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

ISBN-13: 9780195132793 / Angielski / Miękka / 2000 / 296 str.

Mia Bay

Opis

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.

Recenzje

An important and timely investigation of African American conceptions of race from the Revolutionary era to the 1920s ... Its scope is also considerably broader than just a consideration of African American ideas about whites, the author having much to say about white racism, self-conceptions of black identity, and race relations in general