Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O'Connor is the first book-length study of O'Connor's attitude towards race in her fiction and correspondence. It is also the first study to include controversial material from unpublished letters that reveals the complex and troubling nature of O'Connor's thoughts on the subject. O'Connor lived and did most of her writing in her native Georgia during the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights movement. In one of her letters, O'Connor frankly expresses her double-mindedness regarding the social and political upheaval taking place in the U.S. with regard to race: "I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral." Examination of her correspondence demonstrates that though O'Connor likely subscribed to the idea of racial equality, she was wary of desegregation, fearing the erosion of Southern culture and the disappearance of the code of manners that governed the relationships between African Americans and whites. This double-mindedness also manifests itself in O'Connor's fiction. Drawing on critical whiteness studies, Chapter 1 interrogates the concepts of race and whiteness O'Connor inherited and analyzes the ways in which O'Connor critiques the unjust racial practices of the South in her stories and other writings yet unconsciously upholds them. Chapter 2 explores O'Connor's ambivalence with regard to contemporary politics, analyzes her use of derogatory language to describe African Americans, and assesses the inconsistencies in her discussion of race in the stories and letters in light of speech act-theory. Chapter 3 considers the influence of theology and Catholicism on O'Connor's attitudes, demonstrating that O'Connor's radically theological vision and formation in a segregated Church shaped her ideas about race. Chapter Four takes its cue from Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark and examines the complex role played by "Africanist" presence, represented by powerful black bodies, in the construction of white consciousness in O'Connor's stories. Chapter Five explores the theme of thwarted communion between the races that preoccupies O'Connor in her fiction and correspondence. The study concludes that O'Connor's race-haunted writing serves as the literary incarnation of her uncertainty about the great question of her era and of her urgent need, despite considerable reluctance, to address the fraught relationship between the races.