Race In North America: Origin And Evolution Of A Worldview [Paperback]

Audrey Smedley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 11, 1993 | ISBN-10: 0813306221 | ISBN-13: 978-0813306223

Tracing the idea of race through three centuries of North American history, the author shows race to be a cultural construct - a folk worldview fabricated within English culture. The book offers a detailed insight into European and particularly English 18th- and 19th-century intellectual and popular beliefs about "race".

Editorial Reviews

Review

“In this fourth edition, Drs. Audrey Smedley and Brian Smedley describe, in a scholarly but widely accessible and engaging manner, the evolution of the concept of race and the way shifting views of the meaning of race have shaped North America. The book is an essential resource for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of race and race relations in North America.” —John F. Dovidio, Yale University

“Race in North America is an essential text for anyone who engages ‘race’ from the early modern period to the present. … Eminently suitable for a range of learners, from undergraduates to researchers, the book is critical to courses and writings on the ways in which race has been, and continues to be, socially constructed in the Anglo world.” —Laura A. Lewis, James Madison University

 

“This much anticipated new edition continues the global exploration of the roots of race and racism and reveals how structural racism maintains disparities in the modern age. Followers of the epistemology of race and racism will get a historically broader and detailed explanation of why we think about groups of people the way we do today.” —Janis Hutchinson, University of Houston

 

“Race in North America provides an excellent historical overview of how race came to be such a powerful social construct in the United States, and its continued significance in the life outcomes of people of color today. While grounded in research, the book is written in a manner that is well-suited for the casual reader as well as students and scholars interested in the subject of race.” —Maria-Elena Diaz, The University of Oklahoma

 

Praise for Previous Editions:

 

“I am absolutely devoted to this book. Over the years my students have often commented on how much it has changed their thinking and opened their eyes.”—Robyn Rosen, professor of history, Marist College

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Audrey Smedley is professor emerita of anthropology and African American studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Westview Press (March 11, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813306221
• ISBN-13: 978-0813306223
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,806,553 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Definitive work on race so far, July 30, 2010

By 

Herbert L Calhoun "paulocal" (Falls Church, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Race in North America: Origins and Evolution of a Worldview (Paperback)

Before this book, scholarship on the issue of race in the U.S. was already very high. As evidenced by W.E.B. Dubois' "Black Reconstruction in America;" Winthrop Jordan's "White Over Black;" Eugene Genovese's "Roll Jordan Roll;" and George Fredrickson's "White Supremacy," as well as his "The Black Image in the White Mind," and "The Arrogance of Race," just to name those at the top of my list, and several of which I have also reviewed on Amazon.com.

Yet, arguably, they all pale in comparison to this sweepingly complete study that finally gets to the heart of the concept of race as it is applied to Western as well as North American cultures. It is the author's ability to use as an analytic platform, her anthropological and historian's skills to get beyond the walls of America's internal cultural parameters to an "over-the-culture-horizon view," that separates this study from other equally fine studies on race. What results is not just an analytic study that is intellectually pristine, but also one that finally "gets the issue of race right." Put simply, Ms. Smedley is finally able to peel back this complex onion, one layer at a time, so that the reader can see how the whole messy affair was put together from the very beginning. The key is that she is able to untangle the complex interactive and dynamic elements that make the cultural matrix of "race" such a persistent and intractable phenomenon.

As she notes throughout the book, race has evolved as just one of several ways of perceiving, interpreting, and dealing with human differences. It was (and remains even today) a way of imposing order and understanding on the complex reality in which one group attempts to assert its dominance over others. Race thus came together in the minds of its inventors (16th and 17th century Europeans, mostly the Spaniards, and Portuguese, but eventually with the British decidedly in the lead) as a way of ordering and ranking humans in terms of their perceived differences.

A key part of that understanding is to appreciate (and then acknowledge) that "the need for such an ordering system" itself came prior to the very "physical differences" later used (after-the-fact) to justify the ordering. The physical differences later enlarged and exaggerated in order to make them appear natural and god-given, were simply ideological instrumentalities used to justify and rationalize the race-based hierarchical social ordering that resulted (and that in any case was its main intended purpose). Thus, although in the contemporary mind race is "assumed" to have a biophysical basis, in fact, it has always been a "socio-cultural" rather than a "biological" concept. Put simply, race is the "folk meaning" attached to differences by those on the North American continent who needed to enlarge such differences in order to justify their dominance over others. And here it is clear that by "others" we mean over indigenous Native American tribes and nations, and imported African slaves.

With the results of the Gnome Project in, there is now a consensus among scientists that race is little more than a socio-cultural invention with no consistent or measurable biological meaning. All of it's meaning thus is to be found wholly in the cultural and psychological realm. Underscoring this point, the author has said it yet another way: race is a "social fiction" bound up with the mystique of biological heredity and a belief that biophysical attributes such as skin color provide an ineradicable bonding to behavioral attributes used as the basis for dominance. And here we mean such behavioral attributes as moral, spiritual, and intellectual abilities. Together they signify a rigidity and the permanence of position and status within the American socio-economic ranking and order. Since the distinguishing attributes are based on what has universally been believed to be the unalterable and god-given reality of innate biological differences, the ideology of race has worked its way into being a worldview and indeed has become an almost universal cultural way of being -- at least this is so in the Western World.

However, before the 17th Century, the written record shows no evidence of,or reference to, a concept even remotely similar to that currently being used as "race." Westerners are alone in the contemporary practice of enlarging minor physical differences precisely to serve as markers to justify a color-coded hierarchical social ordering; and more importantly, to further advance the fiction that these "assumed biological differences" are inherited, and therefore are not only immutable but also have precise behavioral, moral, and intellectual consequences for society.

In one of her most cogent analyses, this author virtually proves that the ideology of racism preceded both the concept of race and slavery (at least as slavery was practiced in the New World). According to the voluminous sources she cites, there is little doubt that it was the British, through the inhumanity and brutality committed against the Irish (beginning towards the end of the Middle Ages), who invented, introduced and propagated the modern ideology of racism and it's primary instrumentality, the concept of race itself. With a great deal of assistance from Christianity, this ideology was transferred "in toto" from the "Old" to the "New World" where it has been applied with a new kind of British vengeance and brutality, first to Native Americans, and then eventually to imported African slaves.

The history written here is prodigiously researched, well documented, and written very tightly. It tells the most coherent story about race yet to be told.

For me, I guess it was too much to hope that the evolution of the psychological dimension of racism could also be dealt with here. But even without a discussion of the psychology dimension, the author has still made it crystal clear how and why the British ideology of race differs from that of Europe, South Africa and Brazil. For this and many other reasons, this book is altogether a monumental accomplishment and an award-winning contribution to social science scholarship. FIFTY STARS

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Socio-Cultural view of racism and it's origins, October 1, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Race In North America: Origin And Evolution Of A Worldview (Paperback)

Dr. Smedley is not only a wonderful teacher- but an excellent writer as well! In this book she summarizes the evolution of racism and traces it through the bonds of culture to how we percieve it today. It is very interesting, eye opening, though provoking reading! Excellent!!