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Analyzing white life novels by Frank Yerby and Zora Neale Hurston, this chapter theorizes the connection between race and class in the subjectivities of white women. In the psychological sketch Yerby offers of Odalie Arceneaux, we see a miscegenated mind that constructs white subjectivity in rhetorical dialogue with conceptions of Blackness. Whiteness is presented as a Creolized identity in which Blackness is always already implicated in the emergence of the racially White subject. In Hurston’s Arvay Meserve we see a formerly-lower class white woman who is able to embrace her new upper class status only when she is able to exercise power with and over people of color while appearing to affirm her subordinated position in her marriage. The sadomasochism that informs her marriage and the social interactions between her and racialized Others make her more at home in Whiteness and allow her to successfully class pass.

This chapter presents the typical profile of the women examined in the book. Autobiographical writings and interviews show that all the women received the same white supremacist education, a combination of racist prejudices and specific gender norms, which rendered any personal interaction with black men and women impossible. It then shows how these women came to reject their education by deliberately unlearning racism and liberating themselves from the prescriptions of white southern womanhood in the process. Typically, the women who became involved in the “long” civil rights movement started with an acute sense of guilt through a traumatic episode or an epiphany constituting the catalyst for their repudiation of white supremacy. The chapter analyzes the main factors of their subsequent transformation, i.e. interracial contact, religion, and higher education. It concludes by showing how these women's racial activism inevitably entailed their emancipation from southern gender norms.

Chapter 1 locates the treatment of poor whites in the new plantation tradition of post-Reconstruction southern literature, with especial focus on Thomas Dixon’s work, his respondent Sutton Griggs, and Charles Chesnutt, whose 1905 novel The Colonel’s Dream analyses the ascendance of poor whites into formerly bourgeois spaces. Focusing on Dixon, the chapter discusses how racial anxiety relates to the myths surrounding the protection of white womanhood during the Lost Cause era, while also revealing that, for all of Dixon’s pronouncements regarding white unity, a closer look at his work reveals a fundamental disdain for poor whites that, while lacking the outright violence against blacks we see in his works, nevertheless bears a resemblance to the racist language meted out against blacks. Analysis of Sutton Griggs, whose novel The Hindered Hand responds to Dixon directly, further challenges the latter's racist assumptions.

This chapter introduces the key term, the “literature of white estrangement” and argues that African American engagement with whiteness is an unrecognized intellectual tradition within African American letters.