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Reviews of Books
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A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early
Republic. By
BRUCE DAIN
. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Pp. x, 321. $29.95.)
Reviewed by Joanne Pope Melish
, University of Kentucky
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Philosophers, religious and political
thinkers, scientists, and crackpots have tried for centuries to
explain human difference in terms of a category called "race." The
ferocious single-mindedness of this project is baffling; rather
than advancing our understanding of human development, it has retarded
and sidetracked it. Tracing the evolution of "racial" thinking continues
to attract an ever-growing number of scholars, but it is becoming
increasingly clear that we have not yet developed an analytical
language sufficiently distinct from the language of the racial project
itself to stand completely clear of its assumptions. The persistent
use of terms like "black writing" and "white newspapers" (as opposed
to "blacks' writing") illustrates the point. Another difficulty
is that the undeniable moral dimension of the study of race can
tempt us to try to write the disempowered into retroactive equality
by means of the analysis—a strategy that actually masks the
radically unequal power relations that shaped and were shaped by
racial thinking in the first place. "Race" is an intellectual tar
baby made up of insufficiently precise conceptual frameworks, intersecting
colloquial and formal vocabularies, and politics. In A Hideous
Monster of the Mind, an ambitious effort to chart the intellectual
history of theories of race in the early American republic, Bruce
Dain grasps the tar baby confidently with both hands. This book
offers an adventurous dialogic approach, much thought-provoking
analysis, and several fresh interpretations in the course of tracking
more than a half century of racial thinking, but it is not without
some sticky spots.
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Dain's goal is to trace the transformation of the "race" of the natural history debates of the late eighteenth-century Anglo-American Enlightenment into the scientific racism of the nineteenth century. His strategy is to present the evolving discourse of race as a kind of textual conversation between black and white intellectuals. This is the source of the greatest strengths as well as the serious weaknesses of this book. |
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After some preliminary discussion
of evolving uses of the term "race" itself, Dain examines Jefferson's
Notes on the State of Virginia, devoting considerable attention
to contesting "the common argument that Notes is the starting
point for American scientific racism" (p. 3). Dain argues that both
Notes and the writings of early black writers such as Phillis
Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano were products of an epistemology of
natural history structured by the notion that nature reflected a
harmonious and relatively static external order that could be perceived
by the senses and understood by reason and imagination. In contrast,
scientific racism based its natural categories on biology, on inner
structures and essential truths, and on natural processes that allowed
for adaptation and even permanent change. Hence, Jefferson was not
a scientific racist; "the DNA does not match" (p. 3).
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