Innate Inferiority Research Articles

Freedom and Agency in The Second Sex

Freedom and Agency in <i>The Second Sex</i>

The Myth of the Genetically Sick African

Western medicine has an unfortunate history where it has been applied to address the health of African Americans. At its origins, it was aligned with the objectives of colonialism and chattel slavery. The degree to which medical “science” concerned itself with persons of African descent was to keep them alive for sale on the auction block, or to keep them healthy as they toiled to generate wealth for their European owners. Medicine in early America relied upon both dead and live African bodies to test its ideas to benefit Europeans. As medicine moved from quackery to a discipline based in science, its understanding of human biological variation was flawed. This was not a problem confined to medicine alone, but to the biological sciences in general. Biology had no solid theoretical basis until after 1859. As medicine further developed in the 20th century, it never doubted the difference between Europeans and Africans, and also asserted the innate inferiority of the latter. The genomic revolution in the latter 20th century produced tools that were deployed in a biomedical culture still mired in “racial” medicine. This lack of theoretical perspective still misdirects research associated with health disparity. In contrast to this is evolutionary medicine, which relies on a sound unification of evolutionary (ultimate) and physiological, cellular, and molecular (proximate) mechanisms. Utilizing the perspectives of evolutionary medicine is a prerequisite for an effective intervention in health disparity and finally dispelling the myth of the genetically sick African.

A hundred years of debates on sex differences: Developing research for social change

After women secured the right to vote some hundred years ago, the assertions about their innate inferiority gradually began to vanish, giving way to theories about the countless aspects which apparently differentiated them from men. In this paper, we follow the evolution of research on sex differences, starting with the work of the first female psychologists who questioned the theories that justified women’s subordinate positions in society. We trace the main developments of the studies on sex differences, their relationship with social roles, gender stereotypes, and gender identity, and describe the strategies used to highlight the role of society rather than of biology in shaping men and women’s personalities and behaviors. We describe the controversies this area of research gave rise to, the debates over its political implications, and the changes observed over time in women’s social positions and within research perspectives. Finally, we discuss the mutually reinforcing effects of social organization and lay conceptions of gender and reflect on how the field of research on sex differences has contributed to building a fairer society.

Patriarchy and Gender Law in Ancient Rome and Colonial America

Roman Antiquity and Colonial America shared much in common regarding limits on women’s legal rights and the role of gender in law. Gendered stereotypes regarding women’s ability and place in society are reflected in the patria potestas and manus of Ancient Roman law, as well as through the patriarchal and pious Puritan laws of New England society during the American Colonial period. Both male-dominated social and legal systems were based on the notion of women’s innate inferiority and female submission to male authority. Gender expectations and biases are also present, not only in family law, but also in law governing sexual behavior and partnerships. While Roman law punishes sodomy and male same-sex relationships on the grounds of contradicting the concept of the pater familias, Puritan New England relied on Christian morals and religious teachings to govern their sodomy laws. However, such gender disparities in the law are also subject to social status and race, leading men who did not reflect the respective society’s preferable identity to face harsher punishments as a result. Regarding the concept of gender and male superiority, family law and the societal expectations that both shaped and were shaped by such laws reflect an ever-present patriarchal structure throughout the Early American and Ancient Roman legal systems. The gendered attitudes toward marriage, rape, sex, and consent in both Roman and Early American society are reflected in the laws that governed the lives of women and gender non-conforming minorities in both societies.

Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature by Judith Madera

Reviewed by: Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature by Judith Madera Wendy Whelan-Stewart (bio) Madera, Judith. Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. Durham: Duke U P, 2015. Judith Madera's Black Atlas begins with mid-nineteenth-century African American writers' keen awareness of the politicized nature of national borders and the race-based ideologies that carve space into place and manage the movements of black bodies and texts. Assembling works whose narratives hinge on characters' navigation, migration, or exploration, she grounds her readings in attending to "black flow" or the repeated movements of fictional and actual black communities, voices, or texts over spaces. A focus on flow flexibly and advantageously connects the fictional worlds of, for instance, Martin Delany's Blake, where interest in Cuba as a future site for African American emigration, revolution, and eventual independence runs against white America's interest in annexing Cuba as a slave state, and Pauline Hopkins's novel about the coalescing of Southern migrants from the Reconstruction South with the existing (and slowly eroding) African American community in literary Boston. She reveals the remarkable strategies five authors use to textually puncture, dismantle, reverse, or reconfigure the ongoing and racialized mapping of regions, states, and territories by nineteenth-century imperialist America. Madera's theoretical scaffolding draws its terminology from the disciplines of literary and cultural geography, cartography, Black Atlantic studies, postnational American Studies, and the exciting, new tradition of Hemispheric American studies. The dizzying combination allows her to reach surprising conclusions about nineteenth-century African American authorship and the use of texts to study how boundaries between, for example, free and slave states or territories are demarcated and devitalized or how public platforms for black men can be rewritten as spaces for black women's voices. Readers unfamiliar with postmodern theories of geography (such as the idea that space is not so much static setting as it is flux or that geography is defined less by material topographies and more by discursive and performative processes) will find Madera conscientiously instructive, and those already familiar with this newest form of criticism will find her work with diasporic African American communities well-suited to studies about space as process. Those who prefer close readings to the wider sweep of the literary geographer will find their footing in discussions of Francis Harper's Contending Forces and Alice Dunbar-Nelson's The Goodness of St. Rocque. Madera also thankfully introduces Martin Delany's serialized Blake and James Beckworth's frontier memoir to wider audiences. The arc of the book moves from a study of writers problematizing (inter-)national borders to those writers using intimate regional spaces to probe intranational boundaries. [End Page 155] Chapter One begins with William Wells Brown's Clotel and the way it disturbs Thomas Jefferson's claim that slavery is contained by region and not representative of the larger nation. Rather, Madera argues that Clotel intentionally presents a character who is the enslaved daughter of a nation's president and who troubles the borders of the nation's capital in Washington D.C, which conflates both the slave-holding South and the free soil of the Nation. In the same chapter—Madera also points to Brown's nonfiction to illustrate the larger aim of her work, writers' scrutiny of the "symbolic structures of white territorialization" and the "dominant organizational codes of place" (3). She follows William Wells Brown's private (and later published) meditations on moving beyond Missouri into the North and eventually into Europe. Each of Brown's movements away from pro-slave spaces brings new social encounters that affirm Brown's personhood and reveal to him and to white Americans and Europeans the arbitrary and artificial construct of his supposedly innate inferiority. Brown's movements through place reveal the processes (or repeated "performances") that underpin social codes (5). In the second chapter, Madera selects two works dealing with America's territorial overreach and its attempt to enlarge slave-holding spaces. Martin Delany's Blake looks southeastward to Cuba while James Beckwourth's The Life and Adventures of James Beckwourth pans west of the Mississippi. Blake studies America's interest in Cuba...

Zavatti, Francesco Comunisti per caso. Regime e consenso in Romania durante e dopo la guerra fredda (review)

