Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments Like all books, this book has its own history. As World War II drew to a close in Europe, I was a twenty-one-year-old soldier on the Rhine. A group of us were listening to the radio one night and we heard “Lord Haw Haw,” a Nazi commentator with an elegant British accent. He reported on some race riots in the United States and gave them a white supremacist spin. In our Jim Crow army, his words hit home with some listeners and we started arguing. Some said that blacks were getting out of hand. Harmony was restored when we tuned to an American commentator who said nothing about race and gave an upbeat version of the news. But it was the argument that I remembered. Later, when I was a student and aspiring historian, the question of race somehow informed everything I wrote. It seemed the dark counterpoint to the traditional narrative of American history. By the late 1960s, the book of record on the subject was Winthrop D. Jordan’s White over Black. To me it said that racial prejudice, like sin, was a part of human nature, certainly the nature of white people. I did not believe this. But I had already discovered that it is easier to shoot down somebody else’s argument than to come up with a better one. I rashly decided that while Jordan and others had described racial prejudice, I would explain it—how historically it came about. If racism was indeed a universal human flaw, as some writers seemed to think, I would have to look for manifestations of it in ancient times and worldwide . The literature was staggering, much of it in languages I could barely read or didn’t know at all. Fortunately, my son, Daniel G. Evans, strong in languages, helped me. Still it seemed that I was trying to drink the ocean. At one point, I was about to give up when Edmund S. Morgan sent me an encouraging response to some rough writing that I had showed him. I also received early encouragement from Immanuel Wallerstein, Moses Finley, and Charles Verlinden. But the project only took real shape in Timothy Breen’s National Endowment for the Humanities seminar in 1978. In 1980, the American Historical Review published an early part of my project as an article, “From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the ‘Sons of Ham.’” That gave me momentum. Later, I presented a paper to the Southern Historical Association, a rough projection of how I thought the racial system developed in the Americas. The comments of the panelists, David Brion Davis , George Fredrickson, and Carl N. Deglar, were sharp and insightful, and I came away smarter and encouraged. My project further matured in Orlando Patterson’s National Endowment for the Humanities seminar at Harvard. My student assistant, Todd Menzing, later a history professor himself, read several generations of the manuscript; and my student Ursula Markham, later assistant editor of Central European History, gave valuable criticism. The faculty and students of the Cal Poly, Pomona, chapter of Phi Alpha Theta allowed me to try out fragments of my project at our meetings. My colleagues David Levering, Anthony Brundage, David Smith, John Moore, Joseph Block, Ralph Schafer, William Smith, John Lloyd, Lydia Gans, and Saul Landau read parts or all of the work and offered suggestions. Our history department arranged my teaching schedule so as to give me unfragmented time to write, and it also allowed me more than my share of the department’s travel funds. In order to make the project more manageable and reduce it to a more publishable length, I eventually accepted the advice of Otto H. Olsen, who over the years kept up with my project, to restrict it to the American racial system. Later, I also took the advice of Brian Kelly, who thoroughly critiqued the manuscript, to compress the chapters dealing with the Old World and Latin America. Latin America, with its shared history of racial slavery, provided an illuminating counterexample to the way racial ideology unfolded in the United States. I learned about the different way race played out in these countries from my colleagues Donald Castro and José Vadi, who read and criticized part of the manuscript. I observed Latin American racial patterns firsthand during vacations spent in Puerto Rico and Brazil, in Afro-Mexican villages on the Costa Chica of Mexico, and in the Afro...