He describes the “spiritual world” and experience of black identity in America, beginning with the role emancipation has played in their lives. As he states in his introduction: “I have written then what is meant to be not so much my autobiography as the autobiography of a concept of race, elucidated, magnified and doubtless distorted in the thoughts and ded which were mine.” Oxford: Oxford University, 2007.ĭuBois uses his own lived experience as the basis of an exploration of what he calls “a race concept.” Using themes of place, education, science and empire, and war, DuBois delineates the experiences and ideas that form the idea of race in the United States. While writing this historical text, no doubt to offer a counter-narrative to the prevailing history about this era, DuBois also offers a critique and caution of what he calls: “The Propaganda of History.”ĭusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward the Autobiography of a Race Concept Much of the book focuses on work and labor, as well as on democracy, property, and education. Provides a black-centered history of the critical twenty-year period, 1860-1880 after Emancipation, called Reconstruction. Focusing on the one-drop rule and laws around miscegenation, Davis explores the indistinct and oftentimes conflicting social and legal definitions surrounding race-across states in the US and among different countries-as defined by ancestry and lineage, blood and other biological myths, census data, as well as courts and legal documents. This book examines the rules, which varied across the US, but which came to define ideas of race, in particular blackness. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 1991. The book opens with: “Three separate histories collided in the Western Hemisphere half a millennium ago, and the American history began.” This reference is to the Native American, African, and European histories, all three of which, of course, contain a variety of cultures and histories within them, many of which are explored in this text. This website gives population figures and laws passed in Virginia during the colonial era.Īs his subtitle suggests, Countryman writes of the collision of different cultures and their disparate treatments that have created what we now know as America and Americans. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, “Slavery and the Law in Virginia,” Reality.” While these three arenas influenced one another, the argument of this book lies in the influential role anthropology played in changing concepts of race in America. In his own words, Bonilla-Silva “acknowledges that race, as other social categories such as class and gender, is constructed but insists that is has a Weaving in history, this sociological text uses anecdotes and analysis to dissect contemporary ideas of color-blindness and other rhetoric that attempts to protect white privilege and white supremacy. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States Tells the story of the British and American anthropologists and biologists who were instrumental in making this shift, as well as the ways in which this change in discourse affected the politics of racism. The idea of race as a natural and biological concept was replaced with the notion of race as cultural and political in the late 1930s, in large part, as a reaction to the racism of Nazi Germany. The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars. The first letter, addressed to his nephew, is particularly accessible and relevant to high school youth, and especially for black boys can serve as an entry point to politicization. , offers profound insight into his experience-and through it a lens into the Black American experience-through two letters. In the midst of the civil rights movement, Baldwin’s Du Bois and Franz Boas, “ideas of racial inferiority were supplanted by notions of racial equality in law, science, and public opinion.” Baker examines how, with leadership from W.E.B. From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954.īerkeley: University of California, 1998.įocusing primarily on the first half of the 20Ĭentury, Baker explores the shifting discourse of race during this era.
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