Michael Phillips (historian)

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Michael Phillips, an historian and writer born June 17, 1960, is a scholar of Texas race relations and the author of White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001.

Phillips grew up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. After an award-winning career as a reporter and columnist for the University of Texas at Arlington student newspaper, The Shorthorn, Phillips received a journalism degree in 1983. From 1984 to 1990, he wrote for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, starting at its Arlington affiliate, The Arlington Citizen-Journal. Phillips graduated with a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. His dissertation, The Fire This Time: The Battle Over Racial, Regional and Religious Identities in Dallas, Texas, 1860-1990, won the University of Texas’ Outstanding Dissertation Award. Phillips’ first book, White Metropolis, published by the University of Texas Press in January 2006, represents an update of his dissertation.

Deeply influenced by his University of Texas mentor Neil Foley, author of The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture, Phillips argues that in the mid-19th century Dallas leaders attempted to conceal class conflict within the infant city by convincing lower class whites that the only important social division was the line drawn between African Americans and Anglos. Phillips writes that after the Civil War, following waves of immigration to Dallas that included Jews, Mexicans and other cultural minorities, elites redefined white racial identity. Whiteness became contingent upon not just European ancestry, but conformity to a number of political beliefs, including acceptance of elite rule, as well as belief in free market capitalism and in black inferiority. As Phillips suggests, in Dallas “whiteness was most clearly defined by what it was not: it was not black, communal, or socialist.” Those accepted as white were rewarded with higher incomes, life in better neighborhoods, increased health, and access to superior schools. Phillips suggests, however, that whiteness gained can become whiteness lost. The fear of racial demotion has kept the poor and struggling in Dallas loyal to a political system that primarily serves elite interests.

Phillips’ book has received a number of positive reviews, including from the Dallas Morning News, D Magazine, the Journal of Southern Religion, the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Legacies and the East Texas Historical Journal. Phillips is currently completing an oral history project on Texas House speakers at the Center for American History in Austin. Phillips and Dr. Patrick Cox, author of Ralph Yarborough: The People’s Senator, are finishing a book based on the project which will be published by the University of Texas Press in 2008.

References

Flournoy, Craig, “Remembering what our city would rather forget,” Dallas Morning News, March 1, 2006.

“In Your Face,” D Magazine, July 2006

Phillips, Michael. The Fire This Time: The Battle Over Racial, Regional and Religious Identities in Dallas, Texas, 1860-1990 (Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 2002)

Phillips, Michael, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006)

White Metropolis website, [1]