Angie Maxwell

5771. The Indicted South Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness, by Angie Maxwell (read 21 Dec 2021) This is a 2014 book linking the Scopes trial of 1925, the 1930 book by 12 Southern writers on Agrarianism, and the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Each is discussed at length and the author strives to show they exhibit Southern cultural traits listed in the book's subtitle. Much of the discussion is a mite heavy-going and did not arouse much interest in me. I presume many Southerners would disagree with the author, though much of what she says I tend to accept. And I have a less bleak take on what she sees, since one cannot help but see much improvement from the days of Massive Resistance which flared up after the Brown decision… (meer)

History of the reaction-formations induced in white Southerners as a result of criticisms of the South (or really of its whites). Maxwell argues that “southern white identity has allied itself with the unifying sense of inferiority,” leading to positions that go beyond explicit racial and gender commitments to rigidity on religion (conservative Christianity/creationism), education, science, and government’s role. Intriguingly links the New Criticism to other reaction-formations (the Scopes monkey trial and its aftermath including hardening of fundamentalism, as well as Massive Resistance after Brown), deeming New Criticism fundamentalist in its insistence on the primacy of the text over the text’s history and context and in its elevation of the feelings of critics over other forms of knowledge.

The book seemed to attribute responsibility to the South’s critics for making the things they criticized worse, which I don't think is either fair or a pointer to useful alternatives. E.g., “Public criticism of southern racial practices had sparked the fire [of Massive Resistance to desegregation].” Or maybe it was … being ordered to stop segregating? Like, I’ll accept that scorn doesn’t work on many racists, but I do note that the least contemptuous person in public life, MLK Jr., was assassinated for asking for justice without H.L. Mencken’s vitriol. Maxwell identifies him as one of the critics who spurred backlash by pointing out that the civil rights movement was in favor of justice, thus (shockingly/insultingly) implying that its opponents were against justice, which of course they in fact were. Also, Maxwell notes the existence of Southern white self-criticism, but doesn’t blame them for sparking backlash or investigate what gave those whites more self-doubt/moral clarity. She spends no time on unpacking the “no true Scotsman” denunciations of white Southerners who supported at least some reforms. As she notes, Roy Carter Jr. found that, though segregationists constantly denounced the biased media as never presenting the “Southern” [white] perspective, in 12 Southern papers, 27% of the coverage was of pro-integration stories, 12% was “progradualism,” 30% prosegregation, and 31% neutral. The “[p]erception [of lack of media support] mattered,” she says, despite the reality. But Maxwell doesn’t address the fundamental issue surfaced by this mismatch: to this group of whites, any criticism was too much criticism.

Her project is very much to understand people who wrote things in 1928 like “There were people in New England who wanted to destroy democracy and civil liberties in America by freeing the slaves. They were not very intelligent people; so they didn’t know precisely what they wanted to destroy. … These privy-to-God people were sending little pamphlets down South telling the Negroes, whom they had never seen, that they were abused.” I would like to spend just enough time learning about them to know how best to fight them politically and rhetorically, and yeah, contempt probably won’t convince them (though it seems to be working fine for Trumpists’ attitudes towards us). But the fact that segregationists have lifeworlds too does not to me provide a justification for blaming their radicalization on people who disparaged the South (truthfully) as having more lynchings than universities, even if those condemnations were often issued by whites with racism problems of their own (looking at you, Mencken). And I wonder why it’s important to understand these guys without contrasting them to the people engaged in the violence that they only tacitly approved—formally disavowing violence but blaming Emmett Till’s murder on civil rights activists. Without comparison to their more integrationist or more violent white counterparts, Maxwell gives us no understanding of what the alternatives were for these semi-polite racists.

Maybe the most sympathetic reading is that she’s showing how backlash worked in practice: Hardened views meant a consolidation of antigovernment, fundamentalist, antieducation, antiscience, antiprogress views in a white Southern identity that admitted no nuance in things like constitutional interpretation. Despite being released before this round of white moral panic, the book definitely makes clear that the current hysteria over “critical race theory” is the same renamed racial anxiety that has stalked the US—including the white Michiganders who now embrace the Confederate traitor flag their forbears died to fight—for a long time, both as an undercurrent in the Scopes trial/bans on teaching evolution and in Civil War apologism taught in schools. And the historical links with the New Criticism reinforce my conviction that anti-“CRT” legislation embraces the idea of the objective correlative—that simply teaching particular things will create shame and guilt in white students—in excitingly racist ways. (One of the Virginia segregationists she writes about said that the worst thing about the fight over desegregation was how it generated guilt in whites. Also, today’s right-wingers are furious over any attempt to show that racism was integral to American history, whereas yesterday’s were furious that liberals portrayed racists as un-American in their racism and that liberals also portrayed Brown as the realization of the authentic American ideal, so there’s that bit of irony as well.)… (meer)

5250. The Indicted South Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness, by Angie Maxwell (read 24 Feb 2015) This 2014 book by a professor at the University of Arkansa studies the Scopes trial of 1925, the Agrarian manifesto of 12 southern writers in 1930, and the massive resistance led by Virginia to the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The discussion of the Scopes trial is of interest, though Larson's Summer for the Gods (read 3 Oct 1998) is a more popular account. The discussion of the 1930 manifesto was erudite, boring, and never showed me that it was as important as the author attempts to show. By far the most interesting part of the book is the study of the massive resistance which Virginia led to the Brown decision of 1954. One stands in amazement how benighted that effort was, though of course the author's thesis that it made for tremendous changes in the South's political course is sadly true.… (meer)