The New Black Intellectual History

Mia Bay. The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. viii + 288 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Mia Bay's The White Image in the Black Mind is a timely contribution to our understandings of the African-American past, with the potential to catalyze something we might call the new black intellectual history. The much-venerated spirit of the old hovers nearby, as indicated by the book's title. Students of nineteenth-century race relations are familiar with George Frederickson's path-breaking The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (1971); here we have the reverse. There is much to recommend this approach. Studies of race in institutional and community life have long shifted their focus to African Americans themselves, and recent work has done much to recast our understandings of gender and class in nineteenth-century black life. Intellectual history has tended to lag behind. If social historians are truly to comprehend the role of African-descended people in American history, they must grant as much import to the thinking of those people as to the thinking of those who oppressed them. White racial thought has long been an important consideration in studies of race and has been recently invigorated by studies of "whiteness." Our understandings of the process of racial construction will remain impoverished, however, should we fail to consider this process among the targets of white supremacy's hostility.

If The White Image in the Black Mind is to rise above the conceit of its title, however, it must also open up the history of race in new ways. One suspects that the book must be about more than the white image in the black mind, but about the nature of race itself. Here, the results are promising, if perhaps not fully realized. The first three chapters are concerned with black ethnology in the nineteenth century. "Educated" black thinkers responded to a shifting constellation of racial ideas increasingly dedicated to placing African-descended people among the lowest ranks of the human family, if not actually below it. From the ambivalent racial environmentalism of Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, American racial thought descended into arguments for the immutable, irreversible inferiority of blacks. The American Colonization Society argued against the possibility that blacks might be elevated to positions of civic equality, while proslavery biblical exegetes built a case for the divine ordination of black servitude. Toward the end of the antebellum period, the American School of racial thinkers lent the imprimatur of a burgeoning science to claims that blacks were actually the product of a separate creation. The Darwinism and social Darwinism of the post-Civil War period challenged the science behind polygenesis, yet in most ways actually strengthened its underlying case for white supremacy.

Throughout this section Bay proceeds much as an intellectual historian, considering black thinkers such as David Walker, Hosea Easton, James McCune Smith, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Alexander Crummell. These men tended to pursue a two-fold strategy. First, they defended the race from charges of innate inferiority by steadfastly asserting a radical environmentalism, which conceded blacks' temporary inferiority but attributed it to obstacles to "elevation" imposed by whites themselves. Second, they counter-attacked, relying on romantic racial conceptions and religious conviction to posit themselves as a gentle race that might redeem the world from rapacious Anglo-Saxonism.

The central tensions in black ethnology, Bay notes, were embedded in these dual claims. "Black ethnology emphasized the original unity of the human family without claiming that the races were identical," she writes (p. 42). This tension increased throughout the course of the century, as white thinkers drifted toward theories of race that posited blacks as irrevocably inferior to whites. As white racial thought became ever more essentialized, the elite blacks who responded to it increasingly evidenced a reliance...