X INTRODUCTION cerns and pressures of the 1960s, a decade that aroused much scholarly concern with the ideological origins of contemporary injustices.

This book was one of a number of studies of the sixties and early seventies that reflected an intense historical and socialscientific preoccupation with the devastating effects of racism on American society, past and present. When it came out in 1971, the civil-rights movement of the 1960s had run its course, with results that were disappointing to those who had anticipated the full triumph of racial egalitarianism; the urban riots of the last half of the decade strongly implied that many blacks were disillusioned with the integrationist reformism of the early to middle sixties, an implication that was made explicit by the rise of black power and black nationalist ideologies. Among liberal whites there was either a sense of despair about race relations or a decisive shift of attention to other issues, especially to the war in Vietnam. The Black Image in the White Mind reflected the mood of frustration and pessimism about black-white relations that was particularly strong among those who had identified fervently with the civil-rights movement. One reviewer described the book as" somber," and others noted its compatibility with black nationalist views on the enduring power of racism in American life. The undeniably somber concluding paragraphs and the tendency throughout to find white-supremacist warts on white racial “liberals" of the past were obviously influenced by a sense of the failure of American liberalism that had been exacerbated by the Vietnam war. I would be the last to deny, therefore, that the work was to some extent a product of its time, influenced by the concerns of that era. Indeed, throughout the book the method used of relating ideas to their social and political context would prevent me from claiming personal immunity from a degree of" presentism."