When Charles Dew, a white Southerner sat down to write his latest book, he originally titled it, "The Making and Unmaking of a Racist."
But his colleagues told him that the title was too much of a compromise.
“They said I should make the title more direct about how I grew up white in Jim Crow and how I absorbed it,” said Dew the Ephraim Williams professor of American History at Williams College. “You can’t minimize the fact that this attitude toward race gets passed down from one generation to the next. It took the redemptive part of the title away and left me with the stark reminder of how I had grown up and how long it took me to get out of that culture. That whole notion of white supremacy is powerful and alluring.”
And with that, “The Making of a Racist: A Southerner Reflects on Family, History and the Slave Trade,” Dew’s telling memoir of growing up in the Jim Crow South, was born. The book examines Dew’s early life in Florida and recounts how he was subtly groomed to be a racist – from the stereotypical black stories he was read to his lawyer father’s staunch belief that school desegregation was bad for the country.
Dew will talk about the book at 6 p.m. Thursday during a lecture and discussion about his book at The Center for Civil and Human Rights in downtown Atlanta.
In a preview, Dew talked to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week about the motivations behind the book, why the time was right for it, and why he had to tell his story.
"I thought that there were not enough white voices in our racial dialogue. We have had some incredible, powerful black voices like W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates," Dew said. "But not enough from the white side and it is important that we do so in the hope that it would resonate with others. A number of African Americans have thanked me and said they never understood where this stuff came from. How did this happen? Where did it come from?
About the Author
