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247 Notes Introduction 1. The convention of not capitalizing “black” and “white” implies that these are descriptive terms, which poses a problem for a scholar of race. Even as I write to demonstrate how “race” is constructed and deconstructed by human action, the uncapitalized use of racial categories implies that these are biologically based and manifested in incommensurable groups: a black race, a white race, Hispanics who are either white or not white. Scholars of race use both conventions—capitalizing or not. Because the practice of capitalizing has been less common among historians, I will not capitalize these terms in this book. Occasionally I juxtapose “white” versus “nonwhite” to indicate the historical view that “white” people constituted a demographic majority, a dominant cultural expression, or both, which viewed those designated “nonwhite” as unable to constitute the normative “American.” 2. After a jury found O. J. Simpson not guilty of murder in a criminal trial in October 1995, a Gallup poll recorded responses in the same racial terms as the trial’s reporting: 78 percent of blacks and only 42 percent of whites agreed with the verdict. After a civil trial that found O. J. Simpson responsible, 26 percent of blacks and 74 percent of whites supported the verdict. This manner of reporting intensified notions of racial difference, even as the poll numbers revealed that 42 percent of whites aligned with blacks in the first instance and that 26 percent of blacks adopted the same position as whites in the second. The figures are from Gallup Poll News Service, 7 February 1997, cited in Howard Schuman, Charlotte Steeh, Lawrence D. Bobo, and Maria Krysan, Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 362, n1. 3. Examples include Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South in the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969); Ronald P. Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); and Thomas Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 4. Examples include Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil 248 Notes to Pages 5–9 Rights Movement (New York: Morrow, 1987); Constance Curry, Joan C. Browning, Dorothy Dawson Burlage, Penny Patch, Theresa Del Pozzo, Sue Thrasher, Elaine DeLott Baker, Emmie Schrader Adams, and Casey Hayden, Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). 5. Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975 (New York: Knopf, 2006). Sokol describes the “everyday revolution” in racial behaviors that some white Southerners experienced as liberation and others preferred to forget (356, 326). 6. Kevin M. Kruse, in White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), describes the rise of white suburban conservatism as the product of ideas developed in response to urban desegregation. Matthew D. Lassiter, in The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), argues that nationwide a 1970s white, suburban silent majority protected “private property values, individual taxpayer rights, children’s educational privileges, family residential security, and white innocence” as political stances having no origin in, or bearing on, racial segregation and inequality (304). 7. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), makes the case generally for white ethnics replacing suspect WASPs culturally as the normative white American by the mid-1970s. Of many texts Jacobson analyzes, Norman Podhoretz’s “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” published in 1963 in Commentary, made clear that the early twentieth-century European immigrant had no share “in the exploitation of the Negro” and therefore no need to change in response to civil rights. See esp. 187–97; 195, quoting Podhoretz. 8. Tracy Elaine K’Meyer, Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South: The Story of Koinonia Farm (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), makes a significant distinction between “integration” and “interracialism” based on the ideals of the radical white Christians who organized Koinonia Farm in Georgia. Its leaders saw “integration” as “a coercive political and legal process. . . . Instead, they believed they were fostering interracial relationships within a community based on spiritual and material sharing” (102). My interracial sites never reached the level of spiritual self-consciousness or material sharing of Koinonia, but...

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