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This chapter explores the historical problems of understanding and dividing society along racial lines. In some ways, World War II was a race war as both Allies and Axis enforced forms of racial segregation and purity. This chapter traces the roots of race in Christianity beginning with the Great Chain of Being, then explores federal definitions of race, and finally explains the implications of social and legal separation of races in the Jim Crow segregation persistent through World War II.

In the final chapter, the author’s focal point is “disappearing difference.” That is, she looks at how multiracial people attempt to blend racial borders or mask the appearance of any racial mixture in themselves or their chosen romantic relationships. She situates the discussion in the broader context of a colorist society in which the current racial hierarchy privileges whiteness and penalizes blackness.

This chapter investigates how the ancien régime culture, with which officials and settlers came to French Louisiana and which made them highly sensitive to the issue of maintaining their rank in public, intersected with the process of racialization. As the urban milieu facilitated cross-racial encounters and exchanges of all kinds in public civic and religious ceremonies, drinking houses, and street encounters, most whites quickly became aware of the need to maintain some appearance of social superiority and to display and instill the socio-racial hierarchy by their exclusive and violent behaviour in the public space. Still, people of African descent never ceased to fight against their domination, invisibility, and segregation.

This chapter argues that the contemporary action film evidences the persistence of traditional racial hierarchies and racial stereotypes, with the ethnicity of the action hero still frequently ‘defaulting’ to Anglo-American while non-white and non-Anglo characters remain on the sidelines, only permitted to be active and heroic in the context of a larger group. The chapter then investigates the representational negotiations that take place when a nonwhite person takes on the role of action hero, using I, Robot and Avatar to analyse how notions of otherness become redirected, before considering how whiteness operates as a structuring concept in the action movie's representational hierarchy, both as a dominant category and as a locus of fear, using xXx as an example.

The conclusion discusses Mississippi’s immediate postwar period from mid- to late 1865. In particular, it focuses on the Christmasrebellion of that year in order to demonstrate how white Mississippianscontinued their attempts to uphold the racial hierarchy against freed people’scontinued rejection of white dominance. This struggle dominated Mississippi’ssociopolitical landscape through Reconstruction and beyond. Unionforces won the war, but they could not suppress the continued influence ofracial loyalties, which exerted a powerful influence over defeated Confederatesoldiers and Southern civilians.

Chapter 3 moves from the field to the prison building to reveal how hierarchical prisoner labor arrangements structured an internal prison economy that bought and sold prisoner bodies and services as cell slavery. By narrating southern prisons’ shift from dormitories to cells, this chapter will show how the power and control of prisoner trustees was strengthened by the changes. Within the southern convict guard framework, prison rape is analyzed as a state-orchestrated design rather than as an individual act pf prisoner pathology. Through an analysis of sexual violence in male prisons as a social construct of the southern trustee system, this chapter joins in a historical turn toward placing sexual violence at the very center of racial oppression. Seeking to take prison rape seriously as evidence of evolving state control and orchestration, the chapter pushes against the criminological view that has cast prison rape as a timeless function of the prisoners’ own pathology. The chapter also considers how women prisoners experienced the southern trusty system and the state’s attempt to isolate and target women that the prison classified as the “aggressive female homosexual.”

Throughout the United States, early Boy Scout officials relied heavily on highly-structured camping and hiking experiences like the Pine Tree Patrol method, Nature Study and its scientific classification system, and natural resource conservation activities to teach boy members modern manhood’s values and skills necessary to manage an urban-industrial society and its expert-led government. Administrators insisted that the most important use of natural areas and resources was the “conservation of boyhood,” which entailed managed development of the nation’s key asset (its most capable adolescent boys). By characterizing women and minority and farm boys as too sentimental, selfish, careless, and ignorant to conserve natural resources and interact with nature in other modern and scientific ways, early Boy Scout outdoor programming and imagery helped reinforce a masculine and racial hierarchy of character and citizenship.

The chapter begins by stating that a widely circulated picture of a white soldier and a Black Confederate soldier is actually a photograph of Andrew Chandler and his family slave, Silas. Slaves were sometimes allowed to purchase military uniforms or were provided them by their masters, which explains why there are photographs of Black men in Confederate uniforms. At the onset of the war, Confederates believed they could offset the disadvantage of having a smaller population and less war-making power than the Union by utilizing slave labor. The government impressed enslaved people to work on earthworks, railroads, and weapon production. They also performed various jobs in camps such as cooking, performing music, and assisting in hospitals. White soldiers often brought slaves from home to act as personal servants. At times, the presence of personal slaves created class tensions within camps. Enslaved people often took on various tasks in camps for payment. While the shared experience of war likely brought the enslaved and their enslavers closer together, the racial hierarchy was strictly, and often violently enforced by the enslavers. Enslavers’ belief that their slaves were loyal to them and the Confederate cause sometimes caused emotional distress when a slave would run away or defect to the Union.