Kanawha County Revisited: Reply to Billings and Goldman

Clelland, Donald A.; Page, Ann L.

doi:10.1093/sf/59.1.281

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 4 publications

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“…5 5 In general, the media referred to the Kanawha County textbook controversy as a matter of “class warfare” in ways that invoked an established narrative of class consciousness. Specifically, in the pages of the Social Forces , Billings and Goldman (1979) differed with Page and Clelland (1978; see also Clelland and Page 1980) about the source of the conflict, relying on the established history of coal wars and the class consciousness attributed to them (Mason 2005, 354–59). …”

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confidence: 99%

Reproducing the Souls of White Folk

Mason¹

2007

Hypatia

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Focusing on a textbook controversy that emerged in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1974, Mason explores the discursive production of white ethnicity in the rhetorical, visual, and political strategies used during an organized protest against the new multicultural curriculum adopted by the local school board. What the author finds puzzling is the ways in which these productions of “soul” and “nation” enabled unlikely political alliances between national conservative elites and the local, historically left-leaning working class protesters. The author argues that “soul” is reproduced through racialized discourse signifying the spiritual and ethnic purity of whiteness, the consolidation of white ethnicity, and the spirit of white resistance, articulated through campaigns to save children from future captivity in an “alien” world. Through this on-site theoretical analysis, the author demonstrates how a right-wing narrative of victimhood facilitates the reproduction of ethnic identification among the protesters, whose whiteness apparently can be jeopardized by reading the “wrong” books.

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