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

In ironic ways, we have come to accept Jim Crow’s historically inexorable influence among white generations in the post–Civil War South. A few scholars have begun to reveal young people’s role in the survival of white supremacy and racial segregation until the mid-twentieth century. In Raising Racists, Kristina DuRocher resourcefully employs print sources, material culture, and autobiographical and oral testimonies to make a persuasive narrative of children’s socialization into Jim Crow society.

DuRocher argues that the continued existence of white Southern male supremacy demanded active racial and gendered indoctrination of youth, including their exposure to and participation in the lynching of African Americans. The socialization of younger generations, she argues, operated on two fronts: First, who taught children lessons and what tools were used to instruct children and youth? And, second, how did children respond to the efforts of parental guidance, commercial culture, and the experience of lynching? DuRocher answers the former question more effectively than the latter. The narrative opens with a discussion of the role of the home, the most intimate space in which children learned about racial and gendered hierarchies, and then turns to public space, tracing the impact of community efforts, popular culture, and ritualized, extra-legal, race-based violence. DuRocher identifies three major characteristics of the sources and sites of socialization: the fetishization of African Americans as inferior, inept, and animal-like; a glorification of a paternalistic conception of antebellum slave society and the preservation of the Civil War’s confederate historical memory; and, finally, the promotion of race-based violence to ensure the continuation of white male supremacy.

The first three chapters focus on children’s socialization through racial and gendered vocabulary, fiction and nonfiction literature, and cultural images that normalized, preserved, and, ultimately perpetuated white supremacist culture. In chapter one, DuRocher documents the methods and the language that children were exposed to in the home through parents’ anecdotes and instructional manuals. Racial vocabulary stressed the visions of a paternalistic Southern white society in which only whites only could be referred to as “Mr.” and “Mrs.” Storytelling and parables also portrayed African Americans’ ineptitude and stressed the need to keep the races socially and culturally segregated. White Southern parenthood, she argues, was deeply invested in teaching children the perceived necessity of maintaining racial purity and separation.

The second chapter discusses the role of educational and fictional literature in youth’s instructions about Jim Crow’s racial regulations. Schoolbooks often highlighted white men’s powerful roles in American history and idealized Southern plantation culture as a historical fact. Fictional texts exclusively portrayed African Americans “as slaves, subservient roles, or as comic relief” (p. 43). However, DuRocher’s compelling textual analysis of educational materials and storybooks does not engage sufficiently how child readers responded to such literature, using Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin’s autobiographical voice to exemplify all Southern white children’s internalization of Southern print culture.

Chapter three provides the most powerful rendering of whites’ efforts to perpetuate the racial and gender ideology of Jim Crow. DuRocher’s examination of advertisements, toys, game manuals, and plays attests to the pervasiveness of white supremacist education in the South. As a “seamless transition” from school to popular culture, advertisements and games naturalized racial stereotypes and normalized the dismemberment of black bodies. DuRocher’s close reading of Parker Brothers’ “Sambo Five Pins,” a bowling set with black faces on each pin, powerfully illustrates the overt promotion of race-based violence against African Americans (p. 77). Children’s playacts, designed by youth groups such as the auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan or the Children of the Confederacy, also contributed to children’s socialization through the repetitive performance of white society’s social order. However, DuRocher’s illustration of children’s indoctrination falls short in showing whether children understood the messages conveyed. Her analysis tends to situate children as topical subjects in commercial culture rather than as the...