I picked this book up because I am wanting to read more about racism and how to prevent/stop it. How I can work on myself, and how to raise my kids better. This definitely gave me some things to think about, and more research to do on the subject. I would recommend reading it and then doing your own research further into the topic. I know that Jane Dailey is a historian, but I think I would have been more comfortable if the author was a POC.

Thank you to Perseus Books and NetGalley for the Reader's Copy!

Now available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Indie Bookstore.

While intriguing as a concept, I found Jane Dailey's White Fright to be ultimately essentialistic. Through a series of historical analysis, Dailey serves to build the premise that the fear of black sexuality has been the main motivation for racial tension between Black and White communities. She particularly relies on examples of misconduct in the military, contrasting the treatment of hypersexualized Black males to their white counterparts.

The premise laid out in this book is nothing new - fear of sex is the basis of any Puritan society as Howard Bloom tried to prove back in the 1990s. There's no nuance, for example, in differentiating the different Christian communities, only that God fearing white Christians in the South fear black men. Where do non Black POC males like Asian Americans, Latinx or Indigenous folk fit into the conversation? Where do Black and non Black POC women fit into the conversation?

What if we reversed the conversation and discussed the vitality of Black power and Black love and Black community? That Black folk in the US have continued to thrive despite these constant "fears"? What if we talked about White Mediocrity as Ijeoma Oluo does, white insecurity? I felt like that would be a much more interesting conversation.

This book successfully argues that the prevention of sexual mixing of the races was at the heart of segregation in America. It's a factual account without a lot of storytelling involved, but the history itself is fascinating (also heartbreaking and infuriating).

The description calls this book, "A major new history of the fight for racial equality in America, arguing that fear of black sexuality has undergirded white supremacy from the start." That's not quite right. The book argues that white racial purity—defined as preventing sexual relationships between Black men and white women—underpins white supremacy. The concept of whiteness, and therefore white supremacy, can't exist if white women give birth to mixed race children. White men marrying nonwhite women, though equally prohibited by anti-miscegenation laws, was not nearly as threatening (as characterized here).

It took me a while to get into this book because there's no real narrative thrust. By the time I reached the end, though, I was a little disappointed that it was over. Apart from the end notes, it ends at about the 73% point in the ebook, with the Loving decision. Which is a reasonable end point. I guess I was hoping there would be more about the impact of Loving. But that's a topic for another book.

Thank you to NetGalley, Perseus Books and Basic Books for this copy of White Fright by Jane Dailey.

White Fright will be the newest book to be assigned reading in Diversity Studies classes this Spring, for good reason. Well-researched and thorough, White Fright takes you through the history of the struggle for civil rights, focusing on the sexual panic at the center of most, if not all, arguements against equal rights. This is not easy reading, to be sure, but it's essential to read for a deeper understanding of why racial divides still exist in this country.

This book was extremely well-written but it was written by an academic and may be hard to read if you're unaccustomed to that level of detail. I am a current college student, reading this felt like reading an assigned text. That is not a complaint for me but I do think that some readers may have trouble reading this style of academic writing. As for me, I am about to recommend White Fright to the diversity studies program at Penn State, where I am a student and I won't be surprised to find it on a syllabus in the Spring.

Did you know that interracial marriage was regulated in the U.S. for 300+ years? In her heady non-fiction book, “White Fright,” historian Jane Dailey investigates the white anxiety regarding interracial sex and marriage.

“For more than a century, between emancipation and 1967, African American rights were closely bound, both in law and in the white imagination, to the question of interracial sex and marriage. At every stage of the struggle for civil rights, sex played a central role, even when its significance was left unspoken. Overcoming the conflation of sexual and civil rights was a project of decades and arguably the greatest challenge champions of Black equality faced.”

Paralyzed by fear and anxiety, whites long upheld the Jim Crow segregation laws, and carried out unspeakable violence perpetrated upon African Americans. Even after the 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Blacks and whites were legally unable to marry in 16 southern states for another 13 years.

The fear and anxiety of mixing races was the driving force behind the long-overdue repeal, which affected the 14th Amendment which granted Americans equal protection of the laws.

Thankfully, in the 1967 legal case, Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that justifications for Virginia’s anti-miscegenation (interbreeding) laws were “obviously an endorsement of White Supremacy.” Loving denounced “invidious racial discrimination” generally. And Chief Justice Earl Warren declared that marriage was a “vital personal right,” a “fundamental freedom.”

