The origins of this book lie in California, where I did my graduate work and where I am now a professor, but the issues I confronted there stayed with me when I took my first academic post in Texas. In both places historical divisions between black and white are obvious, yet they take different forms in each. In California, the construction in the post-World War II era of the three interstate highways that converge in West Oakland (not far from the bungalow in South Berkeley that I rented while I attended graduate school) disrupted the surrounding neighborhood and its largely low-income African American residents. The new throughways formed a transportation corridor that further facilitated so-called “white flight” from Oakland to the surrounding suburbs. In Texas, State Highway 6 (which runs through College Station, home of Texas A&M University, my first employer) divides the small town of Calvert, separating the black descendants of tenant farmers from the white descendants of landowners in ways that are still starkly visible today.

Such dividing lines are a central issue of this book. While it is clear that the binary separation of black and white is as socially and culturally artificial as it is biologically baseless, academic theories of multicultural diversity and postmodern fluidity have had little impact on American racial ideologies, even in states with large and diverse populations such as California and Texas. Roads are imaginary lines that have real consequences for where people go and how they understand their position. Roads can be crossed, they can be jackhammered into dust, but their foundations are laid in the earth and their traces are not easily eradicated. The following pages examine how the imaginary lines of race, so deeply inscribed in American society and culture, shape young European Americans’ experience of being white and how this experience is articulated in their social practices, especially their use of language.