It is tempting to think that we have heard just about all we want or need to know about race. As the above quotes indicate, modern notions of race have always revolved around the faculty of vision, with supplementary contributions from other senses such as hearing, as Arendt notes in a tacit allusion to one mark of Jewish difference—the way they sounded when concentrated in urban settings. Yet two very recent works—Mark M. Smith's How Race Is Made and Anne C. Rose's Psychology and Selfhood in the Segregated South—have much to teach us about how race has “worked”, particularly in the twentieth-century South but also, by implication, in the United States in general. Both works assume that, historically, race is no mere add-on to the self, a kind of externality that, once detected, can be relatively easily excised. Rather, it stands right at the heart of personal and group identity in a nation where race and ethnicity continue to assume surprising new shapes and forms.

Both books devote greater attention to racial consciousness among white than black southerners. Specifically Smith's book concentrates on the way that race became an integral part of white southern consciousness in slavery times, a story he brings down to around 1960 through anecdotes, explanatory events (for instance, segregation as an indication of a loss of confidence in the ability to tell who was who racially) and narrative sketches (the effect of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision on white racial attitudes). Along the way, he devotes a chapter to how black southerners “viewed” whites and analyses the way better-off blacks internalized the negative racial views whites had of blacks and then applied those negative judgements to less well-off members of the black community. Rose's thesis is that institutional segregation and white racism blocked the discipline of psychology from adequately assessing racism's negative impact on white childhood development. This is particularly interesting, since there is a controversial sociological tradition of analysing the “damage” incurred by African Americans in the South and then as they made their way northwards as part of the Great Migration. From E. Franklin Frazier's work on the black family in America in the late 1930s to Kenneth and Mamie Clark's studies of the effects of segregation on the self-image of black children, from Stanley Elkins's controversial Slavery (1959) to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), the lasting effects of oppression and discrimination on African Americans was a major concern among sociologists, social psychologists and historians until it met resolute political opposition in the second half of the 1960s. The explicit or implicit application of the damage thesis to white southerners in particular is one thing that makes both books under review here of particular interest.Footnote ¹

Intellectual history can treat race in several ways. One is to trace the various ways that race has been theorized as a biological entity, as a natural kind not a historical construct. A landmark book adopting this approach is biologist Stephen J. Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (1981), a work that sought to assess the scientific validity of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biological racism. A second approach is for intellectual historians to study race as it has functioned historically as a symbolic entity (Eric Voegelin's term) in a particular historical context. In this approach it is not race's scientific status but its political, social and cultural impact, not its truth-value but its use-value, that commands attention. For instance, W. E. B. Du Bois’ ideas on race are of interest not for their scientific value but for how Du Bois used race as the central concept in his thought and life as he explained in his Dusk of Dawn (1940).Footnote ²

Smith's book exemplifies a third way of treating race—as an experience before it was, and is, a concept. For instance, very few individual planters or yeoman farmers in eighteenth-century Virginia studied race as a scientific concept or operated with a coherent notion of race as a symbolic ideology.Footnote ³ People who belonged to them, labored for them, and looked different to them—that is, slaves—were an integral part of their experience. Over time, the southern (and American) idea of the Negro as a different sort of (human) being emerged in part from their status as slaves and in part from their manifest (and hidden) sensory differences. In general, the latter were used to justify enslavement of people of African descent and then later to segregate them, except in those aspects of life where their proximity was required. That the experience of racial difference was reenforced by those simulacra of experience we refer to as literature, music, and the visual arts and crafts, and later by photographs and films, is something to which Smith might have paid more attention than he does.

In particular, Smith contends that race became a composite concept, put together from the input of all the senses, although, historically, visual appearance, preeminently color, was considered the most important marker of race. (Whether he could find similar evidence from the Caribbean and Latin America is another matter.) Smith describes the way that early contact with slaves led to the idea that they smelled different—that is, worse—than did white people. By way of contrast, he also notes that no class-linked claims about the way poor whites smelled ever really developed. In addition, how Africans sounded in their native tongues, their accents and eccentric English syntax and, of course, their music, along with the belief that their skin was rougher and their hair coarser, meant that not just the evidence of sight but also of all the other senses played a part in establishing what being a “Negro” and therefore being “white” entailed.

