| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940. By Julian B. Carter. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. x, 219 pp. Cloth, $74.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-3937-3. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-3948-9.)

Whiteness still carries enormous weight, yet many whites express bafflement when accused of exercising racial power. For them, exercising public power is not racist, but natural. Unfortunately, its racial dimensions remain largely invisible to the people who wield it. In this slim but complex volume, Julian B. Carter explores how the power of whiteness was rendered invisible in the early twentieth century. White Americans shifted their rhetoric from talking about the superiority of white civilization to focusing on normality. "Normal" was, in essence, a distillation of white values, and the white origins of normality could go without saying. Making racial signifiers redundant and thus unnecessary made it possible for whites to forget the role of whiteness and white power in determining what "good Americans" accepted and advocated in social behavior. In the process, American culture linked appropriate (meaning white) private behavior with the good of the nation, thus perpetuating "white" civilization.

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