Grad - Dichter

Abstract

This paper argues that by the turn of the twentieth century, a new paradigm had emerged in the United States for understanding white racial identity, one which placed whiteness and the idea of legitimate state power in a closer relationship than before. To illustrate this claim, I examine this ideology of “civil whiteness” at work in three texts by white men of distinctly different political and disciplinary backgrounds: the 1902 debut novel of the radical racist Thomas Dixon Jr. (The Leopard’s Spots), James Elbert Cutler’s groundbreaking 1905 sociological study of lynching (Lynch-Law), and Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan’s celebrated dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). For these authors, white mob violence against African Americans provides a crucial context in which the relation between whiteness and legitimate violence can be articulated. Despite their considerable differences, all three texts reflect and reinforce a newly emergent understanding of whiteness as constituted by an intimate connection to legitimate state violence.