White Professionals, Black Peril: The Racial Inscription of Middle Class Identities in New Orleans, 1868-1875

• In Event: 324 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 15. RGC and Constructing Difference

Abstract

Narratives about the dangers upwardly mobile racial outsiders posed to middle class whites helped to construct and maintain durable links between race and class in the late nineteenth century. In postbellum New Orleans white school officials, parents, and schoolchildren launched protests against blacks’ access to elite public schools as either students or teachers that portrayed white principals and teachers as victims of black aggression. In this article, I analyze these events to show the importance of racially inscribing strategies of class mobility and class reproduction for sustaining a racial order. Faced with a visible black middle class in a period of downward mobility for white elites, newspapers, politicians and everyday citizens stressed the dangers that upwardly mobile racial outsiders posed to both white students and school personnel, thereby linking middle class identity to racial whiteness. I argue that analyses of the race-class intersection should give careful attention to strategies of social reproduction because the maintenance of the racial order depends upon cultural narratives that ensure continued economic dominance over racial minorities.

Author

• Joseph Oscar Jewell, Texas A&M University