Race, Identity and Academic Survival

For at least two centuries, says Mark M. Smith, White Southerners used all of their senses — not just their eyes — to construct racial difference and define race. Smith’s provocative analysis, extending from the colonial period to the mid-20th century, shows how Whites of all classes used the artificial classifications of “Black” and “White” to justify slavery and erect the political, legal and social structure of segregation.

Based on painstaking research, How Race Is Made is a highly original, always frank and often disturbing book. After enslaved Africans were initially brought to America, the offspring of Black and White sexual relationships (consensual and forced) complicated the purely visual sense of racial typing. As mixed-race people became more common in the segregated South, White Southerners began asserting that they could rely on their other senses — touch, smell, sound and taste — to identify who was “White” and who was not. According to How Race Is Made, sensory racial stereotypes were almost universally irrational, but persisted to perpetuate and justify an unequal society.

Smith argues that the history of Southern race relations, and the construction of racial difference on which that history is built, cannot be understood fully on the basis of sight alone. In order to come to terms with the South’s past and present, Smith says, we must explore the dynamics underpinning the deeply emotional construction of race.

— Dr. Mark M. Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina.