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

Mia Bay. The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Important 19th-century black thinker James W.C. Pennington once described the dialectical struggle between master and slave as "a war of minds." As intellectual historian Mia Bay demonstrates in this well-written analysis of black attitudes towards whites, a vital battle within that war was the increasingly vigorous assertion of black humanity by free and ex-slave blacks, as well as by the slaves themselves. Waged within an increasingly white supremacist society, this critical intellectual offensive probed and also valorized blackness while simultaneously analyzing whiteness (see, for example, Winthrop Jordan's study of the earlier period in White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 [1968] and George M. Frederickson's The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 [1972]). In her highly readable analysis of this offensive, Bay insightfully maps the various, complicated, and at times ironic and paradoxical ways in which ordinary as well as elite blacks thought about whites. Speaking with moral authority and the insight of experience, ordinary and often unlettered blacks forged compelling critiques of the racist foundations of white power and privilege. Educated blacks, however, used a rhetorical admixture of 19th-century environmentalism joined with racial determinism and early 20th-century cultural relativism joined with liberal environmentalism--all reigning intellectual discourses of the time--in their compelling critiques.

The work's trajectory proceeds from roughly the antebellum emergence of militant black abolitionism through the DuBoisian and Garveyite cultural politics of the early 20th century. Throughout, Bay cogently argues that together the imperatives of the long-term black freedom struggle in concert with the exigencies of the particular historical moment (i.e., Emancipation) have fundamentally shaped the contours and development of African-American thinking about whites. "Black ideas about white people," Bay thus perceptively concludes, "are inextricably entwined in this history of African-American intellectual resistance to racism" (8).

This is a most significant work in both African-American and American intellectual history. As historians have given exclusive attention to white attitudes toward blacks, they have neglected the critical historical issue of black attitudes toward whites. Similarly, while historians have given considerable attention to elite black discourses, there is scant historical work for this period on what cultural historian Lawrence W. Levine has characterized as "Afro-American Folk Thought" (Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom [1977]). This study offers path-breaking and thoughtful discussions of vernacular as well as elite black interrogations of whiteness. As a result, this work provides a much-needed, refreshing, and illuminating black narrative on whites and racism to the historical literature on American racial thought.

What emerges is a well-conceived three-part argument. "White People in Black Ethnology," the first section, plots how a series of key black thinkers used concurrent racial science (and pseudoscience) and humanistic authorities--especially religious ones--to dissect white racial character. These thinkers concluded that in crucial ways blacks were superior to whites, notably morally and spiritually.

Next, "The Racial Thought of the Slaves" offers a highly original and probing portrait of slave and ex-slave ideas about race. Several features of this section stand out. In an especially illuminating discussion, Bay observes that whereas elite black thinkers "often attributed the status and wealth of white people to the rapacious, acquisitive character of the Anglo-Saxon race, unlettered African-Americans confronted the power and privilege of the white world as a mysterious and troubling phenomenon" (165). Equally revealing is the ubiquity of the animal husbandry trope--the dehumanizing equation of blacks with work animals--as a vernacular representation of the master-slave relationship in particular and of white-black race relations in general. As blacks represented whites during slavery as seeing...