How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses

How Race Is Made

how race is made

SLAVERY, SEGREGATION, AND THE SENSES

MARK M. SMITH

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

© 2006 Mark M. Smith

All rights reserved

Set in Quadraat type by Keystone Typesetting Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

This book was published with the assistance of the Fred W. Morrison Fund for Southern Studies of the University of North Carolina Press.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Mark M. (Mark Michael), 1968–

How race is made : slavery, segregation, and the senses / by

Mark M. Smith.

   p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-3002-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8078-3002-X (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Racism—Southern States—History. 2. Southern States—

Race relations—History. 3. African Americans—Segregation.

4. African Americans—History—1877–1964. 5. Senses and

sensation—Southern States—History. 6. Stereotype

(Psychology)—Southern States—History. I. Title.

EI85.6I.S648 2006

305.896′073075—dc22       2005022833

10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1

For

Tony Kushner,

Eugene Genovese,

Robert Weir, and

Bennett Smith

CONTENTS

Introduction: Making Sense of Race

1 Learning to Make Sense

2 Fooling Senses, Calming Crisis

3 Senses Reconstructed, Nonsense Redeemed

4 Finding Homer Plessy, Fixing Race

5 The Black Mind of the South

6 The Brown Concertina

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

2.1. Stowage of the British Slave Ship ‘Brookes’ 31

2.2. Gordon the slave 45

5.1. Two young black men in South Carolina in 1957 105

6.1. The Negro, The Ape 129

6.2. The Kiss of Death 133

6.3. Youth Movements 134

Introduction

Making Sense of Race

Several years ago I had a chance conversation in a loud church hall at a small wedding on one of those implausibly hot southern summer evenings. I had not been there long when I bumped into Frank. Frank knows my wife from high school, and we see him occasionally when mutual friends marry or get engaged. Slim, white, and tall, he patted me on the back and asked how I was doing. Frank is in his thirties, smart, southern, with a robust sense of humor. I like him. He asked about my new book. I smiled, suspecting I was about to learn something. My wife’s friends are a constant source of information about the South, always willing to share stories, ribald and refined, with her strange husband—an Englishman who studies southern history, no less.

I told him that I was working on an ambitious history of slavery and segregation. I did not elaborate, said nothing about my work on senses and race, on how southern whites and blacks thought they saw, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted one another.

I’ve a story for you, Frank offered. He lingered. Now it isn’t polite.

I stepped in closer, listening hard, trying to parry the noise of the wedding band. Frank always had good stories.

My grandmother, real southern, he said, accent thick with Carolina purl. I nodded.

Well, one day, years ago, probably in the twenties, she left her house on some errands. She returned, walked in, and discovered her house had been broken into. He paused.

Know what she said? He knew how to tell a story—as I said, a southerner. I shook my head.

I smell nigger.

The historical record confirmed what I had just heard above the hubbub: white southerners believed they did not need their eyes alone to authenticate racial identity, presumed inferiority, and, in this instance, criminality. By this point in my research I had read enough letters, journals, and newspaper accounts to know that what Frank had just told me, while rarely uttered in polite company in modern America, was common fare in the antebellum and segregated South (and, for that matter, the North of the same eras). Whites’ noses and ears, their senses generally, could be used to detect blackness—or so they claimed.

There was not a great deal of logic to this claim. In fact, that was the point of sensing race: nonvisual senses often indexed viscera and emotion more than thought and reason. As Havelock Ellis argued in his controversial Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1903): Personal odors do not, as vision does, give us information that is very largely intellectual. Rather, they make an appeal that is mainly of an intimate, emotional, imaginative character.¹ The association between the senses and emotion, between race-thinking and gut-feeling, was, in many ways, a central theme of southern history. It is also an analytical centerpiece of this book.

