Honor Bound: Race and Shame in America by David Leverenz (review)

You recline in the warm water of your claw foot tub. A dirty man enters the bathroom, disrobes, and joins you. Your reaction is reasonable: you leap out of the tub, afraid, demanding the man immediately leave. You refuse to get back in the tub until you calm down and the tub is drained and cleaned—preferably with bleach. Now alter two key facts: the tub is a swimming pool and the man is considered dirty because he is a different race than you. Is your reaction any less reasonable? Now reverse the roles and imagine you are the second person entering the pool. David Leverenz masterfully lays out the manner in which honor and shame are used as blunt tools to shape the American caste system in Honor Bound: Race and Shame in America. The Professor Emeritus from the University of Florida’s Department of English explores deeply personal subjects with a refreshingly personal approach.

Leverenz constructs a haltingly simple formulation for the American mindset: No matter how bad things get, at least I’m not black. It creates a “shame” floor for whites, an “honor” ceiling for blacks, and fortifies national pride based on a fear of racial intermingling (26–27). Leverenz views this phenomena from a self-described white or “light-skinned” perspective, a point I will explore later.

Rock-n-Roll pioneer Bo Didley experienced the above pool scenario in 1959 Las Vegas. Leverenz focuses most of his analytical attention on the two types of fear that motivated the white swimmers who shamed Bo Didley that “’remained mostly unacknowledged’ : the fear that black men could ‘interact with white women at such intimate and erotic public spaces’ and the fear that black men’s strong bodies would undercut ‘assertions of white men’s superior manliness’” (44–45).

Sexual insecurity takes unusual thematic prominence throughout Leverenz’s retelling of American historic touchstones, like the white Mississippi gang lynching of supposedly flirtatious black teenager Emmitt Till, while applying his honor/shame lens to put a novel take on well-known and seemingly well-understood incidents (55). Lynching, probably the most recognizable manifestation of white male sexual insecurity, indeed figures largely in his writings, though Leverenz postulates the very basis of American national pride is actually a white racial pride personified by a victimized fair damsel who requires a white knight to pierce the “black beast” with his phallic spear. “Humiliating black men often enhanced their [social] standing, at least to themselves, as did their sexual exploitation of black women. As a necessary converse, slavery prevented black men from gaining honor through protecting their women or through affirming their lineage” (67).

According to Leverenz, slavery is the fulcrum, making America’s rise to international prominence historically unique with its Janus-like dichotomy: the spoils of freedom for “Us” are stockpiled through subjugation of the domestic (and oft times native!) “Other.” Slavery established an American national structure white men struggle to maintain through methodically shaming blacks in order to first, preserve economic and social status and second, alleviate fears of miscegenation. To demonstrate the pernicious efficacy of his formulation, Leverenz refers readers to how the all-white National Association of Real Estate Boards prohibited its realtors from showing property to bootleggers, madams, gangsters “or, even worse, ‘a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites’” (44).

Leverenz goes further, quoting Alexis de Tocqueville’s assertion that “[American] Democracy joins ‘individual character’ to national honor” (76). This nationalism required the prominence of racism to establish and maintain self-respect for white men. White women “could have no honor, only—virtue” under this form of nationalism and while racism feels individual, in actuality “it’s a collective code manifested through individuals” (78, 77).

Leverenz grapples with de Tocqueville’s nexus of national honor and individual virtue while retelling an incident where Benjamin Franklin, then postmaster general, becomes involved in the release of sensitive private letters to which...