Definitions of whiteness amid the Delta blues

Sunflower County, Miss. — 'ARE LEBANESE white people?" we asked 71-year-old Ned Holder, a former sheriff here. "Yes," he said, "although they're real dark." How about Italian Catholics; are they white? Sure. And Jews? Yes. What about the Chinese? "Yes," he said, "they go to the white schools." And Mexicans? "They're becoming more white. More of them are getting an education."

Then what's a white person, we asked? After some confusion over the meaning of the question, he concluded that it was probably anybody "who isn't black."

Last week, I crisscrossed the Mississippi Delta, the ancient alluvial plain that defines the northwest quadrant of the poorest state in the country. I rode shotgun with anthropologist Jane Adams and photographer and journalist D. Gorton. They're a husband-and-wife team who first met here more than 40 years ago as young white civil rights activists. Now they make frequent pilgrimages to the region from their home in Carbondale, Ill., to study the nature of whiteness.

And what more perfect place to do it? For two decades, the Delta was the epicenter of the national struggle over civil rights. Sen. James O. Eastland, once labeled the "symbol of racism in America," was from Sunflower County. So was pioneering civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who was jailed and beaten for trying to register to vote. The infamous White Citizens Council, the "uptown" segregationist group, was founded here in 1954. A year later, in the next county over, 14-year-old Emmett Till was beaten to death by two white men for allegedly propositioning a white woman. When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee started its assault on Jim Crow in the early 1960s, it chose the Delta as its primary target.

The Mississippi Delta has been called "the South's South" and "Mississippi's Mississippi." Its extremes of rich soil and deep poverty, promise and disappointment, gave birth to the culture of the blues. But to Adams and Gorton, the Delta is also a regional petri dish that can be analyzed to better understand the construction of white identity in the United States. What I learned is that even in the one place where you'd expect the issue of black and white to be, well, black and white, it's a whole lot more complicated, and that it's a mistake, as Angelenos well know, to think that racial identities always obliterate ethnic and class distinctions.