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White fright : the sexual panic at the heart of America's racist history

Dailey, Jane Elizabeth, 1963-2020

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Summary

In White Fright, acclaimed historian Jane Dailey offers a radical reinterpretation of the fight for African American rights, showing how that fight has been closely bound, both in terms of law and in the white imagination, to the question of interracial sex and marriage. White fear of black sexuality not only fueled the systems of exclusion and oppression under Jim Crow, she contends it was also a central factor driving white resistance to the civil rights movement. Sex, love, and marriage were in fact the lynchpin of white supremacist fear and ideology. In the course of this gripping and urgent investigation, Dailey examines how white fears played out in the battles over lynching, in criticisms of black troops' behavior overseas in France and England during WWII, in the violent reactions of whites following the Brown v. Board decision, and in the aftermath of the eventual Loving v. Virginia ruling, which finally declared marriage a "fundamental freedom." Placing sex at the center of civil rights history, White Fright offers a bold and insightful new take on one of the darkest threads running through American history.