Specifically, there were two periods when the problematic status of sight in determining race became particularly clear. In the 1850s the senses other than sight were emphasized because “slavery was becoming whiter.”Footnote ⁴ As miscegenation proliferated, white southerners grew afraid that, without the testimony of all the senses, whites would not be able to say with any certainty who was white and who was not. A sense of encroaching danger reappeared in the period roughly between 1880 and the mid-1920s as the decline of rural and small-town life and the growth of cities and an industrial economy worked a deep change in race relations in the South—and for the worse. Not surprisingly the “racial sensory construction” of African Americans in the turn-of-the-century South had a “ferocity” and “frequency” that was missing during slavery. White suspicion and hatred of African Americans were supplemented by a new kind of loathing.Footnote ⁵ No longer did white people know their neighbors, much less what color they were. What they did know, or at least had heard about, was that some black people were passing for white, itself a way for individuals to subvert the system of segregation by exploiting the racist terms in which it understood itself.

Another important response to this growing racial indeterminacy was the solidification of the “one-drop rule” as the legal basis for racial identity, another sign of waning confidence that race was a visual phenomenon primarily. The conclusion Smith helps us draw from all this is that the human sensorium not only can be easily fooled but also insists on the truth of sense impressions long after those truths have been rationally discredited. But noting the importance of habit (or what might be named “sensory inertia”) implies something relatively superficial and Smith misses a chance to strengthen his thesis by noting that this sensory defamation of black southerners carried a heavy “phobic” charge that went beyond the merely habitual and the empirical. If the dominant image of black slaves was that they were “childlike,” by the early twentieth century they were also suspected of carrying infections. The tuberculosis bacillus was discovered in 1882 and was often associated with African Americans. Smith also uses works such as Otto Klineberg's Race Differences (1935) and John Dollard's better-known Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937) to provide evidence of how whites continued to stress the way blacks smelled in order to justify segregation and subordination on into the middle of the century in the South.

Yet a weakness of Smith's generally fascinating study is his failure to explore the complexities of sensory-based racism in the post-1945 world. That era saw southern whites almost unanimously resisting the desegregation of public swimming pools in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. Black children continued to be seen as potential carriers of disease and were feared as polluters of the water in swimming pools. In many, even most, cases, municipal pools in the South were drained and shut down. To be sure, tuberculosis was still not all that unusual and the idea of catching syphilis from toilet seats was a constant fear. But the great fear of polio dominated the late 1940s and 1950s and it too contributed to the fear of mixed swimming. Not surprisingly, efforts at improving public health by wiping out infectious “social” diseases were often linked to attempts to eradicate “racial” diseases. Such evidence would seem to amply support Smith's general argument, though the existence of “unseen germs” does not really fit the model of the sensorium that he largely depends on. Fear of infection does not work in terms of immediately discernible smell, taste, or touch, not to mention sight. Again, if Smith had made use of a psychoanalytically derived notion of a phobic dimension to white fears, the fear of infection and pollution so central to the resistance to desegregated swimming might be more comprehensible. As it is, Smith mainly emphasizes that “the sensory dimension . . . gave a gut-wrenching quality to white reaction over Brown, a quality that far outweighed the intellectual component of massive resistance.”Footnote ⁶

Indeed, Smith has perhaps overemphasized the lasting power of the contact senses (smell, taste, touch) in “making” race, as the South grew more prosperous and “cleaner.” Personal hygiene and emphasis upon cleanliness and table and toilet manners improved among the classes and races in the years after World War II as the standard of living rose in the South. At the same, however gradually, there was a lessening of white racial prejudice. The “racialized nature of the senses” seems to have become less potent.Footnote ⁷ Despite Smith's evocation of the “gut-wrenching” resistance to desegregation, racial contact of a previously feared or taboo sort seems to have become a bit less scary for most whites. This is not to deny that white racism was still firmly entrenched in the 1960s, but for many people racial contact no longer automatically triggered fear and loathing.Footnote ⁸

If we try to construct the model of mind that informs How Race Is Made, we find that Smith denies that there is a hierarchy of the senses, but assumes that most whites in the antebellum South believed that there was—the more a sense worked at a distance, the more worthy or noble it was.Footnote ⁹ Thus while sight and sound were felt to be superior to smell, touch, and taste, Smith himself does privilege human reason, a capacity which calls the testimony of the senses into question and offers a critical check to “white conceits about blackness.”Footnote ¹⁰ At the same time, he assumes that the five senses overpower reason relatively easily and often. Thus, because the senses were effective in “holding reason hostage,”Footnote ¹¹ irrational (white) fear of the (black) other grew. Whether such a neat split between mind and body is plausible, whether the senses vary in strength among themselves, and whether all are stronger than reason is something else again. Indeed, that reason is a kind of moral capacity is doubtful in itself, since racist theorists deployed reason to formulate supposedly scientific theories of permanent racial superiority. Overall, then, Smith's concept of the mind tends to be a fairly thin one. Specifically, it fails to include any sort of unconscious mechanism that would explain the persistence and power of fantasies against the evidence of the senses of most people.Footnote ¹² As a result, he can only resort to an appeal to habit to explain the persistence of sensory racism.

