Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.