| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mia Bay. The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925. New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. Pp. viii, 288. Cloth $45.00, paper $19.95.

In her important new book, Mia Bay asks and answers two wonderfully timely and relevant questions: what new ideas about white people did Africans and African Americans develop in America, and why have historians been profoundly silent on such an essential subject? Despite two important limitations—that the majority of black people across much of American history have been illiterate, and that blacks have rarely been in a position freely to express their views of whites—Bay patiently and persuasively documents several powerful strands of African-American thinking about whiteness. This book fills a giant hole in the otherwise rich literature about the history of race in America. It is, profoundly, a story of "the limits of what black people can be made to believe about themselves" (p. 220). 1

Common to all black thinking about white people, Bay argues, was blacks' understanding that whites "deemed blacks a lesser species only to rationalize their own exploitation and abuse of people of color" (p. 9). African Americans wondered, from the early nineteenth through the twentieth century, whether the lie of white supremacy instead suggested the truth of white inferiority. Yet "African-Americans never inscribed white images across their culture and imaginative life" (p. 5) as scholars as varied as George Fredrickson, Toni Morrison, Joel Williamson, Eric Lott, and Linda Williams have shown white Americans did with their images of blackness. Black thinking about whiteness, Bay insists in one of her most important arguments, is a much smaller space than its reverse. Black people in America have thought about white people's identities to defend themselves from the effects of white racism. But otherwise, unlike whites, they have filled their psyches and their imaginations with other themes, with what it means to love and fight and live. . . .

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