Conceptually, what Smith's stimulating and often convincing discussion suggests is that what white southerners took as the immediate reports of the senses were really tropes and simulacra of that experience. But surprisingly, Smith fails to discuss how “blood,” one of the most important tropes of racial identity, fits into his analysis. Blood smells and looks the same across racial lines, though blood donors and recipients were classified by race well into the 1960s. Nor, for that matter, does he explore the sense in which Ralph Ellison and/or we understand the concept of black “invisibility” to refer to the capacity visual evidence has to hide rather than reveal the other, though it would have enriched his analysis had he done so. Also, as Matthew Mason has pointed out, Smith fails to devote enough attention to one of our other important capacities—“imagination.”Footnote ¹³ Not only do our senses permeate our conscious attitudes but our attitudes (expectations, presuppositions, prejudices, and fantasies) inflect and structure those allegedly immediate sensory reports. Thus an interactive rather than hierarchical model for understanding the relationship among senses, reason, and imagination might have been more profitable for Smith to have adopted.

The partial inadequacy of Smith's model of mind also becomes clear when the question of whether and how white racism in the South has diminished over time is raised. The enlightened liberal assumption, which Anne Rose tells us belongs to a certain conception of psychology, is that people, particularly children, are weaned from prejudice through appeals to reason and moral values. But if Smith's contention that white racism was grounded in all the senses is correct, then conscious moralizing and appeals to reason will quickly reach the limits of their effectiveness, since they leave the other senses untouched. What will change the latter is not clear. Smith himself is agnostic on the question whether “Brown initiated long-term change in sensory stereotypes.”Footnote ¹⁴ But he clearly doubts it. Indeed, the central point of his last chapter is that the post-Brown era witnessed, if anything, a hardening of white racial attitudes. And yet, as already mentioned, something also lessened white southern racial prejudice in the first three decades after Brown. The problem is that we cannot go to Smith to find out what it was. Put another way, the more convincing Smith makes his case for the sensory basis of white racism, the harder it is for him to explain why segregation did not maintain itself in the South. In this, he shares something with the “whiteness studies” approach, which assumes the permanence of what it sets out to prove—the all-pervasive and indestructible quality of white racial prejudice.

Anne Rose's Psychology and Selfhood focuses less on race per se than on the mutual entanglement of race and psychology up to roughly 1960. It is the kind of intellectual history that pays more attention to institutional factors and historical forces as they affect the spread of an idea or theory than to theoretical arguments or concepts as such. In this sense, Psychology and Selfhood is about the historical and psychological function of race, not about race as a set of theoretical propositions concerning group difference. It is deeply considered, written with subtlety and nuance, but also sometimes oblique in its formulations and conclusions. For Rose, psychology, which emerged as a new discipline around the turn of the twentieth century, had the chance to prove itself, as it were, in the South, which was “an essential place for an investigation of how the psychological sciences responded to racial identities and injustices.” Rose's conclusions about the efficacy of psychology are clear-sighted, for she argues that “segregation was responsible for blocking the development of psychological commentary on racial relations . . . Southerners equipped with psychological knowledge backed away from this mission when the subject bordered on racial mores.”Footnote ¹⁵

That said, it is hard to imagine that the intellectual and moral failure of psychology came as much of a surprise to her. In contrast with sociology, which has always been a major tool for analyzing the South, there have been few, if any, books or courses in psychology departments on the “psychology of the South.” Though sociologists were far from free of racism—Rose is particularly hard on UNC sociologist Howard Odum's retrograde racial views—sociology found it easier, somehow, to escape biological concepts of race and to confront the environmental effects of racism on southerners of both races. Even then, it was primarily outsiders—that is, northerners and even Europeans—who brought fresh ideas and perspectives to the study of race in the South. Some of them, such as Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and William McDougall's work at Duke, were themselves racist to the core. On the other hand, challenges to racism came from Ernst Borinski, a German Jewish refugee at Tugaloo College, and Harry Stack Sullivan, who helped with some of the caste-and-class studies of the 1930s. A few southerners such as Merrill Moore left the region to set up as psychiatrists in the North, while black psychiatrists were concentrated in institutions like Nashville's Meharry Medical College and rarely treated white patients. They were living in a South within the South.

