ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the historical and social matrix of the United States following the Civil War. It provides ideological and structural dynamics of race within the American consciousness by using examples of White fears and racism directed toward African Americans. The chapter also discusses White American attempts to dehumanize Black people through scientific racism, political oppression, and forms of popular culture. It details the conflated relationships between Black migration and foreign immigration with White working- and middle-class fears of a destabilized economic market. It is the economic, psychological, and social turmoil omnipresent during this period of laissez-faire capitalism. It explores the development of American consumer culture by examining the constitutive disposition of material culture in creating and projecting individual desire and identity. For the White working and middle classes, many of whom saw them as teetering on the edge of social and economic poverty, the ideology of race offered a lynchpin with which to hang their perpetual superiority.
