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Reproducing the Souls of White Folk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Carol Mason
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Abstract

Focusing on a textbook controversy that emerged in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1974, Mason explores the discursive production of white ethnicity in the rhetorical, visual, and political strategies used during an organized protest against the new multicultural curriculum adopted by the local school board. What the author finds puzzling is the ways in which these productions of “soul” and “nation” enabled unlikely political alliances between national conservative elites and the local, historically left-leaning working class protesters. The author argues that “soul” is reproduced through racialized discourse signifying the spiritual and ethnic purity of whiteness, the consolidation of white ethnicity, and the spirit of white resistance, articulated through campaigns to save children from future captivity in an “alien” world. Through this on-site theoretical analysis, the author demonstrates how a right-wing narrative of victimhood facilitates the reproduction of ethnic identification among the protesters, whose whiteness apparently can be jeopardized by reading the “wrong” books.

Type
Miscegenation and Purity
Information
Hypatia , Volume 22 , Issue 2: Special Issue: The Reproduction of Whiteness: Race and the Regulation of the Gendered Body , Spring 2007 , pp. 98 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by Hypatia, Inc.

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