“The overall disappearance of the endorsed anti-miscegenation as an acceptable public language is momentous; it represents the collapse of the most enduring color barrier in the United States.”


Overall, I enjoyed this book for the fact that it is necessary and well-researched, but it is very academic. Definitely not a vacation beach read. Instead, it keeps you thinking long after you finish the final chapter. I find that “White Fright” would be excellent assignment for a social justice collegiate syllabus or as a recommendation for your antiracism book club.

Thank you to Basic Books for providing me with an advanced reader copy, via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review.

3.5 stars

I am always looking to educate myself about things and lives I know nothing about and that was the reason behind me requesting this book, and boy was I in for a real lesson in some of the deep-seated roots of where racism comes from, the sexual undertones of Jim Crow, the laws they created, and the lengths those who support white supremacy will go to obtain the white racial purity they are both looking and striving for, even today.

I will admit I was not prepared for this book. It overwhelmed me at time and I will be sitting on all this information for a long time - there is a LOT to unpack here and to just read it and dismiss it does the author a great disservice - this book needs to be unpacked and delved into and absorbed and then one, after getting every last drop out of it, needs to go out and do something about it. Those of us who preach and live and fight against white supremacy have an obligation to educate ourselves on topics such as these [I truly was wholly unaware such sexual undertones and anti-miscegenation laws even existed and am still quite in shock over what I have read in this book] and then go out and MAKE. A. CHANGE. We need to be the change to make this world safe for ALL peoples. And this book will help you learn about ways to do that, simply by giving you history. Knowledge is power. Always.

Thank you to NetGalley and Jane Dailey and Perseus Book/Basic Books for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

"White Fright" by Jane Dailey is a nonfiction book that details how white Americans have upheld their racism around their fear of interracial relationships. As someone who is in an interracial relationship, I found this book to be incredibly sad and terrifying, but also so important! So much has changed since Jim Crow and yet we still have so far to go. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a free e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

this was a really interesting and terrifying read, i really enjoyed learning more about this topic. You could tell Ms. Dailey was knowledgeable of the topic and did the research

"White Fright" by Jane Dailey is a nonfiction work about how white Americans pursuit of continuing to uphold racism centered around their fear of interracial relationships. I learned that white people were often willing to break down racist systems as long as changes did not go so far as to legalize relationships with white women and non-white men. This book presents a unique analysis of racism in America, but I often found that the author had a hard time weaving the book's central topic into the overall work. Nevertheless, it was still an interesting read.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a free e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book explains the sexual undertones of Jim Crow, and how the preservation of white racial purity through anti-miscegenation laws provided the cornerstone for white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction era and throughout the 20th century.

I requested this book from Netgalley in order to further my understanding of racial issues in the US. As a Canadian, sometimes the outsider-looking-in perspective can be helpful, while other times it means there's a lack of context. While I had been educated on American race issues in classes in university, how much interracial marriage was tied into Jim Crow was not something I was aware of.
This book went into much greater detail than simply describing the landmark case of Loving v Virginia. It provided context to many of the issues that were argued in the Reconstruction era, WWI and II, as well as the civil rights battles of the 1960s.

I'm cognizant of the fact that this book is written by a white woman. She's an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, and has written several other works on the post-Civil War and Jim Crow eras. Far from telling white people what to do about racism, this work seems to be more informative, so as to give context.

This is less a review and more of a reflection. I do recommend it to those interested in the topic of anti-miscegenation laws in various eras. I also encourage my fellow readers to support black authors, and read books by own voices. Education is key.

