Review by Choice Review
For generations scholars have debated the question of what defines "the South," southern whiteness, and "heritage." Walker (Saint Louis Univ.) offers a provocative, interdisciplinary addition to this question of identity. Looking closely at authors such as Robert Penn Warren and William Faulkner (among others), Walker explains that they acknowledged the role of slavery and de jure segregation. This "code of honor" forbade intimacy as equals, created an isolation that blocked assimilation, and supposedly benefited blacks by allowing a space in which to create an autonomous culture. Many readers, however, will find the silences, evasions, and excuses for Warren and Faulkner exasperating and self-serving. Warren and Faulkner rejected liberal efforts to force integration on the South, but also found much to admire in the separate black folk culture. Significantly, blacks such as Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison also rejected liberal ideas (Gunnar Myrdal, Brown v. Board of Education) that emphasized black life as pathological and damaged, in need of salvation by integration. The chapter on Justice Lewis Powell and "diversity" is particularly informative. Walker also probes the relationship of southern white identity to a sense of entitlement to inflict violence on blacks, where violence is a creative/destructive force constitutive of identity. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Wayne C. Glasker, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Camden
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A law professor takes on the history of racial integration in the United States by focusing on well-known intellectuals who questioned whether integration was wise or desirable for African-Americans.The intellectuals are primarily writers, black and white: James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Penn Warren, and Eudora Welty. Walker (St. Louis Univ. School of Law; The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights, 2009) connects their outlooks about racial integration through Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Virginia lawyer who became a Supreme Court justice. Whether Powell and the white authors Walker discusses were motivated by racism is an unsettled question, but there is no doubt they preferred separate, parallel societies over integration through public schools and other institutions. As for the black writers, they believed their culture benefitted from separateness, and many believed it to be superior to white culture. Baldwin, in particular, became known for reaching white audiences as well as fellow blacks with the message that mandated integration threw the two races together to lose their identities inside a "burning house." Near the end of the book, Walker analyzes the beliefs of the only "prominent federal official [who] seemed to carry the torch for southern pluralism, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas," who has shown a "commitment to black self-reliance." Today, carrying forward a tradition of resistance to integration is not only Alice Walker, but also Between the World and Me author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who "looked back to James Baldwin and Richard Wright for inspiration" and whose arguments have "evoked many of the same debates that southern writers conducted in the 1950s and 1960s."Readers unfamiliar with the anti-integration culture might find some of the invective difficult to process, but Walker skillfully presents his interpretations of his subjects' writing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review