The white image in the black mind: African American ideas about white people, 1830-192

This dissertation examines African-American ideas about white racial character and destiny in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In examining black racial thought, this work also explores the extent to which black Americans accepted or rejected nineteenth-century notions about innate racial characteristics. The dissertation incorporates black perspectives from both the writings of black intellectuals and the testimony of unlettered African-American slaves and freedpeople. The first half of the dissertation examines the nineteenth-century African-American discussion of ethnology--the era's "science" of human races. We find that while black thinkers devoted themselves to defending the equal status of black people in the human family, they did not always argue that the races were identical. Instead, they offered revisionist assessments of both races that went beyond upholding the equity of the races to argue that the character of the Anglo-Saxon race compared unfavorably with the better nature of their own race. The second half of the dissertation explores the ideas about white people that emerge in the Federal Works Project Administration slave narrative collection, and other slave sources. This investigation reveals that these witnesses of slavery saw the interests and allegiances of white and black people to be quite distinct, and saw white people to be distinguished, above all, by the superior social and economic power that accompanied their whiteness. The final chapter of the dissertation traces the changes in black racial ideology between 1900 and 1925. These years saw black intellectuals welcome the slow demise of scientific racism in the American social science, and reconfigure their own ideas to emphasize culture rather than race as the arbitrator of human differences. Yet the same period also gave rise to a variety of new black separatists ideologies which emphasized race as an organic and divinely ordained distinction between human beings. The dissertation concludes that African-American struggles to redefine the character of the white race, while defending the character of their own race, should be understood as more than just "reverse racism." African-American ideas about white people chronicle the history of this group's intellectual resistance to racism.