least one member per club, with the most participation from the two clubs where I had more familiarity and
connections. The sensitivity of the topic and my academic affiliation may have influenced people’s unwillingness to
participate despite my “insider” status.
The interviews lasted between and hour to two and a half hours. The data for the analysis reported here are
drawn from the constructions of whiteness section of these interviews. There were three parts to the construction of
whiteness section. First, I asked broad, open-ended questions about being a Southerner and being white, such as
“What is your definition of a Southerner?”; “What does it mean to you to be white?”; “What does it mean to be a
white Southerner?”; “What has it meant to be white in this community?”; and “Are there any experiences or
situations in which you really noticed that you are white?”.
On the whole, the respondents seemed very open to answering these potentially difficult and uncomfortable
questions. Since whiteness largely has been invisible and thus, unmarked and assumed, it is very challenging to get
whites to talk about their meanings and experiences of being white. I found that this may be due to a resistance to
thinking about and talking about racial issues, but it also often was due to the fact that most whites had seldom
thought of or discussed themselves as “raced” subjects. However, I think that being raised as a rural, white
Southerner gave me insights into tacit race concepts and enabled me to ask questions that helped respondents tap
into their taken-for-granted ideas and talk about salient issues. My familiarity helped put the interview more in the
language of the respondents and further enabled them to share their perspectives in a localized context in which they
are expert knowers.
For the final interviews, I decided to focus on two of the four communities in Morrisons County,
Mississippi that I previously studied. I chose these two because I had the most participation from those communities
and I had more contacts and familiarity with them. I recruited respondents from these two communities by
contacting the new presidents of the community clubs, the community churches’ pastors, the coaches for the
community baseball teams, and my previous respondents in order to get names for potential interviewees. I chose
to recruit from the community churches and baseball teams, who are sponsored by the community clubs, because
these are the other two main rural community organizations. I hoped to accomplish my goal of interviewing
younger whites, more white men, and whites from more diverse social classes by recruiting from the congregations
and the relatives, friends, and community spectators of the baseball players.
The key demographic characteristics of interest in my sample are age, education, social class identification,
occupation, and length of residence. The final group of respondents varied in age from age 24 to 84, with a median
Convention