ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the interplay between whites' interpersonal racial status concerns rooted in principles of honor, the formation of white social identity, and different forms of lynching. It explores that local structures of interracial status relations, through the mediation of social identity formation processes, influenced whites' readiness to perpetrate private but not public lynchings. One way antebellum southern whites usurped status from black slaves was the etiquette of race interactions and relations that consisted of rules of conduct designed to create social hierarchy and distance denying slaves any claim to honor and extending them a form of nonperson treatment. Racial etiquette played an important part in southern whites' efforts to reconstitute hierarchical interpersonal race relations in the post-Reconstruction period. The chapter provides the local-level structure of white-black interpersonal status relations using a measure based upon the Duncan socioeconomic index (SEI), which assigns prestige scores to a wide range of occupations given their average education and income levels in 1950.
