ABSTRACT
Southern history generally listens less to non-elite, non-white southerners than German history has attended to twentieth-century German Jews. With the writing of history being organized along national lines, American historians and historians of the rest of the world seldom compare notes. American slavery and the Shoah usually keep their distance. Southern historians will also recognize the ugly rhetoric of hate, for southern white supremacy echoes late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German diatribes against Jews. Yet surprisingly few southern historians have given that parallel sustained attention. The everyday racism of ordinary people will come into view, together with the evil embedded in every southern chromosome of all southerners of all races and ethnicities. The testimony of black Americans deserves credence as a description of American society as a whole. Further, the very ordinariness of racism—in this case, southern racism—needs to be faced and admitted.
