In Chapter Three, "The Whiteness of Cotton," Foley shows how cotton culture supported and maintained whiteness. With less than ten percent of the farmers owning more than ninety percent of the land, landowners controlled poor whites as well as Blacks and Mexicans. Poor whites, increasingly sharecroppers, saw their problem as a loss of whiteness. Cotton production was the medium for social division: Its successful production defined who could be white. With insufficient land, poor whites could no realize the rewards of whiteness. Poverty rather than skin color made them unacceptable, and cotton cultivation afforded them no upward mobility. Chapter Four, "Tom Hickey and the Failure of Interracial Unity," is about protest. Seeking whiteness
