{"product_id":"how-race-is-made-slavery-segregation-and-the-senses-9780807859254","title":"How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses","description":"For at least two centuries, argues Mark Smith, white southerners used all of their senses--not just their eyes--to construct racial difference and define race. His provocative analysis, extending from the colonial period to the mid-twentieth century, shows how whites of all classes used the artificial binary of \"black\" and \"white\" to justify slavery and erect the political, legal, and social structure of segregation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBased on painstaking research, \u003ci\u003eHow Race Is Made\u003c\/i\u003e 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 and more common and as antebellum race-based slavery and then postbellum racial segregation became central to southern society, white southerners asserted that they could rely on their other senses--touch, smell, sound, and taste--to identify who was \"white\" and who was not. Sensory racial stereotypes were invented and irrational, but at every turn, Smith shows, these constructions of race, immune to logic, signified difference and perpetuated inequality.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSmith 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 sensory dynamics underpinning the deeply emotional construction of race. \u003ci\u003eHow Race Is Made\u003c\/i\u003e takes a bold step toward that understanding.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor at least two centuries, argues Mark Smith, white southerners used all of their senses--not just their eyes--to construct racial difference and define race. His provocative analysis, extending from the colonial period to the mid-twentieth century, shows how whites of all classes used the artificial binary of \"black\" and \"white\" to justify slavery and erect the political, legal, and social structure of segregation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBased on painstaking research, \u003ci\u003eHow Race Is Made\u003c\/i\u003e is a highly original, always frank, and often disturbing book. Sensory racial stereotypes were invented and irrational, but at every turn, Smith shows, these constructions of race, immune to logic, signified difference and perpetuated inequality. In order to come to terms with the South's past and present, Smith says, we must explore the sensory dynamics underpinning the deeply emotional construction of race. \u003ci\u003eHow Race Is Made\u003c\/i\u003e takes a bold step toward that understanding.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eSmith, Mark M.:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - Mark M. Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. He is author or editor of six previous books, including \u003ci\u003eListening to Nineteenth-Century America\u003c\/i\u003e (from the University of North Carolina Press) and \u003ci\u003eStono: Documenting and Interpreting a Slave Revolt\u003c\/i\u003e.","brand":"University of North Carolina Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50503907541266,"sku":"9780807859254","price":34.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_25d3473e-8471-4b40-b52d-a100f2346126.jpg?v=1730803819","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/how-race-is-made-slavery-segregation-and-the-senses-9780807859254","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}