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BOOK REVIEWS The Bfock Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. By George M. Fredrickson. (New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Pp. xiii, 343. $10.00.) George M. Fredrickson's The Black Image in the White Mind continues the analysis of white attitudes toward the Negro begun by Winthrop Jordan in White Over Bhck. It is a remarkably dispassionate and perceptive treatment of the complex pattern of nineteenth-century American race-thinking. In addition, the work benefits from a conciseness and clarity sometimes lacking in the Jordan study. Fredrickson's principal theme is the development of racism—defined as "a rationalized pseudoscientific theory positing the innate and permanent inferiority of nonwhites"—from its emergence in the early nineteenth century to its peak of influence and appeal in the decades prior to World War I. According to Fredrickson, racist ideology, with its open and explicit assertion of black inferiority, emerged in the 1830's in reaction to abolitionist arguments in favor of racial equality. The new "science" of ethnology strengthened the racist assault on Enlightenment theories of environmentalism and a common human nature; and, paradoxically , so did the democratic and egalitarian aspirations of white Americans—of southerners who advocated a "Herrenvolk democracy," and of "frustrated and deprived groups in the North" who found in the racist ideology "a way to maintain, against all evidence to the contrary, an image of themselves as equal participants in American society." The failure of Reconstruction was both a result of and contributor to the growth of racism. Thus Fredrickson points out that "the operative Northern concept of equality was in fact doubly flawed in its application to the Negro: it gave prior sanction to social and economic inequalities which were likely to result from what was in fact—if not in theory—an unfair competition; and, in addition, it was compatible with a residual or hypothetical belief in racial inequality. . . . the prevailing belief in the probability of racial inferiority provided an ideological escape valve, a ready explanation for future Negro failures which would not call the bourgeois ideology of 'self-help' and 'equal opportunity' into question." Darwinism provided the final impetus behind the development of the extreme racism characteristic of the turn of the century by appearing to provide a scientific basis for deeply rooted ideas of black degeneracy and impending extinction. If "hard" racism served as the dominant racial ideology of nineteenthcentury Americans, it did not go unchallenged. Fredrickson reveals the 56 BOOKREVIEWS57 dynamic character of racism in a consideration of "countertendencies" within racist thinking, such as the "romantic racialism" of the pre-Civil War period and the "new paternalism" of the New South. The latter helped to shape a form of "accommodationist racism" which existed alongside "competitive racism" during the period 1890 to 1914 and appealed primarily to Progressive intellectuals and politicians. In the course of his study, Fredrickson sheds new light on a number of historical issues related to the development of racism. He regards as "doubtful" the argument that aristocratic proslavery theorists such as Fitzhugh and Hughes "produced a coherent world view that placed the South as a whole on the road to accepting a reactionary class ideology as opposed to a modern type of race ideology." Challenging William Stanton's thesis that ethnological doctrines were peripheral to the defense of slavery and were largely rejected by southern opinion, Fredrickson argues that ethnologists like Gliddon, Nott, and Morton "welcomed and even encouraged a proslavery application" of their views and that though the pluralist hypothesis was initially shocking, it "rapidly achieved considerable popularity in intellectual and political circles." Fredrickson also lends support to the view that extreme racism tended to foster an anti-imperialist rather than an imperialist position, and points to "a mutually reinforcing relationship" between the ideology of expansion and the accommodationist form of racism. Readers familiar with Fredrickson's first book, The Inner Civil War, will find in this his second work the same penetrating analysis and skillful organization. The Bhck Image in the White Mind is an indispensable study for all students of American culture. Anne C. Loveland Louisiana State University An Unsettled People: Social Order and Disorder in American...

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