The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925. (Book Reviews).

The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925. By Mia Bay. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. viii, 288. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-19-5132279-3; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-19-510045-X.)

In the nineteenth century the idea of race became an awful morass. African Americans could not avoid mucking around in that theoretical swamp. Although she never forgets that nineteenth-century blacks were more sinned against than sinning, Mia Bay has little patience with black racialism. In her words, "the story of black racial thought in the nineteenth century is in a sense a story defining the limits of what a people can be made to believe about themselves" (p. 220). She is trenchant and insightful in her exhaustive documentary survey of nineteenth-century statements on whites and race by African Americans famous and obscure, high and low, lettered and unlettered. But if part of her goal is, as she says, "Desegregating American Racial Thought" (p. 3), one might question her for framing this study of a reactive "black mind" in essentially segregated terms. Her claim that, "by and large," no historian but her has yet examined early African American racial thought is overstated (p. 220), and she herself may romanticize the thinking of slaves and unlettered freedpeople on the subject. Still, her main thesis absolutely stands: that during the nineteenth century African American intellectuals increasingly accepted and rationalized race. They presented whites as sinful, aggressive, and bloody-minded, as compared to racially gentle, moral, and redemptive blacks.

Bay rejects the idea of a productive, useful place for an "anti-racist racism," to use Sartre's words (p. 224). This idea would have black expressions of black racial superiority as a dialectical negation meant to counteract the effects of white racism and create the possibility for a raceless future. Bay grants that nineteenth-century African American racial chauvinism was part irony and part negation: she knows that most seeming black chauvinists in the nineteenth century also expressed profound faith in human unity and universal equality. Yet for her, once blacks theorized race in any way the damage was done, since in her view, "the concept of race is virtually inseparable from the idea of a hierarchy among the races" (p. 225). Bay shows that at the moment early-nineteenth-century African Americans like David Walker, John Russwurm, or Hosea Easton first presented blacks as both different and equal, meaningfully black and fully human, they began to make invidious racial comparisons favoring themselves. Then as the slavery controversy escalated (and with it white claims that blacks--supposedly lewd, stupid, and ugly by nature--were not truly human), these invidious black racial comparisons hardened into an ideological pattern that made virtue out of necessity. Blacks like Henry Highland Garnet, Martin Delany, and others redefined manhood and humanity in terms of their own supposedly religious, moral, long-suffering, even "feminine" nature, contrasted to conquest-mad, predatory whites. Social Darwinism and white supremacism after emancipation only further reinforced this tendency.

Was black racial thought really so reactive at birth, or is Bay's stress on black reactiveness the product of her hostility to race and her paradoxically segregated approach? Where Bay sees black racialism as reactive and contingent, she has white racism as the prime mover, even an unstoppable juggernaut. Why take black race thinking as contested and white as given? Bay notes the parallels between black thought and what George Fredrickson identified as the gendered "romantic racialism" of antislavery whites like Harriet Beecher Stowe (p. 72). But Bay does not ask if blacks might have influenced Stowe, even though she herself shows that Walker, Russwurm, and especially Easton romanticized and feminized blackness more than a decade before Stowe did. In the first part of her book, Bay uses the label "black ethnology" as an indicator of how blacks reacted to the racial science of whites, yet Walker, Easton, and many others theorized race years before white scientific racism got going--indeed, well before the term "ethnology" existed. And of course white ethnology reacted to radical abolitionism, which itself was spurred by black voices, as several historians have recently shown. A growing body of work on nineteenth-century African American thought attests that figures like Easton, Frederick Douglass, or the black doctor James McCune Smith were more self-conscious about the absurdities and paradoxes of race thinking than Bay allows. Bay might have grappled more with such recent scholarship, a literature that she does not adequately acknowledge.

Her mastery of the primary sources in nineteenth-century black thought, however, is unmatched. For the racial thought of slaves, Bay relies mostly on the WPA slave narratives, essentially interviews of ex-slaves conducted mostly by whites during the Great Depression, seventy years after emancipation. Acknowledging the limits of such sources, Bay still stresses how the ex-slaves reiterated their own humanity, condemned whites not as a racial group but as people corrupted by power, and utterly repudiated white paternalist ideology. "Identifying not with their masters' dependent children but with their masters' four-legged chattel, ex-slaves remembered being fed like pigs, bred like hogs, sold like horses, driven like cattle, worked like dogs, and beaten like mules" (p. 119). Bay's unschooled blacks were sure that many whites would roast in hell. Yet for Bay, since survival as a slave or as a sharecropper could depend on distinguishing among sympathetic, indifferent, or hateful whites and between trustworthy and untrustworthy blacks, ordinary black folk did not as a rule lump all whites or all blacks together as intrinsically good or bad. Bay assails Eugene Genovese's famous interpretation of slavery as a warped, exploitive paternalism (pp. 135-36), but her findings may support Genovese's basic point about black culture: that everyday experience under slavery meant that blacks had to forego strong racial nationalism (much less cross-racial class identification with poor whites) in favor of dealing with one another and whites as individuals.

Bay concludes by showing how early-twentieth-century black intellectuals eagerly adopted the cultural and relativist critique of biological racism pioneered by anthropologist Franz Boas. As black migration northward created large urban black communities and new, non-ironic forms of chauvinism like that of Marcus Garvey or W. D. Fard, many blacks used Boas to stop playing the nineteenth-century ethnological game they could not win. I wonder if the culture concept has really been a panacea: it has not ended but only somewhat transformed American racialism, black and white. Perhaps there never has been an active "white mind" and a reactive "black mind" but instead an encompassing, cross-racial debate that defies description and analysis in terms of the conventional axes of racism versus culture, white versus black, that underlies Bay's important work.

BRUCE DAIN
University of Utah