DE FACTO SEGREGATION'S CONSTANT GARDNER: WHITE WOMEN

Feeling Rebloggy 

Elizabeth Gillespie McRae's Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy takes a sharp look at mainstream, everyday segregationism: the segregationism of respectable white women. 

How, McRae asks, did those white women work to maintain segregation across the 20th century? What was their role in the battle to preserve Jim Crow? Why do many still support racist policies and politicians?

Unlike governors or legislators, white women couldn't directly enforce Jim Crow with state power. Unlike the Klan, they generally eschewed direct violence. Their sphere of authority was family, home, and those local spaces considered extensions of the domestic sphere—most notably public schools. Their work was daily, grassroots, and rarely glamorous. 

White women, McRae writes, were "segregation's constant gardeners."

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...

~PSMag.com

Read More: https://psmag.com/social-justice/segregations-constant-gardeners

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