Making Whiteness is a profoundly important work that explains how and why whiteness came to be such a crucial, embattled - and distorting - component of twentieth-century American identity. Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how, when faced with the active citizenship of their ex-slaves after the Civil War, white southerners reestablished their dominance through a cultural system based on violence and physical separation.

And in analysis of the meaning of segregation for the nation as a whole, she explains how white southerners' creation of modern "whiteness" was, beginning in the 1920s, taken up by the rest of the nation as a way of enforcing a new social hierarchy while at the same time creating the illusion of a national, egalitarian, consumerist democracy.