Raising Racists reveals the interlocking practices, mores, and traditions that trained white children to fear, disdain, and dehumanize their black neighbors. Through crisp, compelling, and trenchant discussions of school texts, consumer goods, violent rituals of black debasement, and day-to-day lessons in Jim Crow etiquette, DuRocher reminds us how much energy and care went into each successive generation of white southerners the ideology of white supremacy.
~W. Fitzhugh Brundage, author of A Socialist Utopia in the New South: The Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Georgia, 1894-1901
DuRocher painstakingly describes the role of parents, teachers and community leaders in 'parental instruction, public schools, churches, and the expansion of consumerism in the South....'
~History Wire
Hard-hitting.... Examining white Southerners' memoirs, advertisements for household products, school textbooks, parenting manuals, children's literature, toys and games, and dramatic productions, Raising Racists reveals the multiple interlocking and mutually reinforcing methods white Southerners used to perpetuate white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South.
~Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
Much has been written about the battles and the privates and the generals who were committed to their cause, but many of us who look back after a century and a half do not comprehend the full effect of that bloody war on this new country, less than a century after it won independence from Great Britain.
~Roanoke Times
Thoroughly exposes a crippled southern society in the wake of the Civil War, still determined to preserve its racial and social control through new generations, and reveals the extent to which southerners manipulated their public and private institutions to that end.
~Southern Historian
Contributes to our growing yet still limited understanding about the central roles that children and young people played in the construction and maintenance of oppressive sociopolitical systems and identities.
~American Historical Review
With an important set of questions to consider, extensive evidence to draw upon, and a large body of scholarship to engage, DuRocher's study promises a great deal. Her thoughtful analysis frequently offers valuable observations about children's experiences.
~Ohio Valley History
DuRocher...has successfully revised her dissertation into an important monograph that scholars interested in souther regional identity, children's history, and the making of white supremacist masculinites and femininities will find valuable.
~North Carolina Historical Review
DuRocher's work continues the recent laudable trend of taking age more seriously as a category of analysis, and her careful research provides a timely reminder that communities are defined by the education of their children.
~Journal of Southern History
In her book, Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South, DuRocher takes the reader on a journey into the shaping of the minds of white children into accepting white supremacy and public rituals of racial violence. — Black Diaspora Review
~Adeyemi Doss, Black Diaspora Review
Raising Racists is a well-written, well-researched account of the ways white supremacists systematically indoctrinated children into a way of life that made rational the cruel, often lethal violence directed toward African Americans.
~Louisiana History
