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Another illuminating study I read for my class on race, ethnicity, and gender in 19th century US.

The political is unequivocally personal, is the succinct version of Jane Dailey’s thesis in Before Jim Crow. By insisting on race as a slippery, tractable, and malleable designation rather than a deterministic, essentializing category, Dailey seeks to redefine race as “situational and historical, created and sustained through social interactions.� In other words, race, in Dailey’s rendering, exists as a social dynamic and interpersonal negotiation. It’s a phenomenon not only enacted and maintained by social structures and institutions, but is also continually renewed and remade through the “ordinary and everyday� actions and interactions often invisibly informed by them.

Recognizing the volatile state of change and instability, slipperiness and malleability that characterize constructions of race, Dailey convincingly demonstrates how white supremacy undermined the efforts to build cross-race political cooperation in the post-Emancipation South. Dailey’s monograph is the Readjuster coalition, an interracial political movement that sought to breach the color line by emphasizing the class-based interests of both Black and white Virginians.

Central to Dailey’s argument is the idea that late 19th century Virginians were acutely aware of the socially constructed nature of race, and that that awareness has generated implacable levels of anxiety that originated principally from “the rising fortunes of Black Virginians.� Indeed, the appearance of Black people asserting their citizenship in public spaces not only challenged existing social hierarchies but also called into question definitions that centered around ‘being black� and ‘being white.� The Readjuster Party, in other words, shattered the sacred fantasies that allowed Virignians to establish whiteness as intrinsically valuable and blackness as inherently inferior.

Playing on these race-based anxieties, white Democrats set out to destroy the Readjusters party. Capitalizing on white Readjusters' fears that their “possessive investment in whiteness� is being challenged, the Democratic Party excluded white Readjusters from definitions of whiteness–and its ‘wages,� to quote the DuBoisian term–on account of them being hybridized or contaminated. For white Democrats, to put it differently, white Readjuster’s social affiliation and proximity to Black people undermined their whiteness and made them inferior.

The strength of Dailey’s reflection in this book is to make clear that evaluations of race should account for the ways in which the gender line and the color line often intersect. As Dailey sees it, white Readjusters� “vulnerab[ility ]to race baiting� stemmed, in a large part, from a sense that their manhood, more than anything else, is being devalued. Indeed, white Democrats, in Dailey’s view, successfully employed a “gendered rhetoric of race and politics� against which white identity was defined and legitimated. Within this rhetoric, Black Readjusters served as a repository for the sexual longings and fears of white Readjusters and Democrats alike (in regards to miscegenation, control over white women, loss of white male authority etc). White Readjusters understood, in other words, that in order for them to be regarded as credibly ‘white� and credibly ‘male,� they had to distance themselves from the Black members of the Party and reassert their whiteness and masculinity in the same breath. To illustrate this, Dailey evokes the white reactions to the appointment of two black men on the Richmond school board in 1883 as the clearest statement of white anxieties about “the value of whiteness.�

The cumulative effect of this commitment to male whiteness, Dailey hauntingly demonstrates, is a resurgence of white male supremacy and the disintegration of the coalition party. To break through the color line, white Readjusters had to make a commitment to a radical repudiation of whiteness where it intersects with received notions of masculinity. That they failed to do so paved the way for the rise of Jim Crow.