In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r f o u r Strange Fruit Lillian Smith and the Making of Whiteness In 1945, an interviewer asked Richard Wright about ‘‘white writers crusading for the Negro.’’ White writers ‘‘should combat white chauvinism while Negro writers combat Negro nationalism,’’ Wright responded. Moreover, in the place of ‘‘special pleas to the Negro to increase his militancy,’’ white writers needed to do more to ‘‘grapple with the deep-seated racial notions of white Americans.’’∞ In his estimation, Lillian Smith provided writers with a model of such critical work. Smith began her career as an observer of the political, social and cultural scenes of the American South in the 1930s and by the mid-1940s had attained a national profile in American letters. Fusing her antisegregationist politics into her fiction and nonfiction , she became a controversial voice in a turbulent period, particularly in the South, where she refused to follow the well-worn paths of liberals who long avoided criticizing the codes of segregated social life. An intellectual activist in the years leading to modern civil rights politics, Smith was among the first American writers not only to give concerted attention to the intersections of racial and gender ideologies but also to make her criticism a site for the investigation of ‘‘whiteness’’ as a cultural force. As a writer and public figure Smith helped to engender conditions for the emergence of alternative forms of antiracism. Greeting civil rights workers and the organizers of the Institute on Non-Violence and Social Change on December 5, 1956, the first anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott, Smith delivered a speech—‘‘The Right Way Is Not a Moderate Way’’— centered on the concept of moderation. Moderation, Smith argued, was an ambiguous word that su√used mass culture, often with ‘‘hypnotic’’ e√ects. Any comprehensive exploration of the pervasiveness of moderation in the culture and politics of the mid-twentieth-century United States required an appreciation of the very ‘‘history of the psychology of our times.’’≤ Smith’s views influenced Martin Luther King Jr., who acknowledged in writing his close readings of Smith’s arguments and kept a copy of her speech among his papers.≥ Both Smith and King sought practices and languages that would serve as alternatives to the lure of moderation. Intended as a response to Strange Fruit 103 social and political backlash and retrenchment in the midst of growing civil rights activism, Smith’s speech was also in keeping with concerns that had long been central to her intellectual biography. Smith’s corpus can be interpreted as various e√orts to describe and understand the ‘‘history of the psychology of our times.’’ Smith described patterns of social life and the e√ects of racial ideologies by drawing from her readings in psychological literatures. Her critical commentary, defined by an open and mobile psychological idiom, posited the mutability of cultural patterns. Smith conceived of the psychological idiom of her criticism not as inventive content but as a practice that encouraged readers to examine the racial ordering of their social environments. The psychological questions Smith posed led her to develop innovative interpretations of the languages of race and made possible a concerted exploration of ‘‘whiteness’’ as a locus of cultural power and social coercion. Anticipating by several decades the ‘‘whiteness studies’’ that would become an active area of research and critical commentary on racial ideology among American academics , Smith took the psychoanalytic focus on conformity and personality formation as the basis of her investigation of the ideological power of whiteness. During the war Smith’s writings often pivoted on the idea of the ‘‘white man’s conscience,’’ which she described as psychologically divided. For Smith, the social and political manifestations of segregation were deeply bound up in the refusal among whites to confront racial conflict. The Negro Problem framework represented a diversion, a singular means of ignoring the relationship between social patterns and the everyday beliefs of individuals. If whites constructed the Negro Problem to avoid examining their own implication in racial conflicts, such evasion seemed to Smith instrumental in the making and reproduction of the color line. As with Wright, much of Smith’s writing involved deliberate movement away from established explanatory models for understanding race thinking and racial antagonisms . By the time of Killers of the Dream, her work of autobiographical cultural criticism and psychological exploration, she writes less of ‘‘white conscience’’ and more about ‘‘whiteness.’’ The book concentrated on the conformity...

Share