Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black And White Southern Children Learned Race [Paperback]

Jennifer Ritterhouse (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0807856843 | ISBN-13: 978-0807856840

In the segregated South of the early twentieth century, unwritten rules guided every aspect of individual behavior, from how blacks and whites stood, sat, ate, drank, walked, and talked to whether they made eye contact with one another. Jennifer Ritterhouse asks how children learned this racial "etiquette," which was sustained by coercion and the threat of violence. More broadly, she asks how individuals developed racial self-consciousness.

Parental instruction was an important factor--both white parents' reinforcement of a white supremacist worldview and black parents' oppositional lessons in respectability and race pride. Children also learned much from their interactions across race lines. The fact that black youths were often eager to stand up for themselves, despite the risks, suggests that the emotional underpinnings of the civil rights movement were in place long before the historical moment when change became possible. Meanwhile, a younger generation of whites continued to enforce traditional patterns of domination and deference in private, while also creating an increasingly elaborate system of segregation in public settings. Exploring relationships between public and private and between segregation, racial etiquette, and racial violence, Growing Up Jim Crow sheds new light on tradition and change in the South and the meanings of segregation within southern culture.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of child identity development in the segregated US South."
— African American Review

"Provides readers . . . with a guide for rooting out the vestiges of Jim Crow that persist today."
— Southern Cultures

"Sheds new light on questions of change and continuity in the South."
— Carolina Country

From the Inside Flap

Ritterhouse asks how southern black and white children in the early 20th century learned the unwritten rules that guided every aspect of individual behavior, from how blacks and whites stood, sat, ate, drank, walked, and talked to whether they made eye contact with one another. More broadly, she asks how individuals developed racial self-consciousness. Exploring relationships between public and private and between segregation, racial etiquette, and racial violence, Ritterhouse sheds new light on tradition and change in the South and the meanings of segregation within southern culture.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (May 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807856843
• ISBN-13: 978-0807856840
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #323,025 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Makes you think, July 6, 2009

By 

H. Fox (Ann Arbor, MI United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black And White Southern Children Learned Race (Paperback)

While the title and cover of this book suggest that there will be more personal recollections, diaries, interviews, and such than actually appear, I still found this book full of fascinating insights into the arrogance and cruelty of Southern race relations. It left me with some disturbing thoughts and questions as well. The propensity for high status individuals to lord it over those they consider beneath them, and to define these human beings as "lower" not by merit or effort but by color and class is not unique to the US past. The way Americans have treated people around the world, both in our military adventures and our humanitarian efforts are strikingly similar to the way whites treated blacks in the old South, less blatantly, perhaps, but with similar assumptions and repercussions. This particularly struck me when I read about the impoverished black father asking his white boss for a loan to cover the cost of an incubator for his premature infant. The white man gives the usual excuses -- no money at this time, etc. -- and later remarks that he has never heard of a black child in an incubator. How similar is this to the attitude of the rich countries toward the most impoverished when it comes to access to the latest medical technology and treatment (as incubators were in the past)? Who has ever heard of a baby in rural Cambodia or Burundi, for example, having access to early detection of genetic diseases, or open-heart surgery? Too expensive, we say. And, well, not really necessary. Lots of children die in poor countries. Of course Americans aren't the only ones with these attitudes, but since we consider ourselves superior in compassion, human rights, and equality of opportunity, we might look at how well we meet our own high standards and our beliefs about ourselves. This book helps us think about these current moral issues as well as exposing, in a clearly written, well-researched fashion, the realities of our own history. I also appreciated the compassionate tone of the white, Southern author -- restrained and scholarly, but never dry or impartial.

4.0 out of 5 stars Worthwhile, November 21, 2010

By 

Maxtone Witherball - See all my reviews

This review is from: Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black And White Southern Children Learned Race (Paperback)

With the exception of those parts of the third chapter that overindulge in Freudian psychobabble, Growing Up Jim Crow is a competent and even insightful examination of how, in the American South of the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century, white children and teenagers learned the tenets and mores of white supremacy, and took advantage of their privileged social and economic positions, and of how black children and teenagers learned to avoid, and failing that, to cope with and even counter the physical, verbal, and other violence continually directed at them by a vehemently racist system, without losing their essential dignity.