LOSING SIGHT, FINDING RACE

Modern discussions of race and racial identity are hostage to the eye. With few exceptions, popular writing as well as many academic works—even the most theoretically sophisticated ones—tend to treat race as an exclusively visual phenomenon, so much so that the panacea for modern ills is, by some lights, a color-blind society. Even though we know that race is a construct, an invented category that defies scientific verification, we still understand that construction as a largely visual enterprise. Color is always seen. But the preference for seeing race is as much a social construction as race itself. This tendency is so pervasive that many historians seem largely unaware that when they search for perspective or try to focus on the problems of race and racism in U.S. history, they unnecessarily stunt understanding.²

There are certain physiological explanations for our ocularcentrism. After all, we are largely visual creatures, our eyes enabling us to accumulate information rapidly and at distances greater than the reach of our other senses unaided. But it is also worth noting that the way we look, the relative emphasis we place on seeing as opposed, say, to hearing, changes over time and place. While we readily appreciate the importance of the ways we look and are looked at, what we see and choose not to see, there are other ways of understanding, ways that are far more visceral than the cool, rationalizing gaze of an eye always searching for Enlightenment perspective and balance (itself a product of the Age of Reason). We seem to have lost sight of other ways to understand beyond vision and, in the process, have quietly endorsed the long-standing Western tendency to denigrate the nonvisual, lower senses.³

As a growing literature on the anthropology of the senses suggests, there is no compelling reason for historians to fixate on what was seen rather than heard, smelled, tasted, and touched; nor is there any compelling reason to treat the senses as unchanging natural endowments. While some fundamental characteristics seem to exist, which no amount of cultural mediation can radically alter, it does seem clear that to understand the function of the senses is essentially a historical enterprise.⁴

What if we begin to restore the other senses—hearing, smell, touch, taste—to our understanding of the ideology of race and racial identity in southern history? Such a restoration does not amount to a wholesale dismissal of seeing race. Plainly, seeing remains—and always has been—extraordinarily important for locating racial identity. But remembering that race was mediated and articulated in ways in addition to seeing helps profile ordinarily hidden dimensions of racial thought and racism—at base, the belief in race—and tells us a good deal about the nature and workings of antebellum southern slavery, the rise of formal segregation in the late-nineteenth-century South, the meaning of the segregationists’ reaction to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and the nature and significance of African American behavior in the face of white racism. My project is ambitious, certainly, not least because so little work has been done on the subject. Although sensory history has made great strides of late, historians of the senses have been surprisingly quiet on the topic of race. Sustained scholarly treatments of the sensory aspects of race and racism do not exist, and so any initial effort to chart the topic is necessarily speculative and skeletal.⁵

Taking seriously the sensory history of race and racism helps us appreciate just how unthinkingly race is made, how racism is learned, and how the ideology of race and racism have arisen historically. Limited to just seeing race, we expect people to behave rationally, coolly, in a calculating, stable manner. After all, Enlightenment eyes tend to strive for focus, balance, perspective, considered insight. Without denying the emotional content of particular sights, a wide range of research suggests that some of the other senses in particular historical contexts and circumstances appeal more to the gut than to the mind. Once we begin to understand that people sensed their worlds—heard sounds they did not want to hear (we are without ear lids, after all), had to smell smells they did not want to smell, used the putatively premodern, proximate, nonvisual senses to invent modern racial stereotypes—we begin to understand the historically conditioned, visceral, emotional aspect of racial construction and racism.⁶

I offer this book, then, as an exploratory essay. The research is here, and I do aim to persuade, of course, but in addition I want to stimulate thinking not just about the way race is understood but also about the role of the senses in structuring historical meaning.