Perhaps the most forthright confrontation of southern racial realities in a psychoanalytically oriented study that Rose examines is John Dollard's Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937), a book which thoroughly deserves the kind of attention to which Smith and Rose have subjected it. As she neatly sums it up, his book made clear that “segregation was not peaceful, that both races were psychologically damaged, and that psychoanalysis claimed the status of science.”Footnote ¹⁶ Predictably, one of the Vanderbilt Agrarians, Donald Davidson, savaged it for raising the matter of sex and race, while sociologist E. Franklin Frazier thought Dollard's study should have provided tools for intervention.Footnote ¹⁷ No one, Rose notes, was very comfortable with the truths psychoanalytically oriented work proposed. For instance, Dollard talked of the psychic gains and losses of segregation for both races and thereby suggested that everyone had been warped in their affective and moral lives by segregation. Still, when desegregation of the public schools later got under way, Rose observes that “southern white scholars had collected [so] little data about the influence of segregation on young people of their own race” and had little knowledge of “how the thoughts and motives of white individuals were shaped by their race.”Footnote ¹⁸ Rose also pays close attention to the work of Harvard's Robert Coles, whose three-volume Children of Crisis (1967–71) explored the experience of white and black children in the racial crises of the late 1950s and the 1960s. But her main point remains: attention to how white children respond to school desegregation remained the exception rather than the rule.

On such matters, I cannot help feeling that Rose might have made better use of works such W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South (1941), Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream (1951) or even Margaret Anderson's Children of the South (1966). Such books revealed, then as well as now, something essential about the tangle of racial and sexual pathology that enmeshed southerners of both races and the difficulties of dismantling psychological as well as institutional segregation. Through fiction, history, and autobiography/memoirs, southerners of both races were able to discover plenty about each other as racial subjects and how historical crises have impacted on their individual lives. The southern autobiography as a genre of self-exploration covers much the same territory as Dollard did, but sometimes with greater nuance and always with greater impact. The very lifeblood of southern fiction during the 1930–1970 period, from William Faulkner through to William Styron, from Richard Wright through to Alice Walker, was the exploration of the dark places of white and black consciousness taken separately and together. It is too bad that because such works do not fit into the category of disciplinary psychology, they do not come under Rose's chosen purview.

Ironically, Rose does scrutinize the lives of Cash and Smith, along with those of minor Agrarian John Gould Fletcher and Robert Burgess Johnson, the son of Fisk University president and sociologist Charles Johnson, to drive home the way each failed to fully avail themselves of psychotherapy, even though they had read widely in psychoanalytical literature. In the case of Cash and Fletcher, their lives ended in suicide. But hers is strange construal of their lives, since all them had been in some form of therapy. Indeed, the central role of psychoanalysis in their intellectual and emotional lives makes one wonders if the unhappy outcome of their lives does not indicate the therapeutic limits of self-oriented psychology rather than the missed opportunities the South suffered in stifling it. Whatever the case, Rose contends, “Although each had a role in bringing new ideas to the region, the difference between what they said and how they lived is a reminder of how slowly southerners changed.”Footnote ¹⁹

There are also conceptual difficulties threading through Rose's rich and often provocative book. One is the ambiguity in the term “psychology,” which can refer either to the characteristic ways of thinking and feeling of an individual or group—for instance, the way the term “mind” is used in the title of Cash's classic text—or to an academic discipline, which is made up of a set of problems, methodological concerns, internal theoretical differences, and institutional expressions. Rose focuses mainly on the second usage of psychology, as I have already tried to indicate. Psychology as a discipline was ensconced in educational research projects in southern universities and colleges, mental hospitals, and medical schools, and in projects funded largely by northern philanthropic foundations. The chief institutions Rose focuses on are medical schools at (white) Vanderbilt and (black) Meharry in Nashville, along with developments at (white) Duke in Durham. Later in the 1950s, the University of Virginia in Charlottesville became something of a center for academic opponents of racial equality and desegregation. The Rockefeller-funded General Education Board sought to improve southern education for both races, with childhood development a central concern of educational psychology. Though few, if any, lances were broken by white institutions or academics trying to undermine racial segregation, there was some informal faculty contact across racial lines, for instance, among Vanderbilt, Fisk University, and Meharry Medical School in Nashville. Interestingly, Rose also notes that the fact of racial segregation failed to generate two separate accounts of development according to race: “a child was just a child.”Footnote ²⁰

