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It was in the home and from the instruction of their mothers that white children learned what Ritterhouse calls ‘racial etiquette’ – the overly polite term that she uses to describe the spoken and unspoken rules that governed relations between white and Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. The gradual acceptance of a new ideal of childhood innocence and dependency was not extended by most whites to Black children: ‘even those white Southerners who devoted the most attention and material and emotional resources to their own children rarely saw any but the very youngest black children as innocents or extended the ideal of the sheltered childhood to blacks’ (Ritterhouse 2006: 63). Many white children were taught not to use terms of respect for Black people, including ‘Lady’ or ‘Sir’, ‘Miss’, ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’. Clifton Johnson in his Highways and Byways of the South (1904) recorded an exchange between a white girl and her grandmother whose home he was lodging at in Florida. ‘There’s a colored lady out on the porch wants to speak to you’, the girl told her grandmother. The grandmother shouted at the girl demanding that she use racist epithets to describe the woman at the door (Ritterhouse 2006: 55).

It is one of the contradictions of the social relationships that economic inequalities produce that those with social power both despise those without power and are dependent on their labour. In Southern households domestic labour and the care of children were often done by Black servants. The intimacy of the contact between white people and their Black servants is illustrated by countless stories of white children’s emotional attachments to Black servants; this intimacy did not erode white racism in most cases. (A fact that should give pause to those who argue that contact across the boundaries of social difference undoes prejudice and discrimination.) Indeed, stories of white children being reprimanded by their parents when they ignored the rules of contact across the ‘colour line’ are very common in white narratives of growing up in the American South (Ritterhouse 2006: 78–80; Quinn 1954) and in settler colonies. (Nor was this insistence on refusing polite forms of address to Black adults a private matter. In the 1940s white sociologist Arthur Raper was called before a grand jury for using courtesy titles for Black people (Ritterhouse 2006: 81).)

Not all white Southerners were wealthy, and neither were all African Americans poor (although most were), but being middle class for African Americans was no protection against racism; middle-class African Americans were subject to the same public or social mores and legal regulations of segregation as working-class African Americans. It is true that middle-class African Americans had the financial resources to allow them to not engage with or to get around some aspects of segregation. One of Ritterhouse’s sources recalls how her father would never travel by bus so that he could avoid the humiliation of having to sit at the back.

If the class privilege of middle-class African Americans could not insulate them from racism, conversely the class oppression of working-class whites did not prevent them from being included in the politics of white supremacy. Sara Brooks in her autobiography comments that their white neighbours were as poor as her own family but they still ‘musta thought they was more than we were because when we’d go to the spring to get water, Mr Garrett [the white neighbour] had to drink the water first . . . he’d drink and his kids would drink and then we’d drink’ (cited in Ritterhouse 2006: 127).

One of the roles of a parent is to protect their children. This is a difficult role for Black parents in a racist society. In the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) newsletter there was constant debate about how parents could counter their children’s exposure to racist violence and disrespect. Strategies to counter the influence of white racism on the child’s sense of self ranged from the politics of respectability to a refusal to discuss white racism while insisting that, in the interests of their safety, their children should accept the limits that racism placed on their freedom (Ritterhouse 2006: 98–102).