A Space Away from Race: White Racial Innocence and the Rural Vermont Landscape

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Over ninety percent of Vermonters are white, which makes Vermont a place where white people have almost accomplished segregation on the scale of an entire state. Although this segregation was neither inevitable nor accidental, Vermonters make claims to an exceptional form of progressivism that is held in contrast to the imagined white racism of low-income rural Southerners. How is it that the work of white Vermonters to maintain segregation has been made invisible? This thesis explores the processes through which the “Vermont character” has become associated with Anglo whiteness through tourist marketing and through violent, state-sponsored projects like the Eugenics movement in the 1930s or state complicity in racist violence in the 1960s. Simultaneously, the “Vermont character” has become associated with moral virtue through the figure of the “typical Vermonter,” a Yankee farmer imagined as epitomizing the traits of the ideal American citizen, which, since the Civil Rights Era, have included anti-racism. Middle-class white liberals in America consume the innocent brand of whiteness that the “Vermont character” represents through means as diverse as purchasing vacation homes or eating Ben and Jerry’s, and, in doing so, perform anti-racism without disrupting the benefits of whiteness that they continue to enjoy.

Type of resource	text
Date created	2018

Subject	ace
Subject	ethnicity
Subject	rural
Subject	Stanford University Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
Subject	white innocence
Genre	Thesis

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/qc514hz6291

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Preferred Citation: Osler, Mikaela and Anderson, Michelle and Carlisle, Liz. (2018). A Space Away from Race: White Racial Innocence and the Rural Vermont Landscape. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/qc514hz6291

Stanford University, Program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Honors Theses

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