I distinctly remember once hearing my great-aunt remark that, had God intended the races to mix, He wouldn’t have put them on separate continents. Even at the time I thought such an argument was ridiculous, both because I didn’t believe in the idea that God created man directly and, more importantly, because my mother had raised me to have a deep-rooted abhorrence to such racist beliefs. It seemed (and seems) ridiculously to me that people should be opposed to interracial marriage.
Reading Jane Dailey’s new book, White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History, I was dismayed (but, unfortunately, not surprised) to learn that such an ignorant and backward beliefs were not just to be found among elderly women in Appalachia. Instead, they were to be found throughout American society, from the pulpit to the bench, from state houses to universities. The reason for this wasn’t hard to find: for both proponents and opponents of interracial marriage, this institution represented the keystone of Jim Crow and white supremacy. Interracial marriage had the potential to bring both of these fundamental building blocks of American society crashing down.
Dailey documents in exhaustive detail the many ways in which the fear of interracial mixing manifested itself in the United States. It shouldn’t be too surprising that it frequently took the form of racist violence, particularly lynching, but she also points out that it emerged in other places as well, including some that might surprise some readers. As my great-aunt’s remark made clear, there was, and is, a tendency among many American Christians of a certain type to use religion as a means of justifying their racist views. Throughout the 20th century, many white supremacists could take comfort that their spiritual leaders had already taken a fairly firm stance against interracial marriage because it supposedly violated biblical principles. This shouldn’t really surprise us, given that there were many in the South that defended slavery using similar specious logic, but even so it’s always rather shocking to see such hypocrisy among those who take faith to be a key part of who they are.
Dailey has a keen eye for what makes a historical narrative work, and she keeps her book moving book moving at a lightning pace as she shows how fears of racial mixing remained a central motivator for all aspects of Jim Crow, as well as efforts to overturn it. Thus, even though Brown v. Board of Education was, ostensibly, about desegregating schools, for many white people it was as much about heading off the specter of interracial sexual encounters as it was about schools themselves. Equally unsurprisingly, it was met with horrific acts of violence as states resisted what they saw as federal tyranny (it should shock no one that many states asserted that marriage, and its definition and regulation, was a responsibility best left to them).
Needless to say, much of Dailey’s narrative focuses on the South, since it was there that fears of miscegenation were strongest and frequently elicited the most extreme forms of violence. However, she also does an excellent job of pointing out that those who live in “blue” America shouldn’t pat themselves on the back too much. Outside of the South, it was actually California, frequently seen as the bluest of blue states, that had some of the most restrictive and discriminatory laws regarding race, ranging from anti-miscegenation laws to laws restricting who could own property and who couldn’t (guess who got the short end of that deal).
What’s more, Dailey also points out that resistance to interracial marriage wasn’t even limited to tried and true racists. In fact, many of those who were devout allies of the cause of racial justice founds themselves getting a little squeamish about the idea of interracial marriage and racial mixing. These were some of the best parts of the book, precisely because they managed to be so pointed without explicitly calling out liberal complacency when it comes to issues of race. This ambivalence on the part of white liberals across America also highlights the profound fear of black sexuality that motivate(d) so much of this country and its institutions. Even science, supposedly the bastion of objectivity and nuanced thought, was used to justify fears of “mongrelization.”
While much of Dailey’s book makes for troubling, and sometimes downright depressing, reading, it is also true that she strikes a note of optimism near the end. Attitudes about interracial marriage have changed enormously over the past few decades, though it’s not able that there are some holdouts among various segments of the population (with Republicans and evangelicals proving to be more resistant to interracial marriage than others). What’s more, it truly is remarkable the speed with which such acceptance has taken place and how essential the issue of marriage has come to all aspects of the struggle for civil equality. In many ways, those who advocated for same-sex marriage were carrying on the work begun in earlier decades.
There’s a tendency among a certain group of white people to think that racism of the most virulent and violent sort is a thing of the distant past, that we no longer subscribe to the sorts of pathological anti-Blackness that used to be so proudly announced by public figures from all walks of American life. And it is true, to a degree, that such disgusting attitudes were, until recently, pushed into the shadows.
In many important ways, however, this belief in a better America is also a polite fiction, and the summer of 2020 has done much to rip away that gauzy bit of self-deception to reveal the extent to which white supremacy of the most vile, toxic, and violent form is still very much alive in today’s America. Books like Dailey’s White Fright remind us that, despite the progress, there is still much to do when it comes to right the racist wrongs of this nation. Just as importantly, it’s a clarion call to white progressives everywhere to examine their own biases and blindspots when it comes to race.

The author's exploration of the history of segregation after the Civil War and the struggle for civil rights primarily through the lens of the argumentation regarding sexuality, primarily the fear of miscegenation.

The author does speak regarding the situation of interracial sex before the Civil War but spends most of the time investigating how the fear of miscegenation was ever-present in conversations about race relations and the primary fearmongering platform by which to deny any kind of change in the status of black people in America. She also shows how even more "enlightened liberals" who wanted to see the situation of black people made better maintained the delusion that black people did not really want full equality and all of that and were shocked to hear the opposite was the case. She also explores how black people would attempt to frame matters regarding civil rights in light of the fears of miscegenation.

She follows the narrative throughout until the Loving decision, pointing out how strange it was how accepted it would be when the ultimate thing the fearmongering had been agitating against had come to pass. It was as if the civil rights decisions which came beforehand had made the decision inevitable.

