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Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul (review)

Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul (review) steered their children away from too much close, unstructured contact. Furthermore, middle-class blacks reared their children with an emphasis on respectability to counter the negative messages that came from white society. Ritterhouse found powerful stories of resistance to the social order, especially an account from a man whose family was cheated by a white landowner. He moved away and returned years later in a Cadillac to confront the landlord, sarcastically telling him, "I just wanted to thank you for taking my farm that year I worked out here so hard. Because if you hadn't taken it all, I probably would have stayed out here and got married and had a bunch of children and made your children rich." What Growing Up Jim Crow does best is focus on small, but telling moments--a white girl's rejection of a black boy's social card; a white employer's clumsy attempt to fondle a domestic worker as she stacks glasses in a cupboard; a white boy's elaborate sexual fantasies about black girls--to show the pernicious, dehumanizing racism behind the so-called etiquette. Ritterhouse correctly points out that the Civil Rights era ended the Jim Crow laws, but not the attitudes it inculcated. In the http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Southern Cultures University of North Carolina Press

Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul (review)

Kasprzak, Perry.
Southern Cultures , Volume 15 (1) – Feb 21, 2009
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Center for the Study of the American South
ISSN
1534-1488
Publisher site
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Abstract

steered their children away from too much close, unstructured contact. Furthermore, middle-class blacks reared their children with an emphasis on respectability to counter the negative messages that came from white society. Ritterhouse found powerful stories of resistance to the social order, especially an account from a man whose family was cheated by a white landowner. He moved away and returned years later in a Cadillac to confront the landlord, sarcastically telling him, "I just wanted to thank you for taking my farm that year I worked out here so hard. Because if you hadn't taken it all, I probably would have stayed out here and got married and had a bunch of children and made your children rich." What Growing Up Jim Crow does best is focus on small, but telling moments--a white girl's rejection of a black boy's social card; a white employer's clumsy attempt to fondle a domestic worker as she stacks glasses in a cupboard; a white boy's elaborate sexual fantasies about black girls--to show the pernicious, dehumanizing racism behind the so-called etiquette. Ritterhouse correctly points out that the Civil Rights era ended the Jim Crow laws, but not the attitudes it inculcated. In the

Journal

Southern Cultures – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Feb 21, 2009

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