The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 / Edition 1

by Mia Bay

Overview

How did African-American slaves view their white masters? As demons, deities or another race entirely? When nineteenth-century white Americans proclaimed their innate superiority, did blacks agree? If not, why not? How did blacks assess the status of the white race? Mia Bay traces African-American perceptions of whites between 1830 and 1925 to depict America's shifting attitudes about race in a period that saw slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, and urban migration.

Much has been written about how the whites of this time viewed blacks, and about how blacks viewed themselves. By contrast, the ways in which blacks saw whites have remained a historical and intellectual mystery. Reversing the focus of such fundamental studies as George Fredrickson's The Black Image in the White Mind, Bay investigates this mystery. In doing so, she uncovers and elucidates the racial thought of a wide range of nineteenth-century African-Americans—educated and unlettered, male and female, free and enslaved.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195132793
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/10/2000
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	9.27(w) x 6.14(h) x 0.78(d)
Lexile:	1610L (what's this?)

About the Author

Mia Bay is Assistant Professor of History and Co-Director of the Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University.

Table of Contents

Introduction:1. Desegregating American Racial Thought2. OverviewPart I: White People in Black EthnologyChapter 1: "Of One Blood God Created All The Nations Of Men": African-Americans Respond to the Rise of Ideological Racism, 1789-1830Chapter 2: The Redeemer Race and the Angry Saxon: Race, Gender, and White People in Antebellum Black EthnologyChapter 3: "What Shall We Do With The White People?": Whites in Postbellum Black ThoughtPart II: The Racial Thought of the SlavesIntroduction to Part IIChapter 4: "Us Is Human Flesh": The Racial Thought of the SlavesChapter 5: "Devils and Good People Walking De Road At De Same Time": White People in Black Folk ThoughtPart III: New Negroes, New Whites: Black Racial Thought in the Twentieth CenturyChapter 6: "A New Negro For A New Country": Black Racial Ideology, 1900-1925ConclusionNotesIndex

Editorial Reviews

With a title that makes an unveiled reference to George Fredrickson's classic The Black Image in the White Mind (1971), this study takes a long-overdue look at the other side of the coin. Aware that her task is more than just an inversion of Fredrickson's, Bay (history, Rutgers) explicitly addresses issues of methodology and sources in this carefully considered, thorough volume. African Americans, she notes, didn't always get to write down their own stories. As a result, she admits that she has had to rely heavily on records left by whites. She spends half of the book considering the Herculean efforts of a small group of black intellectuals to counteract white racist ideologies before and after the Civil War. But she also examines the complex racial ideologies of slaves, whose opinions she somehow manages to extract from the prejudicial writings of white observers and interviewers. Throughout, she demonstrates that, with a keen eye, a historian may learn much about the opinions of the unlettered. A worthy successor to earlier work on racial ideology, this book fills a major gap in the scholarship. For academic and larger public libraries.--Charles K. Piehl, Mankato State Univ., MN Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

"With a title that makes an unveiled reference to George Frederickson's classic The Black Image in the White Mind (1971), this study takes a long overdue look at the other side of the coin...Bay explicitily addresses issues of methodology and sources in this carefully considered, thorough volume...Throughout, she demonstrates that, with a keen eye, a historian may learn much about the opinions of the unlettered. A worthy successor to earlier work on racial ideology, this book fills a major gap in the scholarship."—Library Journal

"[Bay] explores the time-centered context that shaped the images slaves and freedmen formed of white people in the period before and following emancipation...An excellent work that relates the roots of race-centered ideology to their past precedents."—Booklist

"While many scholars have devoted a considerable amount of attention to the image of Black people in Western culture, very few have thought it important to examine the role that images of white people played in the Black cultural imagination. Mia Bay has done just this in this subtle and elegant study, a truly germinal contribution to American historiography."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research, Harvard University

"By revealing for the first time what blacks thought about whites in the era of slavery and segregation, this incisive work adds a whole new dimension to our understanding of black-white relations in American history. It is deeply researched, astute in its interpretation, and very readable."—George M. Fredrickson, Stanford University

"A meticulous and imaginative reconstruction of compelling chapters in African American cultural and intellectual history. Bay is equally at home in probing the responses of Black intellectuals to racist ethnology and in mining slave narratives for evidence of the complex views of white people developed by those for whom whiteness was most acutely experienced as a problem in everyday life."—David Roediger, University of Minnesota

"[Bay] addresses an important question about black thought, in the past and in the present. Why have so many black thinkers readily embraced notions of racial difference, when such ideas were not only the mainstay of white supremacy, but also philosophically damaging to the cause of equality?"—The New Republic

"A detailed and often insightful analysis of American racial thought."—Journal of American Ethnic History

"Trenchant and insightful...[An] exhaustive documentary survey."—Journal of Southern History

"Deeply researched, well crafted, and engagingly written work. It will long be considered important for broaching issues of central concern to all who study the black past."—Reviews in American History

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