POINTS OF SENSING; THE PLAN OF THE WORK

At its simplest, this is a broad, two-hundred-year story about how many southern whites manufactured sensory stereotypes about black people and how black people in turn challenged those assumptions. The book begins in the late eighteenth century and ends in the late 1950s. A central argument is that the sensory construction of race held important benefits for whites. Not only did the invention and subsequent application of the stereotypes help justify slavery and segregation, but the senses also allowed white southerners not to have to think about race. I do not deny that there was a vibrant life of the mind in the South at any point in time. There is simply too much work to suggest otherwise. But I do agree with W. J. Cash’s famous if now unfashionable 1941 estimation that when it came to race, white southerners demonstrated an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought. I argue that the senses facilitated the rule of feeling and made men and women unthinkingly comfortable with their racial worlds. Sensory stereotypes about black people shellacked the white southern mind, holding reason hostage. The sensory underpinnings of slavery and especially of segregation took on a visceral quality that relieved most white southerners of the discomfort of thinking, levied no tax on the mind, and allowed white conceits about blackness to go unchecked.⁷

Sensing race proved handy for other reasons. White southerners (northerners too) used more than just sight to validate, betray, and affirm racial identity. The need to sense race beyond vision began in the colonial period when a racially mixed population increased to the point where sight alone could not always reliably authenticate race. As a result, slaveholders, with pseudoscientific backing from Europe and the North, began toying with other ways to supposedly detect racial identity—by smelling, touching, listening, and tasting, as well as by looking.

By the antebellum period, the idea that there were nonvisual sensory markers of racial identity was de rigueur. The way slaveholders sensed their black slaves was deeply implicated in their paternalist ethos. Yes, slaveholders said, blacks smell, sound, look, feel, even taste different (and often inferior), but we live with them and work with them and love them regardless. The slaveholders also cast blackness in sensory terms both to justify and to explain exploitation. As everyone knew, slaves had very thick but supple skin, well suited to picking cotton. The very labor to which slaves were consigned and the rationing of sensate niceties—good food, refined music, delicate clothes—served to create and then reaffirm stereotypes. Slaveholders invented and then acknowledged the sensory difference of blacks and based a part of their paternal largesse on the indulgence of that difference. Slavery was never really about physical segregation because the paternalist web linking master and slave mandated close, often intimate association that required each group to see, hear, smell, touch, and taste the other on a daily basis. Love and hate regulated southern slavery, and at the center of that perverse intersection stood an intimate, uneven, sensory exchange between the races.

Sensory racial stereotypes served another important function in the antebellum period. Several historians have argued that, beginning principally in the 1850s, racial identity—and, hence, race-based slavery—was becoming increasingly problematic for southern slaveholders. A rapidly increasing mixed-race population (courtesy of the slaveholders themselves) produced slaves who looked white, thus muddying the logic of racial slavery to such an extent that southern slaveholding society, so the argument goes, edged toward crisis precisely because racial identity could no longer be verified. There is a good deal of nonsense in this argument—matters to which I shall later return—but for now it is worth wondering why the belief in race proved so enduring if the idea of race was so unstable? The reason that some historians believe in the increasing instability of race in the 1850s is because they view race, literally. Certainly, over time it became more difficult to ascertain true racial identity by the eye alone, as some slaves became whiter in the late antebellum period. But once we grant that southern whites believed they could detect racial identity using senses in addition to the eye, it becomes clear that the so-called racial crisis of the antebellum period was, from the slaveholders’ perspective, no such thing.

With the end of the peculiar institution in 1865, the old arguments about sensory otherness took on deeper, more visceral meaning. The intellectual components and iterations of the proslavery defense were barely detectable in the postbellum segregationist screed that relied on gut and feeling and raw emotion, not the mind, to make its case. No longer required, as they saw it, to support blacks, southern whites strove to separate the races, their paternalism evaporating with the end of the Civil War and their way of life. The late nineteenth century saw the legal consolidation of this desire to establish separate spaces for black and white, and even in the driest legal document we find senses playing pivotal roles in segregating streetcars, restaurants, theaters, and all manner of public accommodations well into the twentieth century.

