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Jennifer Ritterhouse. Growing Up Jim Crow: The Racial Socialization of Black and White Southern Children, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006. 320 pp. $19.95
Growing Up Jim Crow is a substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of child identity development in the segregated US South. Author Jennifer Ritterhouse asks, "How did black and white children of me Jim Crow era learn race - both me racial roles mev were expected to play in their society and a sense of themselves as being 'black' or 'white?' " (2). The key word for Ritterhouse is learned. Like many before, she argues that African American and white children learned racial identity- their own and others' through direct and indirect parental and community instruction. However, Ritterhouse stresses that these lessons were taught in the form of "racial etiquette," expected social behaviors used to establish, reinforce, and sustain racial hierarchies.
Unlike previous studies, Ritterhouse attributes a "greater significance" to the function of "racial etiquette" during segregation, "seeing the unwritten rules that governed day-to-day interactions across race lines not only as a form of social control but also as a script for the performative creation of culture and of 'race' itself" (4). She notes that racial etiquette functioned differently in the lives...