Whiteness and Civility: White Racial Attitudes in the Concho Valley, 1869-1930

Implicit in the ideology of White Supremacy is the idea of moral supremacy over non-white peoples. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century whites consistently crossed the blurry, racialized line that defined them by what they were not. In the west-central Texas region of the Concho Valley, breaching law and order and social mores condemned some whites to lose degrees of whiteness in the eyes of their peers. Some whites appeared hypocritical in their rebuke of racial terrorism. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century many white West Texans became guilty of the very lawless and violent attributes they generally applied to those of a different skin color, thus exposing the schizophrenic and ambiguous nature of the notion of white supremacy.