Intellectual hiccupping and contradictions abounded, at once animating southern society and forcing awkward, perverse compromises. Whites maintained close ties with blacks throughout the twentieth century in the segregated South. Even as segregationists claimed black difference and sensory offensiveness, even as they publicly reviled black scent, mocked the sound (more often, noise) of blackness, and proclaimed the terrible dangers of coming into contact with black skin, they also experienced blackness with rude appetite and appalling eagerness. White tongues tasted food prepared by black hands; white noses smelled black maids who washed white clothes and tidied white houses; white bodies inhaled, touched, and tasted black wet nurses; whites reveled in the beauty of black singing; and, clandestinely, white men experienced the intimacy of black women while publicly proclaiming the utter necessity of protecting white womanhood from the touch and taste of black men. The sensory justifications of segregation, in fact, would have lost legitimacy if there had been a complete separation of the races. After all, blacks labored for whites and of necessity engaged in sensory exchange. It was only through day-to-day familiarity with the sensory dimensions of blackness, as whites invented and styled them, that they could maintain the fiction of sensory inferiority. The reality of segregation was far more complicated and contingent than its rhetoric. Whites often suspended rules simply because the effective functioning of southern society mandated such suspension: black hands, for example, had to cook white food. Rules were also suspended because the suspension itself, far from challenging the core of the segregated social order, worked to augment white authority. Whites were sufficiently powerful to suspend their own protocols, powerful enough to ignore their own hypocrisy, strong enough to offer occasional reminders of who was who. Sometimes relaxed, sometimes taut, rules were rules less because of their consistency and more because of the race of their authors.

But there were other, quite pressing reasons to sense race under segregation at century’s end. Put simply, many whites worried that blackness was in danger of becoming whiteness. The number of visually ambiguous black people increased (the great age of passing was 1880–1925), and sight became ever less reliable as an authenticator of racial identity. Ascertaining racial identity was even more important under segregation than under slavery because race had to be authenticated on a daily basis between strangers in a modernizing, geographically fluid South. The basis of segregation, a system that argued for the utter, intrinsic, static, and meaningful difference between black and white, was a product of a late-nineteenth-century, largely Western questioning of vision, in which Western elites generally, southern segregationists included, found they could no longer rely solely on their modern eyes to verify all sorts of truths, racial ones included. Segregationists faced this visual tremor with aplomb. The problems with seeing gave further authority to nonvisual sensory stereotypes, such that smelling, tasting, feeling, and hearing race were now more important—and, whites liked to believe, more reliable—than ever. They acknowledged the visual instability of race by increasing their reliance on the one-drop rule, which, if anything, confirmed the argument that race could not, in fact, be seen. And instead of fretting about the invisibility of race, segregationists invoked the other senses as authenticators. Becoming visually whiter did not necessarily entail a dilution of the other sensory characteristics. Mulattoes, as one observer claimed in 1918, might look white and have the skin coloration of the white man, but they would retain the body odor of the Negro. Blackness, whites had to believe, was always vulnerable to sensory detection.⁸

Was there a material basis to the claims made by southern whites? Did black people really have an innate, identifiable scent? While, by their own account, black people smelled distinctive because of diet, the use of particular perfumes and hair products, and their predominance in manual, sweaty labor, whites of all classes reconstituted these historically contingent differences as biologically governed or coded blackness as culturally determined, static, and natural. Certainly, matters of class complicated the picture, but white segregationists—and even white liberals and some elite blacks—maintained that class dynamics were always secondary to race. The belief that blacks as a group smelled, that they sounded a particular way, that their skin felt different (usually thick and sometimes coarse—that’s why they were manual laborers, or hands), and that there was much to be feared from touching and tasting blackness—all these sensory constructions muted class distinctions under southern segregation in the first half of the twentieth century. Although southern elites acknowledged that poor southern whites—mill hands and rednecks—might well smell different, might well have rougher skin, might well sound inferior, they did not sound, smell, or feel like blacks.⁹ Poor and unrefined though they were, their white skin rescued them. Exceptions abounded, of course, and deep loyalties and cherished friendships exempted some blacks from the charge of sensory inferiority. Yet exceptions only proved the rule, and the sensorial dimensions of blackness were prerogatives to be applied and suspended as whites saw fit.

