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THE
REVIEW OF
COMMUNICATION Racial Redemption and the White Southern
Racial Conversion Narrative
Dreama G. Moon
Fred Hobson.
But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative.
Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. 159
pages. $30.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). “I once was lost, but now am found “Faith’s Review and Expectation” (“Amazing Grace”), by John Newton, English minister, abolitionist, and former slave ship captain (cited in Hobson, 1999). Fred Hobson, a historian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, begins his examination of the struggles of white southerners coming to grips with racial guilt with this provocative line from an old Christian hymn, “Amazing Grace.” This notion of redemption–being lost, then found; blind, now able to see–is a recurring theme throughout Hobson’s text as he examines the writings of white southerners that comprise a form of southern expression he calls “racial conversion narratives.” In these narratives, white southerners detail their personal journeys in coming to “see” race and white supremacy. Hobson notes that, “the authors, all products of and willing participants in a harsh, segregated society, confess racial wrongdoings and are ‘converted,’ in varying degrees, from racism to something approaching racial enlightenment” (2). Though different from the more commonly understood “religious conversion,” racial conversion narratives share with religious conversions a recognition and confession of one’s sins, a stated need for redemption, and a description of the person’s transformation. Hobson positions these narratives as a form of “testifying” or “witnessing” commonly engaged in by religious converts. In addition, he suggests that we might think of these stories as “slave narratives” in that, through confession and redemption, white women and men too escape the bondage of white supremacy. Hobson explains that “these writers . . . flee from the slavery of a closed society, of racial prejudice and restriction, into the liberty of free association, free expression, brotherhood, sisterhood–and freedom from racial guilt” (5). Hobson examines racial conversion narratives written by white southerners during the mid-1940s through the 1970s. En route, he studies the works of both white women including Lillian Smith, Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, and Sarah Patton Boyle, and white men such as James McBride Dabbs, Will Campbell, Willie Morris, and Rick Bragg. Most of the writers he highlights were members of the southern aristocracy and came from slave-owning families. The book is comprised of an introduction and four chapters, each of which addresses white racial conversion narratives of a particular decade. In the introduction, Hobson outlines the 17th century notion of conversion narrative and its historical situatedness within Christian thought. He acknowledges that conversion narratives of all types tend to follow the same format of description of a journey out of the dark into the light, or how he describes it, “from sinfulness to a recognition of sin and consequently a changed life” (2). In this section, Hobson traces the role of Christianity in the maintenance of a chattel slavery system in the South, and the reasons for the general lack of race confessions by white southerners until about the mid-1940s. In the next four chapters, Hobson examines specific confessionals and writers. In chapter 1, he analyzes racial conversion narratives of the 1940s, with particular focus on two well-to-do white women from Georgia slave-holding families, Lillian Smith and Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin. Hobson outlines the ways in which their probable lesbianism helped them to identify with oppression, and perhaps led to their involvement with anti-racism and what Smith termed “freeing whites.” In chapter 2, Hobson details the lives and moments of racial conversion for James McBride Dabbs of South Carolina, Sarah Patton Boyle of Virginia, and Will Campbell of Mississippi. Both Dabbs and Boyle were descendants of wealthy plantation families; Campbell described himself as a “poor white.” Writing in the 1950s, all of them were involved to some extent in the new Civil Rights Movement. By the 1960s and 1970s, white narratives of racial transformation had become a flourishing southern industry. Chapter 3 addresses a number of the works published during this time period including those of Robert Penn Warren, Anne Braden, Willie Morris, Larry L. King, and Pat Watters. As Hobson moves his discussion to the 1970s, an air of hopelessness begins to appear in much of the works he discusses. In many of these writings, the reader is left with a sense of the writers’ disillusionment: the Civil Rights Movement is over, King is dead, and whites are still not redeemed. Lastly in Chapter 4, Hobson speculates on the South and white racial awakenings at the end of the 20th century. White racial conversion narratives were quite common by the 1980s. So much so, Hobson notes, that they form their own southern literary subgenre. He observes that more white confessionals than ever continue to pour forth from white southerners, and reviews the works of a number of them including Virginia Durr, Edward Ball, Elizabeth Spencer, Mab Segrest, Tom McLaurin, Rick Bragg, and the notorious former Klansman, C. P. Ellis. Throughout this chapter, Hobson compares and contrasts this more recent outcrop of racial conversion narratives with those written earlier in the century. In addition, the intersection of race and class is more explicitly addressed in these writings. As a historian, Hobson is focused on carefully crafting a portrait of the white racial conversion narrative through the writings of selected white southerners. As such, the text is deeply descriptive. While he is sensitive to the personal experiences and cultural situatedness of these writers, Hobson is also