This history book on race may be dated (1968), but it has endured without much controversy. White Over Black, by Winthrop D. Jordan, analyzes the history of Anglo-American attitudes toward black slaves during 17th and 18th century America. While Jordan's underlying question is simple, his thesis is not, as the book is over 600 pages of encyclopedic detail. On first glance the book may be dated (we now use the term African American instead of Negro). But it is still, as the publisher University of North Carolina Press states, "the definitive work on the history of race relations in America." Furthermore, "every book published to this day on slavery builds on his {Jordan} work; all are judged in comparison to it; none has surpassed it." Noted early American historian Gordon S. Wood calls White Over Black "one of the most important historical works of the past 40 years, contributing to the cultural shift in white thinking that made possible the election of Barack Obama." White Over Black has so many details, but Jordan argues that racism toward Africans began in the fifteenth century, when European nations (principally Portugal and Spain) started to expand into America and Africa. Europeans believed that Africans descended from one or several of the four sons of Ham (whom God had cursed in the Bible) and all their descendants bore the color black. This way of thinking carried down all the way to the late eighteenth century, when one pamphleteer in Philadelphia wrote in 1773 that blacks were descended from Ham and "a race of men devoted to slavery." Thus, when English colonists in Jamestown, Virginia met the first "twenty Negars" in 1619, they had already acquired a racist attitude toward Africans, leading Virginians to adopt the "unthinking decision" commencing the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Blacks were part of a "Chain of Being" that relegated them in place in society. At the same time white Americans debated blacks' intellectual abilities and skin color, they also sought to explain the presence of another subjugated people: Native Americans. White attitudes began to change during the American Revolution as freedom and liberty became questioned, but slavery endured until the Civil War. Jordan's book has had a tremendous impact on American historiography. Seven years later Edmund S. Morgan published his seminal work American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (which I and countless other history students read in college), building on Jordan's groundbreaking text. White Over Black was the first academic book to acknowledge that Thomas Jefferson had an affair with slave Sally Hemmings and Jefferson's contradictions as a slave owner and writer of the Declaration of Independence while maintaining negative views of African Americans and their role in the new United States. However, some readers might find White Over Black's sheer size to be overwhelming. Instead, they might like to read Jordan's abridged version The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). Jordan, Winthrop D., White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina Press, 1968. TS
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CategoriesAuthorTom Schmidt lives in Prescott Valley, AZ. Archives
October 2018
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October 2018
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