Title: White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812
Author: Winthrop Jordan
Year of Publication: 1968
Thesis:
Racism a lot more intractable than previously thought as the roots were deep in the 16th century and developed from European views on Blackness [this really develops from even earlier, but I know this because a friend taught me a little about Medieval Sign Theory]; Jordan charts how these ideas traversed the Atlantic and culminated in Jefferson's proto-scientific racism exemplified in Notes on Virginia. A brief possibility during the American Revolution for emancipation was sublimated by white fears of rebellion, which is essentially what is veiled in Jefferson's writings.
Time: 1550-1812
Geography: England/U.S.
Organization:
Foreword by Christopher Leslie Brown
Foreword by Peter H. Wood
Preface
Acknowledgments
PART ONE. GENESIS 1550-1700
I. First Impressions: Initial English Confrontation with Africans
II. Unthinking Decision: Enslavement of Negroes in America to 1700
3) The Concept of Slavery
- Slaves could be servants, but not vice-versa. Captivity also a distinguishing feature. Points out that even prior to sequitur ventrum slavery thought as hereditary.
10) Racial Slavery: From Reasons to Rationale
- Difference in color, appearance, language. religion, etc. all form part of the racial slavery line
- Christianity and whiteness (and here and there Englishness) merge together by 1700; by 1680 the term white becomes commonplace & overlaps the previous (95)
PART TWO. PROVINCIAL DECADES 1700-1755
III. Anxious Oppressors: Freedom and Control in a Slave Society
IV. Fruits of Passion: The Dynamics of Interracial Sex
V. The Souls of Men: The Negro's Spiritual Nature
VI. The Bodies of Men: The Negro's Physical Nature
6) Mulatto Offspring in a Biracial Society
- Laws in 1600s making sure that biracial children still enslaved.
- "What the matter came down to, of course, was visibility. Anyone whose appearance discern- ibly connected him with the Negro was held to be such. The line was drawn with regard to practicalities rather than logic. Daily practice supplied logic enough." (168)
VII. Self Scrutiny in the Revolutionary Era
PART FOUR. SOCIETY AND THOUGHT 1783-1812
VIII. The Imperatives of Economic Interest and National Identity
IX. The Limitations of Antislavery
X. The Cancer of Revolution
XI. The Resulting Pattern of Separation
PART FIVE. THOUGHT AND SOCIETY 1783-1812
XII. Thomas Jefferson: Self and Society
- Hates slavery (not enough to stop profiting from it) but is anti-Black
- "While he recognized the condition of slaves as "miserable," the weight of Jefferson's concern was reserved for the malevolent effects of slavery upon masters." (433)
- See his quote on prejudices and complaints bound to tear up the country (these are his fears of rebellion) (436) then ideas about Black people's innate inferiority.
- This is key: "With nearly audible relief he remodeled an anti-Negro diatribe into a scientific hypothesis, thus effectively depersonalizing a matter which was for him obviously of some personal importance." (439)
- Moral sense (developed) but reasoning a problem (439) - also key - this is the root of all complaints about Black protest.
- Environmentalism ("nurture") becomes an argument of the anti-slavery opposition to Jefferson.
- Argues that paradoxes in the Constitution were more important for anti-slavery folks than responding to Jefferson (446)
- Benjamin Rush becomes an advocate for Black achievement, (449, 451)
- There is an assumption in Jefferson, even if we get past his incongruous ideas about Black "inferiority" that elites should rule.
- Much on Jefferson's views about the passsions of African Americans. (Jefferson, the adulterer, who does the medieval thing of projecting his "sin" onto women as temptresses).
"Moreover, Jefferson failed to offer even a hint concerning the Negro male's supposedly large organ, and though this failure may have stemmed from an under- standable reluctance to broach the matter publicly, he gave no
suggestion even indirectly of the sexual aggressiveness of Negro men; nor did he ever do so privately. In fact—and it is an arresting one upon re-reading the passage—his previously quoted remarks concerning beauty and breeding had reference not to Negro men, nor to Negroes in general, but, in implicit yet highly specific fash- ion, to Negro women!" (464)
- Discusses Hemings/Jefferson as a representation of perceived threat to whiteness through miscegenation.
