Elizabeth Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998)

Hale has gone some way to link the historiography of 1890s racial segregation with modernity and consumption. Hale periodizes the crystallizing of segregation as rooted in modernity. In chapter four, Bounding Consumption, Hale examines Southerners' assimilation struggles as their region became incorporated into the expanding national market. As railways and eventually highways transformed the Southern landscapes of old, billboards and neon characterized the new visual environment.

And the benign stereotypes often ‘competed in general stores with more homegrown racist horrors. Displays of souvenir body parts and picture postcards from lynchings were especially popular.' Hale argues that mass visual marketing and promotion made lynching an act of modernity too. Although lynchings slowly declined in number during the early twentieth century, in chapter five, Deadly Amusements , Hale argues that they became increasingly commodified and transformed into mass cheap spectacle. Railroad travel, radio, print advertising, and eventually the car allowed mass audiences from wider afield to witness the most barbaric rituals of torture. The stereotype “black beast rapist” had also been imagined in the New South, and photographic images of these lynched transgressors policed and signified segregation and racial inferiority. In the modernizing New South, Aunt Jemima and Rastus the Cream-of-Wheat man competed with photographs of actual lynching victims as benign and malign sides of blackness.

Hale argues spectacle lynchings were about making and maintaining racial difference. She maintains this as a modern phenomenon because modern technologies allowed them to evolve into a standardized ritual, where they denoted ‘the spread of consumption as a white privilege.' Thus, trains, cameras, phones and newspapers shaped a common Southern narrative of white superiority over emancipated African Americans. And crowds at these rituals included women and children too. In the modern age, Hale argues, it was not necessary for whites to be present at a spectacle lynching: ‘Representations of lynchings, multiplying and increasing their power with the spread of consumer culture, made the line between individual and collective experience much more permeable than the line between the races.' Thus the function of lynching in the modern age made all spaces of consumption white, transforming ‘possibilities of consumer products and consuming spaces by changing blacks themselves into the objects of white desire.'