White Image in Black Mind : African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 - 00 edition

Bay, Mia : Rutgers the State University of New Jersey Central Office

Mia Bay is Assistant Professor of History and Co-Director of the Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University.

''With a title that makes an unveiled reference to George Frederickson's classic The Black Image in the White Mind (1971), this study takes a long overdue look at the other side of the coin....Bay explicitily addresses issues of methodology and sources in this carefully considered, thorough volume....Throughout, she demonstrates that, with a keen eye, a historian may learn much about the opinions of the unlettered. A worthy successor to earlier work on racial ideology, this book fills a major gap in the scholarship.''

--Library Journal

''[Bay] explores the time-centered context that shaped the images slaves and freedmen formed of white people in the period before and following emancipation....An excellent work that relates the roots of race-centered ideology to their past precedents.''

--Booklist

''While many scholars have devoted a considerable amount of attention to the image of Black people in Western culture, very few have thought it important to examine the role that images of white people played in the Black cultural imagination. Mia Bay has done just this in this subtle and elegant study, a truly germinal contribution to American historiography.''

--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research, Harvard University

''By revealing for the first time what blacks thought about whites in the era of slavery and segregation, this incisive work adds a whole new dimension to our understanding of black-white relations in American history. It is deeply researched, astute in its interpretation, and very readable.''

--George M. Fredrickson, Stanford University

''A meticulous and imaginative reconstruction of compelling chapters in African American cultural and intellectual history. Bay is equally at home in probing the responses of Black intellectuals to racist ethnology and in mining slave narratives for evidence of the complex views of white people developed by those for whom whiteness was most acutely experienced as a problem in everyday life.''

--David Roediger, University of Minnesota

Oxford University Press Web Site, February, 2001

Introduction:

1. Desegregating American Racial Thought
2. Overview

Part I: White People in Black Ethnology

Chapter 1: ''Of One Blood God Created All The Nations Of Men'': African-Americans Respond to the Rise of Ideological Racism, 1789-1830
Chapter 2: The Redeemer Race and the Angry Saxon: Race, Gender, and White People in Antebellum Black Ethnology
Chapter 3: ''What Shall We Do With The White People?'': Whites in Postbellum Black Thought

Part II: The Racial Thought of the Slaves
Introduction to Part II

Chapter 4: ''Us Is Human Flesh'': The Racial Thought of the Slaves
Chapter 5: ''Devils and Good People Walking De Road At De Same Time'': White People in Black Folk Thought

Part III: New Negroes, New Whites: Black Racial Thought in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 6: ''A New Negro For A New Country'': Black Racial Ideology, 1900-1925

Conclusion
Notes
Index