- Jefferson defends Native Americans using African Americans as inferior comparative (478)
XIII. The Negro Bound by the Chain of Being
XIV. Erasing Nature's Stamp of Color
XV. Toward a White Man's Country
Epilogue
XVI. Exodus
Type:
Intellectual/Social
Methods:
Sources:
Mostly public: statues, (see Essay on Source, beginning 587), travel narratives, historical accounts, personal diaries & letters, anti-slavery tracts,
Historiography:
Racialized slavery pushed back to 16th century
Keywords:
Themes: Guilt - see p.431 - referring to enslaved people as servants. Not sure this is guilt
Critiques:
"If, however, an infusion of white blood had been regarded as elevating status, then the more white blood the higher the social rank. Had such ranking existed, descriptive terminology would have been required with which to handle shades of distinction. Yet no such vocabulary developed in the continental colonies." (168) <-- Despite this lack of vocabulary there was no difference? "Fancy" trade?
"In addition to this statutory homogenization of all persons with Negro ancestry, mulattoes do not seem to have been accorded higher status than Negroes in actual practice. Whatever the case in other countries or in later centuries, mulattoes seem generally to have been treated no better than unmixed Africans. The diaries, letters, travel accounts, and newspapers of the period do not indicate any pronounced tendency to distinguish mulattoes from Negroes, any feeling that their status was higher and demanded different treat- ment. These sources give no indication, for instance, that mulattoes were preferred as house servants or concubines. There may well have been a relatively high proportion of mulattoes among manumitted slaves, but probably this was owing to the not unnatural desire of some masters to liberate their own offspring. It seems likely that
the relatively few mulattoes given favored treatment were favored for literally paternal reasons." (169) <-- curious if this has been revised
"The point here was, of course, not that mulattoes were in fact superior to Negroes, but that they alone thought they were. Appar- ently mulattoes thought white blood to be a source of social eleva- tion, a proposition which whites (and Negroes as well) were quick to deny. White blood secured one's status only if undiluted." (169) <-- this is his answer. Why would they think this if it wasn't? And doesn't this assume something about whose thinking matters? See 174 - he differentiates in the Caribbean Islands.
"On the continent, unlike the West Indies, mulattoes represented a practice about which men could only feel guilty. To reject and despise the productions of one's own guilt was only natural." (175) <-- unexplained
Questions:
"What were the attitudes of white men toward Negroes during the first two centuries of European and African settlement in what be- came the United States of America?" (xxvii)
Quotes:
"that both slavery and prejudice were cause and effect," and that "the events which occurred may be better explained by considering their mutual interaction than by postulating the pri- macy of either." (xii)
"He decided, as well, that the book would do no more than explain the "debasement of the Negro" in American culture. As a result, the emerging manuscript came to center upon the place of race in the making of American culture. It would be a book, therefore, not only about the making of inequality but about the creation of American identity." (xiii)
"This is not a book about Negroes except as they were objects of white men's attitudes. Nor is it about the current, continuing crisis in race relations in America." (xxviii)
"He discussed the Negro's nature within the confines of a specific intellectual milieu, as who does not. Two important traditions, the Chain of Being and Linnaean biological classification, did a great deal to shape the terms of his thinking and that of his fellow natural philosophers." (xxxii)
"What American intellectuals did in the post-Revolutionary decades was, in effect, to claim America as a white man's country." (xxxiii)
"Virginia's second statutory definition of a slave (1682), for example, awkwardly at- tempted to rest enslavement on religious difference while excluding from possible enslavement all heathens who were not Indian or Negro." (92)
"For Jefferson, the overwhelming aspect of the Negro's color was its reality; he simply shelved the important scientific question of its cause. Even when he considered the question in a more neutral context, in his discussion of albino Negroes in the section on "Pro- ductions Mineral, Vegetable and Animal," he refused (or perhaps was unable) to offer a word of speculation about a matter on which other scientists speculated freely." (458)
Notes:
Lucretia Mott's descendant. Abolitionist household. (ix)
His training in social science as well as in European history comes through in this book.
Just thinking, when a white man raped a Black woman, it was not considered a crime, and she was a temptress; but any Black man in relation with a white woman was a crime in and of itself--she no longer a temptress but a victim.