The narrative is not always about fears regarding miscegenation - the author is more expansive than just this one part of the narrative, and it was important to learn about how it was given to Christian ministers to attempt to create space for the civil rights movement within the mainstream of Christian thinking. It was also interesting to see the last desperate stand to try to suggest somehow that miscegenation was against the will of God all the way back in the...1950s.

This is not a fun book to read, but a very necessary one. The generation raised in and before the 1950s still will often express disapproval of interracial marriage; as usual, white American Christians remain the least receptive group to the idea, and far more find it uncomfortable. It is deeply lamentable to see how pervasive a lot of ungodly thinking was regarding these matters, and thus it is all the more important for us to recognize it, confess it, and give it no space in modern Christendom.

I am sorry, but, I had to DNF this. The writing is very academic and requires a prior level of understanding on the subject matter, which I lacked... My failing, but I just could not carry any longer. 😔

This book sets out to examine the roots of white racism in the US as seen in sexual insecurity in white men as compared with Black men. This struck me as a novel approach to the foundations of Jim Crow but most of the book actually focuses on other fears on the part of white Americans regarding Black people. The book contains a great deal of the history of Jim Crow, the fight for civil rights, the founding of civil rights organizations, court cases, and the work and suffering that became woven into activists' commitment. There are many well-presented examples of lynching and other forms of suppression used by whites, including the cases of Emmett Till and Jesse Washington. The author goes to great lengths to explain how the NAACP and other organizations fought for the freedom of Black people to marry (or have an intimate relationship with) a person regardless of either one's "race". "Social rights" were bitterly opposed by the KKK and their ilk because it was believed that freedom of Black people to eat at a lunch counter next to a white person of the opposite sex would soon lead to becoming acquainted socially then sexually. The primary phobia behind Jim Crow laws was that Black men would become sexually involved with white women and that would lead to "mixed blood" in children which would lead to the downfall of southern society. As Ms. Dailey points out, there was significantly less fear of white men becoming sexually involved with Black women (despite the "mixed blood" objection still seeming applicable) because for hundreds of years, white men had been producing children with enslaved Black women without crosses being burned on anyone's lawn. This book is more of a textbook in its detail and length than a book for a more casual reader; it requires a lot of time and concentration, but is worth both.

Just wow! This insightful, often confronting, analysis of racism must be read. Drawing on different eras, cases and situations, the concepts of sex and race bring the analysis together to offer a compelling theory. If we are to understand each other and our behaviour, both individually and as a society, this is a must read.

It is not a coincidence that racism and sexism are often espoused by the same demographic. In White Fright, Jane Dailey digs into the interconnection between white supremacy and fear of sexuality (both black sexuality and female sexuality) to provide a fresh perspective on the pervasiveness of racism in America. Dailey traces through the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and modern racial tensions to identify the bright red line that connects the white supremacist movement and its desire for racial purity to an underlying sexual insecurity that depends on both the vilification of Black men and the sexual repression of white women.

Dailey launches into this exploration by discussing the sexual abuse of female slaves at the hands of white men, as the laws of the time enshrined the status of such children as following the status of the mother to ensure that the slave master’s “legitimate” heirs did not need to worry about mixed race siblings. However, as the laws explicitly stated that a child naturally follows the condition of the mother, over time the mixed-race children that resulted from liaisons between white women and black men undermined efforts to tie freedom and citizenship strictly to race.

With the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of African American men during the Reconstruction era resulted in the mental gymnastics of “social equality” versus “political equality.” While there was little white supremacists could do legally to directly stop African Americans from gaining political rights, they relied on pushing a narrative that said segregation was not a “political” issue but a “social” issue, and that allowing African Americans “social equality” would result in polluting the racial purity of whites as African American men would, in the rhetoric of white supremacists, aggressively and violently pursue white women in a sexual manner.

Dailey’s presentation is straightforward and easy-to-consume, which is important considering the complex scope of the subject matter. She leans heavily on illustrative examples from historical sources and court cases over reams of dry exposition, letting the words of those involved in the events make her point for her. Her writing is clear, concise, and organized. White Fright provides a new perspective on the issue of racism that is as relevant today as it has ever been.

Such an important book, especially during these times of the BLM movement becoming more prevalent in our society. A lot has changed but at the same time, nothing has changed. This is different from other black books I've read. I think this will become very popular. Thanks so much netgalley for the advanced copy!