Book description
White southerners recognized that the perpetuation of segregation
required whites of all ages to uphold a strict social order-especially
the young members of the next generation. White children rested at the
core of the system of segregation between 1890 and 1939 because their
participation was crucial to ensuring the future of white supremacy.
Their socialization in the segregated South offers an examination of
white supremacy from the inside, showcasing the culture's efforts to
preserve itself by teaching its beliefs to the next generation. In
Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow
South, author Kristina DuRocher reveals how white adults in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continually reinforced race and
gender roles to maintain white supremacy. DuRocher examines the
practices, mores, and traditions that trained white children to fear,
dehumanize, and disdain their black neighbors. Raising Racists combines
an analysis of the remembered experiences of a racist society, how that
society influenced children, and, most important, how racial violence
and brutality shaped growing up in the early-twentieth-century South.
Kristina DuRocher, assistant professor of history at Morehead State
University, lives in Morehead, Kentucky.
