| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Black Identity & Black Protest in the Antebellum North. By Patrick Rael. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xiv, 421 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2638-3. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4967-7.)

In Black Identity & Black Protest in the Antebellum North, Patrick Rael argues that black elites, rather than slave and free black artists and workers, constructed black identity and waged protests through debates in the public sphere. There the founding values of the nation were accessible with the hope that social change might occur, and there only educated blacks could join whites because they had command of the rhetorical grammar appropriate to that sphere. According to Rael, since whites defined slave culture "as defective perversions of civilized culture," black leaders avoided the subject (p. 48).

When the author writes that many northern blacks defined "themselves through the practice of folk or popular culture" (p. 45), however, he raises questions about his proposition that black elites exercised exclusive authority in constructing black identity. The confusion is compounded when Rael states that "blackness," and he does not tell us what that is, was rooted in public sphere debates "dominated by whites" (pp. 48, 298). And yet, astonishingly, he questions his evidence and conclusions even more sweepingly by claiming "a vacuum in our knowledge of black popular expression in the critical decades prior to the Civil War," the very period that is the focus of his study (p. 58). The relationship, then, between black leaders and antebellum black folk culture is left open to question, and with it the nature of Rael's treatment of black identity construction.

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