Description
Book SynopsisPart history, part memoir,
Outliving the White Lie charts conflicting narratives of American and southern identity through a blend of public, family, and deeply personal history. James Wiggins, who was raised in rural Mississippi, pairs thorough historical research with his own lived experiences.
Trade ReviewComprised of poignant, interwoven reflections on family, public history, and personal experience,
Outliving the White Lie provides a sweeping history of the costs of slavery and white supremacy to the South and nation." - David R. Roediger, coeditor of
The Construction of Whiteness: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Race Formation and the Meaning of a White IdentityTable of Contents
- Introduction: The Boy Emperor’s New-Old Clothes
- Chapter 1: Race and Me and Mississippi
- Part 1: The Larger Implications of the Small Debates of the Moment
- Chapter 2: Our Distinguished Error Emeritus
- Chapter 3: Becoming Abraham Lincoln; Remaining Robert E. Lee
- Chapter 4: The Riddle of the Confederate Sphinx
- Chapter 5: The Black Confederates Who Were, and Those Who Weren’t
- Chapter 6: The Sins of the Fourth-Great-Grandfathers
- Chapter 7: Asset De-appreciation
- Part 2: The Importance of Slavery in the Antebellum South (and Beyond)
- Chapter 8: The "Peculiar" Case of the Antebellum South
- Chapter 9: Slavery’s Capitalism
- Chapter 10: Slavery’s Freedom
- Part 3: How Slavery Shackled the White South
- Chapter 11: The Two Souths of Tom and Lewis, Sam and Elijah
- Chapter 12: The One Percent
- Chapter 13: The Miseducation of the South
- Part 4: How the White South Was Persuaded to Shackle Itself
- Chapter 14: The Invention of the White "Race"
- Chapter 15: "Racecraft"
- Chapter 16: The First Families of Racism
- Chapter 17: The Solidarity Myth
- Part 5: Constitutional Constructions, Reconstructions, and Deconstructions
- Chapter 18: Diogenes Finds His Honorably Honest Southern Man
- Chapter 19: Constitutional Construction and the Reconstruction of American Democracy
- Chapter 20: The Reconstruction and Deconstruction of American Democracy
- Chapter 21: When Jim Crow Was Chairman of the School Board
- Chapter 22: Mac and Black Annie
- Chapter 23: Affirmative Action for White People
- Chapter 24: The Second Reconstruction of American Democracy
- Part 6: The Second Deconstruction of American Democracy
- Chapter 25: The Great Migration of the Yellow Dogs
- Chapter 26: The Southern Strategy of the Republican Party
- Chapter 27: The Republican Strategy of the Southern Party
- Chapter 28: Trump (and Trumpism) as Mirror
- Chapter 29: The Third Reconstruction of American Democracy
- Postscript: Edley, the Mirror, and Me
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliography
- Index
