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

Mia Bay (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195132793 | ISBN-13: 978-0195132793 | Publication Date: February 10, 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

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 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (February 10, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195132793
• ISBN-13: 978-0195132793
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #738,567 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thank goodness for the WPA Slave Narratives, February 2, 2010

By 

Maxtone Witherball - See all my reviews

This review is from: The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (Paperback)

And thank goodness for the towering intellect of Mia Bay, who carefully draws what common threads can be drawn about ex-slaves' views of themselves and their white fellow citizens (the two conceptions are, Bay shows, intricately wound together) from the over 2,300 interviews WPA writers conducted between 1936 and 1938, and gleans brilliantly keen insights therefrom.

Only the middle section--constituting about a third--of Prof. Bay's book considers the white image in ordinary black folks' minds, however. The bulk deals with the thinking of black elites, primarily 19th-century ethnologists and early-20th-century anthropologists and religious leaders. Perhaps because this upper class was a minority of black Americans, and their beliefs and writings tended to be more abstract than the testimony of the ex-slaves, the first and last parts of Bay's work are a mite less gripping than the central one. That is not to say, though, that they are any less important, penetrating, or instructive. Just a wee bit drier.

All in all, I could not more heartily recommend this highly erudite, deeply discerning, and terrifically edifying tome. Few are the volumes I've been more impressed by or from which I've learned more.

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Black ideas about white racism, December 5, 2003

By 

Jeffrey Leach (Omaha, NE USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (Paperback)

Historian Mia Bay tackles the reverse side of the coin first forged by George Fredrickson in this examination of African-American thought concerning whites, "The White Image in the Black Mind." The transposition of Fredrickson's title for this book is appropriate as Bay traces the development of black responses to white racist ideology from nineteenth century African-American intellectuals to the emergence of messianic black sects in the early twentieth century. Such a comprehensive task was not easy since Bay had to tackle both black intellectual responses to racialist ideologies and the generally uneducated slave perceptions regarding institutional racism. Wisely deciding to approach these two diverse African-American responses by splitting them into separate sections, Bay then draws the two areas together by constructing an overarching argument about black responses to dominant white racial ideas. According to the author, both black intellectuals and slaves formed their opinions and theories about whites within a racial discourse constructed by whites. The book argues that blacks in the nineteenth century reduced white supremacist ideas about Africans to issues of social power, charging that whites maintained black inferiority in order to justify exploitation and abuse. In the early years of the twentieth century, changing conditions in American society and a new anthropological theory rejecting the biological concepts of race led to a significant divide among blacks concerning their views on racism. The intellectuals endorsed the new cultural theory of race while nascent black messianic sects founded by Marcus Garvey and other charismatic leaders embraced racist ideas that emulated the old white racial ideologies of the nineteenth century.

Black ethnographers such as Frederick Douglass and John McCune Smith developed a revisionist argument against white racism that operated within the confines of white racialist dialogue. These intellectuals adhered to a strict environmentalist position concerning racial categories, allowing for a temporary black inferiority while proposing arguments about future ascendancy for the African race. Moreover, according to these thinkers, one only needed look at ancient Egypt as proof of the potential for black merit because the ethnographers charged that black Africans once ruled that advanced land. Regrettably, these intellectuals fell prey to a contradiction in their arguments: while claiming an origin indistinguishable from that of all other peoples on the earth, the redefinition of Egypt as a touchstone for black excellence tacitly endorsed an idea of racial supremacy over white cultures, especially when the ethnographers placed these claims next to examples of the barbarity of Anglo-Saxons.

Slaves constituted the majority of the black population in the nineteenth century, but without an education and suffering under the yoke of illiteracy these men and women knew little about the ethnological debates occurring between educated whites and blacks. But the enslaved still recognized and responded to the racism they endured on a daily basis. According to Bay, slaves realized that southern whites saw them as little more than domesticated animals, but African-Americans never internalized this insulting comparison. Blacks in bondage often defined whites in terms of their economic and social power, rarely through color distinctions. Ultimately, enslaved blacks accepted certain distinctions between themselves and whites, one example being the issue of divine justice and how whites would suffer at the hands of God for their poor treatment of black slaves, but again these differences had little to do with the color of the skin.

Perhaps Bay's most important achievement with this book concerns her claims about how black arguments against white racialism fell, almost without exception, within the constraints of a racialized society. Black ethnographers argued against white theories on race by revising, not completely redefining, those ideas. Their thoughts did not bring about a paradigm shift in racial relations because of the embedded structures of racism within American society. It fell to Franz Boas and his new anthropological theories to bring about a sea change in American racial thought, and this shift did not occur in earnest until the early to mid twentieth century. In retrospect, black thinkers of this era deserve some credit for doing the best they could under the circumstances. Although these black scholars fell victim to an inconsistency in their theories that ultimately led to distinct forms of reverse racism, their arguments against white ideologies kept a flame of hope alive during the darkest days of oppression. If there had been nothing but silence from African-Americans during the nineteenth century, efforts at improved race relations today could look substantially different.

Bay concludes with an examination of Afrocentrism and its perceived origins in nineteenth century black ethnology. Afrocentrism argues that blacks are largely responsible for the development of mathematics, physics, philosophy, and other mental achievements. Afrocentrists generally agree that the Greeks stole most of their ideas from the ancient black Egyptians, and that individuals like Cleopatra and Jesus were black. Recently, academics have repudiated many of the claims of Afrocentrism, specifically Mary Lefkowitz in her book "Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History." This scholar convincingly argues that many Afrocentric theories originated from a Freemason text which borrowed heavily from an eighteenth century tract written by a French classicist. This author, who had no access to Egyptian sources and wrote his history before linguists learned how to translate hieroglyphics, constructed an alternate history of Egypt using fragmentary and questionable Greek and Roman sources. Bay unfortunately never examines this new scholarship on the origins of Afrocentrism. Doing so could pose some interesting questions about where black ethnographers got their ideas about the grandeur of an ancient black Egypt.