Poor and working-class whites under segregation endorsed the thinking of those higher in social rank because, in reality, their rough skin also rasped, their bodies also smelled, and they too could sound loud and noisy. But by racializing what was in effect a class distinction, lower-class whites elevated themselves. They exalted the manliness and scented nobility of the sweat of their labor while telling blacks who performed manual work that their sweat stank. Poor and laboring whites achieved this level of false consciousness on a daily basis because they had every incentive to do so.

This book is hardly unmindful of the African American experience. I examine the ways that black slaves used the senses—materially and ideologically—to thwart slaveholders and I pay attention to blacks’ partial and strategic application of sensory stereotypes to other black people. I also make the point that southern black sensory stereotypes of whiteness were far milder and less systematic than those deployed by whites, principally because they did not possess the power to make the stereotypes politically and socially meaningful. For African Americans to argue for an innate sensory dimension to whiteness would be to endorse the logic of their oppressors. Instead, black people challenged segregationist sensory stereotypes in other, more fundamental ways. Among their most powerful arguments was a materialist, common-sensical critique, one that effectively exposed the constructed nature of race while profiling the grinding reality of racism. Yes, they said, we might well smell, but if you did the work we have to do and lived in the conditions we live in, then you would smell too. In this respect, as both slaves and freedpeople, African Americans employed a style and language of critique favored by nineteenth-century materialists and one that white liberals found essential to their campaign against segregation during the Civil Rights Movement.

Understanding the sensory history of race allows us to understand how and why the clumped notions of black and white, of binary notions of racial identity, gained such social currency. Of course, it is historically misleading to speak of the black experience or of the white experience. The gradations and the variety of views and experiences within such a large region over such a long period of time were considerable. Interracial unionism, interracial ties, the activities of white liberals in fostering interracialism, class divisions within the black and white communities, instances where gender seemed more important than race—all are topics now at last getting their due from historians.¹⁰ And yet it is important to remember that contemporaries, particularly whites of all classes, racialized the senses in a deliberate effort to impose and maintain the artificial binary between black and white. Whatever the instances of complication, nuance, and subtlety—and there were many—historians still face a South that divided along the fundamental lines of something people called black and white. The senses were central to the creation of that clumsy world even as it was belied by everyday contingencies, compromises, and complications.

This book is also a primer of sorts, a call to think about the many ways in which race has been made. To effectively counter racism, we need to understand, precisely and more fully, the nature, origins, and sources of the creation of racial imagery, how race is made, and the mechanisms by which those images—so damaging and so powerful that they can make unthinking creatures of rational people—are reproduced. One way, as W. E. B. Du Bois argued, is to rewrite those stereotypes. Indeed. But doing so requires an understanding that race is made in ways in addition to vision.¹¹

Here, we would do well to ponder Paul Gilroy’s work, particularly his Against Race, a powerful meditation on the need to renounce race-thinking and venture beyond the color line. Gilroy explores the subtleties of racism, and he is painfully aware of the role played by the senses in helping perpetuate race-thinking, in shaping histories and memories of race and its meaning. His recognition of the importance of the senses urges us to embrace the idea that if we are to really venture beyond race-thinking, we need to understand how race and racism in all their sensory forms are constructed, peddled, and marketed. Without understanding the role of the senses in race-thinking, we will remain doomed to live within the bounds of the color line, a place replete with banal calls for absolute racial identity, chilling forms of extremism, and raciology’s brutal reasonings. What Gilroy says of modern race-thinking, that the essentialist theories of racial difference that are currently so popular are best understood as symptoms of a loss of certainty around ‘race,’ is an observation equally applicable to aspects of race-thinking—more properly, race-feeling—in southern history. It was no accident that the most vicious sensory stereotypes