The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s profoundly changed the lives of many young southern White citizens. Southern racism was a product of traditional indoctrination common in the culture of the Old South. During the generations after slavery to the Civil Rights Era, vulnerable White children were typically exposed to racist and prejudiced influences from families, fellow citizens, education, popular culture, and segregation laws established within their communities. The Civil Rights Movement brought forth elaborate legal reforms that broke segregation and enabled integration programs to take place at schools and other public institutions, which ultimately expanded many southerners' cultural awareness of different racial groups. Many accounts on the Civil Rights Movement and its relation to southern White racism are generally confined to narrow descriptions that emphasize extreme resistance measures, such as violence or civil disobedience acted out from members of the White community. Many students who do not study American history beyond the high school or college survey course levels unfortunately learn a limited history about White racism and its relation to the Civil Rights Movement. The sources commonly used in these courses include textbooks, films, and documentaries. Based in part by time and budget constraints, oral histories about White racism are often not incorporated in the classroom curricula. The available sources explain the history of White racism to a limited degree and the fact that it contributed to a mobilization effort to gain civil rights protection for racial minorities. However, they leave out other accounts about White racism relative to the history of the Civil Rights Movement. Many southern White children from this time grew up around prejudiced influences and witnessed blatant racist treatment of African Americans. During their upbringing many of these southern citizens developed solid beliefs in White supremacy and justifiable racial prejudice. Oral testimonies told by them that focus on their racism reveal social, economic, and political details which standard sources do not provide. Their stories demonstrate learned factors commonly found in racism and show how contemporary circumstances, such as living with segregation every day, can impact behaviors. Many common social factors that relate to understanding the roots of southern White racism are often not provided in sources used in most American history courses. Such works leave out a significant percentage of stories from regular White people from the South, and in particular many young individuals, who throughout the Civil Rights Era showed passive contempt, i.e., remaining silent on issues of overt discrimination and racism, toward African Americans as a result of cultural indoctrination. These White individuals' resistances and their youth illustrate a different aspect of prejudice in contrast to the traditional reports on the topic that highlight hate crimes and more stubborn forms of racism. Passivity expressed by these southern White citizens enabled them to reform their prejudices through the encouragement of the Civil Rights Movement. The impact of the era on their thinking offers an important lens that illustrates Civil Rights Movement and southern segregation history. Yet, generally, such perceptions are ignored in many historical works. This thesis attempts to bring out the social and evolutionary elements of White racism in the twentieth century South and the impact of the Civil Rights Movement on White prejudiced behaviors once traditionally found in southern culture that date back to the end of the Civil War and the birth of segregation. In reference to the use of capitalization of certain words I have placed capitals on terms that refer to periods of time such as the Civil Rights Era or events like the Civil Rights Movement. Additionally, groups of people identified with a racial group received recognition with a capital letter. Some of the sources I used from previous eras do not apply capitalization with specific color group terms such as "black" or "white," and I have left them as they are printed in their works. As I explain the evolution of racism and prejudice in the first half of the twentieth century, I also want to illustrate the evolution of racial labeling from the past three decades. For example, textbooks from the early 1990s describe African Americans and Caucasians as "black" and "white." However, texts from the twenty-first century label these groups as either "African Americans" or "White." The purpose of this is to show that many American historians and authors continue to evolve their understanding of racial identification.

In what ways does the legal and political monitoring of “hate groups” and "hate group activities" benefit the American left? Possible victims of crimes? Law enforcement? The state? Specifically, in what ways does the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map” challenge and/or reiterate relations of power and knowledge? This thesis offers a feminist critical analysis of hate group surveillance and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s mapping of hate. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is a progressive legal advocacy group that aids in the surveillance of “hate groups” and legislation against “hate crimes.” I investigate the assumptions grounding the SPLC’s rhetorical use of the term “hate” and analyze their surveillance and mapping in order to add to the growing body of literature that that seeks to rethink the institution of whiteness and the relationship between progressive groups and law enforcement. The SPLC’s “Hate Map” offers a visualization of “hate” while simultaneously ignoring and obscuring racism. This thesis is meant to produce an alternative reading of this map and the SPLC’s hate group surveillance. Using a critical feminist framework that is intimately linked to critical race theory and anarchist criminology, I interrogate the SPLC’s methods of mapping and surveillance as well as their connection to law enforcement and governmentality. In analyzing SPLC’s “Hate Map” and their “Law Enforcement Resources” page, I contend that the SPLC's use of "hate" in lieu of racism is a reflection of their uncritical analysis of systematic racism and state violence associated with whiteness. While I recognize SPLC’s important role in combating crimes against marginalized groups through advocacy and legal aid, I contend that their rhetoric around “hate” and use of mapping and surveillance may potentially collude with governmentality and state violence against historically disenfranchised populations.

The ways in which white Americans understand the racial landscape and their own racial identities are not well understood. Through the lens of the racial past, in this study I investigate how memory operates within the white racial frame, the dominant white-centric worldview, to uphold systemic racism and to maintain whites’ collective and individual identities. Through a narrative analysis of original in-depth interviews conducted with 44 ordinary white southerners – lifetime residents of Greensboro, North Carolina – who lived through the legal segregation and civil rights eras, this research demonstrates the interviewees’ contemporary investment in positive notions of the white self and white society. The respondents' autobiographical narratives of life during legal segregation, a time of overt white supremacy, are typified by nostalgia for a childhood era of safety, security, and "good" race relations. Interviewees' narratives of the civil rights era, including nonviolent student sit-in protests for which Greensboro is known and school desegregation, have themes of disruption, danger, and white victimization. Overall, respondents portray Jim Crow segregation as a calm and peaceful time and the civil rights era as chaotic and harmful to whites, at the same time as they acknowledge, to a limited extent, the unfairness of Jim Crow's blatant racial inequalities. In this work I propose the concepts white victimology, white protectionism, and white moral identity. I argue that white victimology – whites' perception, largely imagined, of their own racial victimization – is a major ideological and emotional facet of the white racial frame, whereby whites dismiss the historical and contemporary reality of white racism. My analysis demonstrates that white victimology is a primary way in which whites assert themselves, individually and collectively, as racial innocents and "good" people. In this work I also conceptualize the dynamic of white protectionism, explanatory and rhetorical ways in which whites "rescue" white acquaintances and family members from potential accusations of racism. Ultimately, I argue that whites' investment in perpetuating white dominance and upholding the white racial frame occurs through white moral identity-making, myriad active and subtle ways that whites continue to construct themselves positively and construct people of color, especially black Americans, negatively.