University of North Carolina Press
White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960
White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960
Regular price
€42,95 EUR
Regular price
Sale price
€42,95 EUR
Unit price
per
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Couldn't load pickup availability
For decades, historians have primarily analyzed charges of black-on-white rape in the South through accounts of lynching or manifestly unfair trial proceedings, suggesting that white southerners invariably responded with extralegal violence and sham trials when white women accused black men of assault. Lisa Lindquist Dorr challenges this view with a careful study of legal records, newspapers, and clemency files from early-twentieth-century Virginia. White Virginians' inflammatory rhetoric, she argues, did not necessarily predict black men's ultimate punishment.
While trials were often grand public spectacles at which white men acted to protect white women and to police interracial relationships, Dorr points to cracks in white solidarity across class and gender lines. At the same time, trials and pardon proceedings presented African Americans with opportunities to challenge white racial power. Taken together, these cases uncover a world in which the mandates of segregation did not always hold sway, in which whites and blacks interacted in the most intimate of ways, and in which white women and white men saw their interests in conflict.
In Dorr's account, cases of black-on-white rape illuminate the paradoxes at the heart of segregated southern society: the tension between civilization and savagery, the desire for orderly and predictable racial boundaries despite conflicts among whites and relationships across racial boundaries, and the dignity of African Americans in a system dependent on their supposed inferiority. The rhetoric of protecting white women spoke of white supremacy and patriarchy, but its practice revealed the limits of both.
Author: Lisa Lindquist Dorr
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 03/22/2004
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.06h x 6.06w x 0.76d
ISBN: 9780807855140
Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2004 pg. 546
While trials were often grand public spectacles at which white men acted to protect white women and to police interracial relationships, Dorr points to cracks in white solidarity across class and gender lines. At the same time, trials and pardon proceedings presented African Americans with opportunities to challenge white racial power. Taken together, these cases uncover a world in which the mandates of segregation did not always hold sway, in which whites and blacks interacted in the most intimate of ways, and in which white women and white men saw their interests in conflict.
In Dorr's account, cases of black-on-white rape illuminate the paradoxes at the heart of segregated southern society: the tension between civilization and savagery, the desire for orderly and predictable racial boundaries despite conflicts among whites and relationships across racial boundaries, and the dignity of African Americans in a system dependent on their supposed inferiority. The rhetoric of protecting white women spoke of white supremacy and patriarchy, but its practice revealed the limits of both.
Author: Lisa Lindquist Dorr
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 03/22/2004
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.06h x 6.06w x 0.76d
ISBN: 9780807855140
Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2004 pg. 546
About the Author
Lisa Lindquist Dorr is assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama.
