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Summary Of Neil Foley's The White Scourge

1348 Words6 Pages

In _The White Scourge_, Neil Foley uses a wealth of archival materials and oral histories to illuminate the construction and reconstruction of whiteness and the connection of this whiteness to power. Focusing largely on cotton culture in central Texas, Foley 's book deconstructs whiteness through a new and detailed analysis of race, class, and gender. The most intriguing aspect of this book is its comparison of the impact of whiteness on various ethno-racial classes and how each struggled in relation to the other to develop a meaningful existence. _The White Scourge_ shows the pathology of a racial system that continues to produce both material poverty and poverty of spirit. The users ' mentality develops in such a way that everyone -- even those who …show more content…

By insisting on their Spanish blood and the absence of any African blood, some Mexicans were able to claim whiteness and purchase land. Whiteness was thus inscribed in Texas law as the precondition for the rights of both citizenship and land ownership. This construction of whiteness separated white Texans from slaves and laborers of such "mongrel" groups as African Americans and Mexicans. Chapter Two, " 'The Little Brown Man in Gringo Land," details the impact of the legalization of Mexican labor and the relaxing of the Immigration Act of 1917 on farm labor and tenancy in central Texas. Large numbers of Mexicans in central Texas replaced African American and Anglo American tenants and sharecroppers, exacerbating tensions among the remaining white tenants. There was a fear that the mixing of white tenants and Mexicans would produce genetically inferior "seed stocks." The discussion of immigration raises questions of who is American. Immigration sustained whiteness, because it allowed farmers and businessmen to import cheap labor, thereby keeping existing laborers and tenants in poverty. Poor whites were unable to see their

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