White Purity, Black Sexuality, and Their Roles in America’s History of Racism |
White Purity, Black Sexuality, and Their Roles in America’s History of Racism
Center for Brooklyn History
2020-12-18
In her new book, “White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History,” historian Jane Dailey places white fear of Black sexuality and interracial sex at the center of America’s history of racism.
Dailey brings into sharp relief how white focus on safeguarding purity fueled centuries of brutality and structural racism. Historian Nell Painter looks at the nineteenth and twentieth century south through an intersecting lens. Her book “Southern History Across the Color Line” brings to the surface the many ways in which the lives of southern Blacks and whites were thoroughly entangled. Join these two thinkers as they reflect on the white American psyche, the messy tangles between races in the south, and the throughline that brings us from Emmett Till, to Loving v. Virginia, to the racism that continues today.
Tags: Center for Brooklyn History, Emmett Till, Jane Dailey, Loving v. Virginia, Nell Irvin Painter, Nell Painter