Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South by Kristina DuRocher (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 100 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South Kristina DuRocher In recent years, historians of the American South have focused attention on children’s “learning” of race. How did white children learn to believe in their own superiority? When did black children learn to recognize white authority, and how did they learn to show appropriate deference? Questions of this sort arise from countless memoirs and autobiographies. Classics such as Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, Sarah Patton Boyle’s The Desegregrated Heart, and Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi all suggest the importance of childhood experiences in formulating racial beliefs. Despite the prominence of these accounts, scholars have only begun to pay attention to many of the questions they raise. Kristina DuRocher’s Raising Racists is among the most recent additions to a growing literature on children and race. A wide ranging study of white children ’s acquisition of racial knowledge, it probes children’s exposure to racialized beliefs and adult efforts to educate children about racial practices. DuRocher organizes her study around examinations of several sites of racial learning. Chapter one, for example, considers the home. According to DuRocher, parents rigorously policed children ’s encounters with blacks, regulating interaction with African Americans and consistently emphasizing the importance of white dominance. Through these efforts, the home became a formative site of racial education. In Chapter two, DuRocher turns to schooling. Recognizing school textbooks and fiction as influential, DuRocher subjects a large sample to careful analysis. She finds no shortage of nostalgia for slavery, childlike portrayals of blacks, and Birth of a Nation-style views of Reconstruction. Chapter three focuses on mass culture, especially commercial advertising and youth organizations such as the Children of the Confederacy and the Junior Ku Klux Klan. Here again, DuRocher finds ample evidence of white southerners’ commitment to white supremacy and pervasive belief in black inferiority. Many of the family’s men served the Confederacy while others sided with the Union (we hear much more about the Confederates in these pages). During Reconstruction and the “nadir” of race relations that came later, Clay women and men wrestled with how to reconcile Kentucky’s embrace of the lost cause myth and white supremacy with the founder’s antislavery principles. Clays seldom distinguished themselves in public service , but they felt compelled to offer themselves to their state and country. They had better fortune in business, particularly in the state’s horse breeding industry. Apple suggests that Henry Clay’s descendants carried on his belief that business was a form of gambling; whether or not that can be sustained, numerous Clays did quite well for themselves. The Family Legacy of Henry Clay makes frequent allusion to historians. Bertram WyattBrown , Daniel Walker Howe, and Paul Nagel merit the most frequent mentions, but so do many others. Yet the book fails to address thorny interpretive issues of current interest to historians. While that modesty will likely limit this book’s appeal to scholars, its accessibility may make it attractive to general readers interested in family history, the history of Kentucky, and the Clays. Daniel Kilbride John Carroll University BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2012 101 The final three chapters of the book focus on lynching. As DuRocher correctly notes, lynching not only served to maintain white dominance , it also taught white youths when and how to deliver a brutal form of extralegal violence . Historical photographs and autobiographies make clear children’s presence at lynchings and DuRocher shows that parents frequently insisted that children attend for the sake of “education.” Having established children’s involvement, DuRocher investigates the consequences . Chapter six considers the participation of young boys and the influence of such experiences on emergent conceptions of masculinity . Chapter seven takes a similar approach for young women. In exploring the involvement of young girls, DuRocher recounts their role in identifying alleged rapists and the well known history of accusations made for the sake of personal empowerment. With an important set of questions to consider , extensive evidence to draw upon, and a large body of scholarship to engage, DuRocher’s study promises a great deal. Her thoughtful analysis frequently offers valuable observations...