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The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 ReviewFredrickson defines racism as a reasoned theory that posits the "innate and permanent inferiority of nonwhites" (xvii). He argues that racism in some form has plagued American thought throughout the nation's history, and in this volume he traces the different forms it has taken in the period from 1817 to 1914. He thus arranges his study chronologically, progressing methodically through the nineteenth century. Fredrickson begins by showing that the underlying arguments for the colonization movements were based on the recognition of white prejudice in American society. Colonizationitsts argued that black people would never have the opportunity to integrate into the society because of deeply ingrained racial prejudices. The abolitionists answered this position by arguing that whites should be able to overcome their prejudice and achieve the ideal of Christian brotherhood. Then, as more abolitionists based their attack on moral grounds, proponents of slavery searched for ideological justification for their position and argued for the innate racial inequality and permanent inferiority of the black slaves. From this emerged a Herrenvolk democracy in which the creation of a permanent underclass (slaves in this case) protected the radical equality of the higher class (whites). Scientific theories emerge in the 1840s and 1850s to support the position of the innate inferiority of the slaves and gave rise to the theory of polygenesis which holds that only whites descended from Adam, while God created blacks as an inferior species. Romantic racialism also emerged at the same time moving focus from seeming social and intellectual deficiencies of black people and emphasizing their lightheartedness and willingness to serve, qualities of natural Christians. This position finds its fullest expression in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.Thus, in the 1860s the more conservative romantic racialists pushed again for colonization, arguing that these "natural Christians" could only flourish back in their native Africa. The ideal of white America had again become a racially homogeneous society. Frederickson argues that Reconstruction was therefore merely a political tool because the attitudes of racial superiority prevailed among whites. This renewed racial superiority then gave rise to a sense of paternalism in the period from 1877 to 1890. At the end of the nineteenth century Darwinian thinking came together with racial superiority to spawn the idea that black people, as the weaker race would be wiped out in this country. Finally, he concludes with a chapter on the accommodation that flows from progressivism which manifests itself as a return to a paternalism and a sense of treating black people with a modicum of decency as the "white man's burden."
Frederickson gives flesh to the above sketch of this argument in his well-documented and carefully nuanced book. The work is an excellent intellectual history of the phenomenon of racism in the United States.The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 Overview
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