Whitewashing the South is a powerful exploration of how ordinary white
southerners recall living through extraordinary racial times-the Jim
Crow era, civil rights movement, and the post-civil rights
era-highlighting tensions between memory and reality. Author Kristen
Lavelle draws on interviews with the oldest living generation of white
southerners to uncover uncomfortable memories of our racial past. The
vivid interview excerpts show how these lifelong southerners reflect on
race in the segregated South, the civil rights era, and more recent
decades. The book illustrates a number of complexities-how these white
southerners both acknowledged and downplayed Jim Crow racial oppression,
how they both appreciated desegregation and criticized the civil rights
movement, and how they both favorably assessed racial progress while
resenting reminders of its unflattering past. Chapters take readers on a
real-world look inside The Help and an exploration of the way the
Greensboro sit-ins and school desegregation have been remembered, and
forgotten. Digging into difficult memories and emotions, Whitewashing
the South challenges our understandings of the realities of racial
inequality.