Book Review: Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood by Rebecca Brückmann
The stereotypical idea of the southern lady, in ‘her silent influence, in her eternal vigil’, was belied by photographs of white women who protested school desegregation by screaming at young Black children.[i] Rebecca Brückmann’s study, Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation, is a significant contribution to the growing body of scholarship that shows that white southern women were neither passive nor powerless in their support of segregation.
MAGA, White Evangelicals, and the Objection to Kamala Harris
Trump established his political career with the Obama birther conspiracy, which alleged that President Obama was not a natural-born citizen of the US and was, therefore, an illegitimate president. Since then, discrediting Black and Brown people’s full human standing, particularly women’s, has been a central feature of his presidency, as shown when he told “the Squad” to “go back” to wherever they came from; three were born in the US, and the fourth, Ilhan Omar, found asylum in the US as a child. Similarly, the Trump campaign attempts to chip away at Kamala Harris’s legitimacy as a presidential candidate with messaging underpinned by the white South’s historic veneration of manliness, suspicion regarding anyone who is not white, and fear of anarchy.[1] Trump’s ads against Harris and, through her, Joe Biden, contain elements of traditional, religion-laced white supremacy and sexism, which attempt to attract Trump’s white, evangelical Christian base through rhetorical […]