Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: the view from under the sink -- Making sweat trickle up: organizing first steps toward underdevelopment in the U.S. south -- Derailing rebellion: inventing white privilege -- Life in Black and white -- Resisting trickle-up while accommodating whiteness -- Forks in the road -- Gender, whiteness, and the psychological wage -- Jim Crow, underdevelopment, and the reinforcement of the tottering drainage system -- Critiquing capital: the wannabes -- National capital and the waning of independence -- The redefinition of the producer egalitarian ethic -- The Klan and the manufacture of middle-class consent: splitting the white working class, terorizing the Black -- Brown shirts/white sheets: fascism and middle-class demotion -- National capital, the retreat from fascist processes, and the sugar-coated contract -- Local elite choices and the reorganized drainage system: "Old South" and "New South" -- Hooking in the rest of the world: the reorganization of drainage in the new world order -- The resumption of fascist processes -- Whitenesss: the continuing evolution of a smokescreen.