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영어

Whiteness as a counterpart of Blackness is an invention and a pretense that white people are superior to black people in every way. However inaccurate and untrue, whiteness has been considered Americanness since it was constructed in the South after the Civil War. Many white Southerners had a fear of losing their masterhood over ex-slaves, so it was extremely urgent to find a new way to craft new racial orders such as one drop rule, culture of segregation, racial etiquette, black beast rapist myth, mammy myth, Old South myth. These entire methods to keep blacks in their ‘place’ were throughly entrenched, taking full advantage of the threatening systems and the ultimate menace of lynching. This oppressive and terrifying Southern Way to control freed blacks and establish white superiority at all costs was adopted as the American Way following the First World War. William Faulkner represents whiteness as terrifying and terrorizing in Go Down, Moses and Light in August, which cover from the antebellum South to the modern South in 1940. In Light in August, the Jefferson community defines Joe Christmas as a black, lynches, and finally castrates him, alleging him as a black beast rapist, even though it is not certain that he is really a black. In Go Down, Moses, Isaac McCaslin repudiates his patrimony to expiate ancestor’s wrong and shame. Most of all, his ancestor’s wrong is related to a slave named Eunice and her descendents. Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin raped his own black daughter Tomasina and had a black son and grandson Turl. In a sense, McCaslin history is a history involving the rape and exploitation of the wilderness and its people, namely, the South in microcosm. The significance of the definition of who is black and the unique history of black-white relations in the South show that race as well as racism is a conceptual and historical construct.