Hale’s first book Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1980-1940 (Pantheon, 1998; Vintage, 1999) made her a nationally and internationally recognized expert on how white Southerners think about race.  Toni Morrison offered the following assessment: “Scholarship, even when thorough, doesn’t always enlighten. For that one needs the kind of surgical insight Grace Hale has applied to her impeccable research.  Making Whiteness is both brilliant and essential.”  Making Whiteness won the Willie Lee Rose Prize and the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award and was widely reviewed and praised in newspapers and magazines as well as academic journals. 

In Making Whiteness, Hale argues that white Southerners created segregation or what people at the time often called Jim Crow, the racial order that replaced slavery, in order to maintain white supremacy in a post-Emancipation world.  Because other scholars had examined segregation laws, she focused on culture, on the ways white southerners legitimated their practice of white supremacy in fiction, film, photography, popular and academic history, memoir, poetry, advertising, landscapes, and buildings.  Among other contributions, this work named and defined the horrific practice of "spectacle lynchings" and pioneered the study of lynching photographs.  It also changed how US historians conceptualized segregation by proving that contrary to the claims of segregationists across more than half a century, including the defendants in the Brown decision, segregation was not simply a “response” to racial difference.  Instead, it was a practice that produced the racial identities and differences it claimed to reflect.  Hale found that while the civil rights movement succeeded in destroying segregation laws, it had a much more difficult time changing the culture.  Stories and symbols created to support southern white supremacy like the Confederate monuments in so many towns and cities and the novel and film versions of Gone With the Wind survived the civil rights movement intact.  Twenty years ago, Making Whiteness transformed the subfield of southern history.