The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People, 1830-1925

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Summary: Black ideas about white racism
Review: Historian Mia Bay tackles the reverse side of the coin first forged by George Fredrickson in this examination of African-American thought concerning whites, "The White Image in the Black Mind." The transposition of Fredrickson's title for this book is appropriate as Bay traces the development of black responses to white racist ideology from nineteenth century African-American intellectuals to the emergence of messianic black sects in the early twentieth century. Such a comprehensive task was not easy since Bay had to tackle both black intellectual responses to racialist ideologies and the generally uneducated slave perceptions regarding institutional racism. Wisely deciding to approach these two diverse African-American responses by splitting them into separate sections, Bay then draws the two areas together by constructing an overarching argument about black responses to dominant white racial ideas. According to the author, both black intellectuals and slaves formed their opinions and theories about whites within a racial discourse constructed by whites. The book argues that blacks in the nineteenth century reduced white supremacist ideas about Africans to issues of social power, charging that whites maintained black inferiority in order to justify exploitation and abuse. In the early years of the twentieth century, changing conditions in American society and a new anthropological theory rejecting the biological concepts of race led to a significant divide among blacks concerning their views on racism. The intellectuals endorsed the new cultural theory of race while nascent black messianic sects founded by Marcus Garvey and other charismatic leaders embraced racist ideas that emulated the old white racial ideologies of the nineteenth century.

Black ethnographers such as Frederick Douglass and John McCune Smith developed a revisionist argument against white racism that operated within the confines of white racialist dialogue. These intellectuals adhered to a strict environmentalist position concerning racial categories, allowing for a temporary black inferiority while proposing arguments about future ascendancy for the African race. Moreover, according to these thinkers, one only needed look at ancient Egypt as proof of the potential for black merit because the ethnographers charged that black Africans once ruled that advanced land. Regrettably, these intellectuals fell prey to a contradiction in their arguments: while claiming an origin indistinguishable from that of all other peoples on the earth, the redefinition of Egypt as a touchstone for black excellence tacitly endorsed an idea of racial supremacy over white cultures, especially when the ethnographers placed these claims next to examples of the barbarity of Anglo-Saxons.

Slaves constituted the majority of the black population in the nineteenth century, but without an education and suffering under the yoke of illiteracy these men and women knew little about the ethnological debates occurring between educated whites and blacks. But the enslaved still recognized and responded to the racism they endured on a daily basis. According to Bay, slaves realized that southern whites saw them as little more than domesticated animals, but African-Americans never internalized this insulting comparison. Blacks in bondage often defined whites in terms of their economic and social power, rarely through color distinctions. Ultimately, enslaved blacks accepted certain distinctions between themselves and whites, one example being the issue of divine justice and how whites would suffer at the hands of God for their poor treatment of black slaves, but again these differences had little to do with the color of the skin.

Perhaps Bay's most important achievement with this book concerns her claims about how black arguments against white racialism fell, almost without exception, within the constraints of a racialized society. Black ethnographers argued against white theories on race by revising, not completely redefining, those ideas. Their thoughts did not bring about a paradigm shift in racial relations because of the embedded structures of racism within American society. It fell to Franz Boas and his new anthropological theories to bring about a sea change in American racial thought, and this shift did not occur in earnest until the early to mid twentieth century. In retrospect, black thinkers of this era deserve some credit for doing the best they could under the circumstances. Although these black scholars fell victim to an inconsistency in their theories that ultimately led to distinct forms of reverse racism, their arguments against white ideologies kept a flame of hope alive during the darkest days of oppression. If there had been nothing but silence from African-Americans during the nineteenth century, efforts at improved race relations today could look substantially different.

Bay concludes with an examination of Afrocentrism and its perceived origins in nineteenth century black ethnology. Afrocentrism argues that blacks are largely responsible for the development of mathematics, physics, philosophy, and other mental achievements. Afrocentrists generally agree that the Greeks stole most of their ideas from the ancient black Egyptians, and that individuals like Cleopatra and Jesus were black. Recently, academics have repudiated many of the claims of Afrocentrism, specifically Mary Lefkowitz in her book "Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History." This scholar convincingly argues that many Afrocentric theories originated from a Freemason text which borrowed heavily from an eighteenth century tract written by a French classicist. This author, who had no access to Egyptian sources and wrote his history before linguists learned how to translate hieroglyphics, constructed an alternate history of Egypt using fragmentary and questionable Greek and Roman sources. Bay unfortunately never examines this new scholarship on the origins of Afrocentrism. Doing so could pose some interesting questions about where black ethnographers got their ideas about the grandeur of an ancient black Egypt.