critical of their work. He is quick to point out, for instance, incidents of white paternalism and white solidarity. He also gives at least passing attention to some of the many recurring themes in the narratives, such as the centrality of father-daughter conflict in the conversion experiences of white southern women, the close ties between Christianity and white racism, white disillusionment with the Civil Rights Movement, and the indulgent aspect of white racial guilt. However, as a communication scholar interested in the ways in which discourse functions, I am curious about how we might think about such narratives through a critical lens. What might these narratives teach us about white supremacy and its tenacity? What might we have to learn here about the ways in which whiteness works to re-center itself? Indeed, Hobson’s text raises a number of interesting and provocative questions about how whiteness functions discursively. As I read the book, I was again struck by the difficulty in talking about whiteness and anti-racism in ways that do not re-enact white privilege and that do not re-center whiteness. I was particularly intrigued by the recurring theme of redemption in these writings and the ways in which redemption can work within racial discourses. On the one hand, as Hobson points out, narratives of conversion often can serve as instruments of conversion. Such stories may be put to use as uplifting testimonials for other whites, perhaps motivating some to “convert” to anti-racism, and encouraging those already converted to continue grappling with white supremacy and white privilege. Indeed, there are some in academia who have suggested that the recovery of such white heroes needs to take place so as to provide worthy role models for other would-be non-racist whites (Moon & Flores, 2000). On the other hand, redemptive narratives can also work to re-center the very privilege they attest to protest. Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek (1995) remind us that whiteness is a strategic rhetoric that re-asserts itself in complex and often surprising ways. As a result of redemptive processes that release one from blame (and perhaps social responsibility for current manifestations of white supremacy), whiteness may “be restored to its full material value by removing the encumbrances that the legacy of racism has placed upon it” (Cho, 1998, p. 123). Marty (1999) too has commented on how white apologia can function as a way of repudiating the horrors of a racist past, while ignoring the ways in which white supremacy functions in the present. In addition, all too often in the telling of their stories, even racially aware whites often re-center their own definitions of, and perspectives on “Others” (in this case, African Americans). One area that illustrates this re-centering revolves around many of the authors’ disillusionment with the Civil Rights Movement. Although the metaphor of “redemption” is a recurring and variously conceptualized theme in the writings of these white southerners, ultimately it is self-redemption through release from racial guilt on which these white racial converts are most focused. Blacks have always existed for whites in the white U. S. imagination, first as slaves and later as saviors. This white supremacist attitude comes through most clearly when, once racially enlightened, these white Southerners continued to behave as if Blacks existed for them. This shows up most clearly in their constructions of Blacks as “Negroes-as-white-saviors.” For instance, Hobson notes in his discussion of Lillian Smith’s conversion story that she preached strongly of the link between “black rights and white psychological health” (33). Many of these writers were imbued with fantasies of white salvation through Blackness, which, once dashed, led to their abandonment of the Civil Rights Movement. For example, Sarah Patton Boyle, a white woman writing in the 1950s, stated that she had “known no experience more distressing than the discovery that Negroes didn’t love me” (cited in Hobson, 68). Not surprisingly, it is when Blacks begin to call for Black power and Black determination that many of these white converts began to back off of the Movement. At this point we begin to see a resurgence of racial constructions of Blacks as dangerous. For example, Hobson reports that Larry L. King, when confronting the emerging black militancy in the late 1960s, found himself becoming afraid of the Black man. King states: “[The black American wants] black separation, black control of black destinies, black institutions for black people . . . black power. And it scares us to death” (cited in Hobson, 106). In closing, let me encourage those communication
scholars interested in race and issues of culture to read this book. It
offers provocative insights into the difficulties of discussing white
racial enlightenment without re-centering whiteness. These stories also
tell us a great deal about the tenacity of white supremacy and the
limitations of white racial awareness that is not coupled with a clear
vision of, and commitment to, social justice and human freedom. Dreama G. Moon is assistant professor of
Communication at California State University, San Marcos. ReferencesCho, S. (1998). Redeeming whiteness in the shadow of internment: Earl Warren, Brown, and a theory of racial redemption. Boston College Law Review, 40, 73-170. Marty, D. (1999). White antiracist rhetoric as apologia: Wendell Berry's The Hidden Wound." In T. K. Nakayama & J. N. Martin (Eds.), Whiteness: The communication of social identity (pp. 51-68). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Moon, D. & Flores, L. A. (2000). Antiracism and the abolition of whiteness: Rhetorical strategies of domination among “race traitors.” Communication Studies, 51, 97-115. Nakayama, T. K. & Krizek, R. L. (1995). Whiteness: A strategic rhetoric. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81, 291-309.
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