Atilio's Post

A theme I kept coming back to when reading Hale's work is the shaping of identity, be it through class, gender, and especially racial lines in terms of the political arena. The first chapter cites W.E.B Du Bois' sentiment that “personal whiteness” was a “very modern thing.” In the South, this new way of thinking about race co-incided with large scale postbellum economic transformation. Also, the discussion of Faulkner's lingering use of the fundamental culture/nature dichotomy which had little use racialized hierarchy (due to man's first duty of hunting) seems to hint that historical materialism is a good hermeneutic for analyzing the practice of sub-dividing humans. Although plantation slavery was certainly the social system in place in the antebellum South, the emphasis was on the local economy of free labor. Although race was the dominant factor in slave/master relations, we learn that it was not simply the case that blackness equalled slaveness. After the Civil War, this more regional economy was radically altered and the industrial, networked and most importantly mass economy of the North was being imposed on the South. Freedpeople represented a valuable force in southern society, either through their labor or consuming power, and could not be completely excluded in the emerging economy. This why segregation become the “foundation of southern society,” because it allowed “the spread of new national ways of buying and selling” (125). In my opinion the doctrine of separate but equal was not so much a compromise, but the most efficient system of ensuring a hierarchical social system, through the accumulation of wealth (under the bourgeoisie).