailey offers a radical reinterpretation of the fight for African American rights, showing how that fight has been closely bound, both in terms of law and in the white imagination, to the question of interracial sex and marriage. White fear of black sexuality not only fueled the systems of exclusion and oppression under Jim Crow, she contends it was also a central factor driving white resistance to the civil rights movement. Sex, love, and marriage were in fact the lynchpin of white supremacist fear and ideology. In the course of this gripping and urgent investigation, Dailey examines how white fears played out in the battles over lynching, in criticisms of black troops' behavior overseas in France and England during WWII, in the violent reactions of whites following the Brown v. Board decision, and in the aftermath of the eventual Loving v. Virginia ruling, which finally declared marriage a 'fundamental freedom.' Placing sex at the center of civil rights history, White Fright offers a bold and insightful new take on one of the darkest threads running through American history"--

Contents

• Origins of white fright
• Fighting for justice
• Protecting "racial purity"
• The United States of Lyncherdom
• "Nobody is asking for social equality"
• What the Negro wants
• Fighting Hitler and Jim Crow
• The "second front"
• Will the peace bring racial peace?
• Brotherhood
• White supremacy in peril
• Architects of a better world
• Grappling with Brown
• Breaching the inner shrine
• Death groans from a dying system
• The fall, without a whimper, of an empire.