After reading Making Whiteness and seeing The Murder of Emmett Till, I thought hard about the interactions between Whites and Blacks in what was previously thought as “White territory.”
The first instances of these types of interactions regard money as it is a catalyst of early interaction during segregated times. Emmett Till went into Bryant’s grocery store to spend money, unfortunately, this interaction led to his death, and as Hale states in Making Whiteness, “a small but visible number of African Americans had acquired the money to get on…trains and ride…[leading to forced interactions between Black passengers and] White conductor[s]” (p. 126.) There was so much importance that Whites placed on their being able to ride in first class, and when African Americans shed their “poor and uneducated” (p. 129) and poorly dressed stereotype, Whites were even more threatened. The fact that African Americans were now able to attain material possessions that they could previously not attain brings up the very interesting question of “passing”.
However, passing does not just apply to socioeconomics. Passing, in a racial sense, was also very threatening to Whites, as it complicated African American stereotypes in the White world. An almost-White person who had “the middle-class markers of proper clothing and speech…[illustrated how] the figure of the mulatto became much more threatening” (p. 129) than an ordinary African American and pushed Whites in the south to make “deadly signs and separations” (p. 129) to enforce White supremacy.
-Matt
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