But there is another, more interesting ambiguity in Rose's discussions of psychology in the South and that is the split within the discipline of psychology. When she is concerned with the links between psychology, education, and race, Rose seems to be referring to psychology as it is concerned with what helps and hinders learning, including the development of cognitive capacities as the child matures. Historically, a focus on comparative racial intelligence was also found in this approach to cognitive development. The assumption behind cognitive psychology was that individuals had a normal course of development which was biologically predetermined. With black children, the assumption was that those capacities were less. On the other hand, Rose uses the term “psychology” in much of the book to refer to the analysis (and treatment) of the affective development of individuals and the impact of environmental factors (e.g. child-rearing) on their achievement of emotional maturity— that is, adulthood in a normative sense. The basic assumption here is that mental illness or psychological distress is corrigible, often through a combination of therapy, drugs, and mechanical means such as electric shock.

Of course the distinction between these two types of psychology is sometimes hard to make. For instance, since the 1960s, autism has migrated from being an affective to a cognitive disorder and from being environmentally to genetically caused. Still, few think that someone with limited mental capacities would be helped by psychoanalysis, while the high IQ of a borderline psychotic is only of minor importance to his or her treatment. Overall, the focus on cognitive capabilities tends to stress inherent capacities and fixed patterns of development, while affective psychology tends to search for the ways that behavior and feelings can be transformed.Footnote ²¹ The reason I emphasize this conceptual split in the discipline of psychology is that it is not entirely clear whether Rose thinks that the great promise of psychology fell in the cognitive or the affective realms. Did the South need better-trained teachers and better-funded schools or did it need more therapists and mental institutions? Or was it that black southerners primarily needed more of the former, while white southerners needed more of the latter?

In her last chapter, “The Southern Background in the War for Human Nature,” Rose focuses, as does Mark Smith, on the resurgence of racial–biological explanations for differences in so-called native intelligence in the 1950s and 1960s. It was then that the South became a haven for a neo-racist academic cognitive psychology, where figures such as Wesley Frank George, Henry Garrett, R. Travis Osborne and independent scholar Carleton Putnam set up outposts of academic resistance to racial egalitarianism. For instance, Osborne at the University of Georgia claimed to show that blacks were inferior in mathematics. These figures, notes Rose, tended to neglect regional dimensions in their analysis of race, though their work was obviously of use by opponents of desegregation in the South. Data was derived from experiments rather than, for instance, from such participant observation of actual social settings as Dollard and Allison Davis had carried out in the 1930s. The South as a place and as an experience dropped away within their studies. Race became an independent variable, the same everywhere. However, Coles and Alvin Poussaint, who were sympathetic to the efforts at racial transformation, sought to understand the psychological stress that the besieged position of the civil rights workers of both races entailed. Again, it is important to note that the main figures on both sides of the debate tended to be northerners rather than southerners. Thus not only did the South have a neocolonial relationship with the rest of the country economically, it was also an intellectual captive of the outside world in remaining an experimental site or proving ground for diverse psychological and sociological theories.

Finally, the work of Mark Smith and Anne Rose raises important questions. For instance, does a purely regional analysis of white racial attitudes make much sense, if it ever did? One omission by both authors, but particularly by Rose, is particularly striking—the neglect of the historical role of religion in the South both in blocking a nonracial, secular understanding of the self and in encouraging a certain moral concern with doing right by others. Rose's most interesting point remains her claim that how the South's white citizens have reacted to, become further entrenched in, or even overcome older racial attitudes and self-conceptions has been largely missing from a general understanding of the South. But while Rose and Smith are excellent guides to our understanding of the rocky, often treacherous, terrain of the past and of what went wrong in the lives of black and white southerners, they fall short in helping us understand how many white southerners have learned a kind of acceptance, even affirmation, of a radical change in their sense of themselves, their region, and their race. Just as race relations have changed radically since the end of World War II, so the self-consciousness of both races must have shifted too. It is perhaps time for intellectual historians of race in the South (and the nation) to begin to focus on how (white) racial consciousness has moved toward a belief in equality rather than continuing to retell the old story of how racism came to define the South.