Reproducing the Souls of White Folk

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.

Public Sociology or Partisan Sociology? The Curious Case of Whiteness Studies

“…A Eurocentric worldview claimed that reason, rationality, and self-control were synonymous with whites, whereas superstition, illogic, and abandonment were synonymous with nonwhites (Barnett 2000;Eze 2002). Allegedly, the West dismissed alternative epistemologies as subjective, partial, biased, or less true, thus de-legitimizing alternative worldviews (Bacon 2007;Best 2003;Diangelo 2006;Green and Sonn 2005;Grimes 2002;Guess 2006;Jay 2005;Jugé and Perez 2006;Kincheloe 1999;Mason 2007;Perry 2001;Riggs and Augoustinos 2004;Yancy 2000). It took for granted a set of processes that established the legitimacy of, then normalized, white values and expectations as superior to nonwhite values and expectations-made possible because whites control the "gateway to knowledge" (Sue 2004).…”