Customer Reviews

The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940

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This is a really well-written book! The author does a nice job of balancing his interest in the lives of four specific people with the big picture. With a very big picture! I especially liked the equal attention paid to the stories of white America and black America, not to mention everything in between or outside of these. And the section on Jean Toomer is so very sad and very moving.

This is an exceptional addition to the body of work that explores the idea of race as a social and ideological construct in American history. In four tightly argued essays, Guterl deftly analyzes the contributions (and contradictions) of Madison Grant, W.E.B. Dubois, Jean Toomer, and Daniel Calahan as a viable window to the problems inherent in the color line. This work is a welcome (and highly sophisticated) addition to the field of whiteness studies (joining such works as Matthew Frye Jacobson's *Whiteness of a Different Color*, George Lipsitz's *Possessive Investment in Whiteness* and of course, David Roediger's *Wages of Whiteness*) as well as the growing body of work on scientific racism (one thinks of Lee Baker's work, *From Savage to Negro*) and race biography (following in the footsteps of his mentor David Levering Lewis). This book makes a number of promises and certailny delivers the goods. It is a wonderfully written book that weaves personal and historical information in a seamless study. I highly recommend it!!!!

Interesting study of the construct of race and how little and how very much the definitions matter.