Honor Bound: Race and Shame in America

Contents

C O N T E N T S vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Fear, Honor, and Racial Shaming 8 Overview 8 Hardball versus Eric Holder 11 Fear, Honor, and Fictions of Race 16 Racial Shaming 23 Slavery Still Matters 26 2. How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? 30 How White Shaming Worked 32 Two Explanations 39 Fear and Honor 47 Shaming and Civil Rights 53 3. Honor Bound 58 Honor-Shame Societies 59 Tocqueville on American Honor 73 When Honor Turned White 77 “The Souls of White Folk” 81 4. Four Novels 85 Toward Freedom? 86 The Scarlet Letter 88 Honor and Shaming From Huck to Humbert 94 Challenging White Honor 103 5. Two Wars 109 Humiliation and American Wars 109 The Barbary Pirates, 1783–1815 114 The Clash of Civilizations 123 The Second Iraq War, 2003–? 129 6. The 2008 Campaign 142 John McCain’s Lineage 143 The 2008 Presidential Campaign 150 Honor Unbound 161 7. To the Tea Party–and Beyond? 167 The Tea Party 168 “You Lie!” 172 The Drumbeat of Public Shaming 174 The Gates Arrest 180 Notes 185 Index 261 viii contents ...