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 784 World War and in its aftermath. Service’s monograph thus serves as a highly useful introduction to the phenomenon for non-specialist historians and social scientists with limited familiarity with the phenomenon, even as the detailed case studies are essential reading for researchers in this burgeoning field of study. King’s College London James Bjork Zavatti, Francesco. Comunisti per caso. Regime e consenso in Romania durante e dopo la guerra fredda. Passato prossimo, 19. Mimesis, Milan, 2014. 300 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €22.00 (paperback). One reason behind Romania’s difficult transition to democracy after 1990 was the re-emergence of a powerful nationalism in the early aftermath of the December 1989 events, and the consolidation of a nationalist discourse from then on, which contributed significantly to the way in which post-Communist Romanian politics were to be framed. Francesco Zavatti offers an insight into this development with his perceptive analysis of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s National Communism and its aftermath. Explained succinctly, National Communism in Romania can be sourced to Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s quest for autonomy from the Soviet Union in the late 1950s. Whilst remaining faithful to the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, Gheorghiu-Dej’s trajectory was followed with zeal by Ceaușescu who gave it a strong cultural dimension in 1971 through his ‘July theses’. These proposals called for ‘the continuous growth of the Party’s leading role in all domains of political-educational activity’, an emphasis on ‘the great achievements recorded by the Romanian people — builder of socialism’, ‘ a more rigorous control […] to avoid publication of literary works which do not meet the demands of the political-educational activity of our Party, [of] books which promote ideas and conceptions harmful to the interests of socialist construction’. In the repertoire of ‘theatres, operas, ballet and variety theatres’, stress was to be laid ‘on the promotion of national productions having a militant, revolutionary character’. In effect, Ceaușescu was advocating a national cultural revolution which was to generate a mythologization of Romanian history and a personality cult of the Romanian leader. Zavatti examines closely the development of the nationalist discourse under Ceauşescu, acknowledging Katherine Verdery’s seminal National Ideology under Socialism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1991). His reading of the 1980s weekly television spectacle, Cenaclul Flacăra, devised by the poet Adrian Păunescu, with its emphasis on a form of alternative culture with patriotic overtones, is but one of a number of original, and sensitive, critiques of artistic production of the period. Lest the reader believe that all writers succumbed to the siren- REVIEWS 785 call of National-Communism, the names of, amongst others, Ana Blandiana, Augustin Buzura, Mircea Dinescu and the ‘Paltiniș’ circle would have been worthy of mention by the author. Of particular merit is Zavatti’s discussion of protochronism. Protochronism had its origins in a rejection of foreign forms. Invoking the national interest and the right to define it was a prerogative that Ceauşescu abrogated to himself. Included in this definition was an antipathy to foreign forms, be they imported goods or ideas. This antipathy was forcefully expressed in Ceauşescu’s July theses and gave the green light for a cultural offensive that trumpeted what one Romanian critic called ‘eastern and native’ values while rejecting European ones. Some advocates of protochronism argued that Romanian experience had long anticipated that of the West in the political, cultural and historical domains; others bemoaned Romanians’ innate inferiority complex and sought to restore Romanian culture to its true place of recognition. A casualty of this approach were the Romans. The demotion of the Romans in the formation of the Romanian people was a result of the primacy now accorded to the indigenous Dacians. Under Ceauşescu, Dacian primacy was used as a political tool to give historical legitimacy to the policies of the leadership; the socalled ‘independent centralized Dacian state’ which, it was argued, was created under the Dacian leader Burebista circa 80bc and was the archetype of the ‘independent’ policies pursued by Burebista’s 1980s counterpart. By extension, Nicolae Ceauşescu was presented in official literature, several examples of which were ‘authored’ by Ilie Ceauşescu...

&lt;em&gt;Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians&lt;/em&gt;, by Patrick Brantlinger

Reviewed by: Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians by Patrick Brantlinger Cora Kaplan (bio) Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians, by Patrick Brantlinger; pp. x + 277. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011, $45.00. For almost three decades Patrick Brantlinger has been in the vanguard of critics and cultural historians who argue that empire was at the heart, not the periphery of nineteenth-century British life. Taming Cannibals is the third in a trilogy, dedicated to exploring how and why empire and race mattered to Britons in the long nineteenth century. The now canonical Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (1988) was followed by Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (2003). These are interlinked and overlapping studies, the last two books returning productively to themes drawn from the “repertoire of Victorian imperialism and racism” adumbrated in the epilogue of Rule of Darkness (262). Ranging from their deployment in nineteenth- century missionary accounts of the Fiji and Tasmanian islanders to the influence of Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) on Theodore Roosevelt, the essays in Taming Cannibals anatomize that repertoire and its leading tropes, highlighting the key [End Page 129] contradiction in racist and imperialist ideology: the widespread belief in the innate inferiority of indigenous peoples set against the imperial rationale of the civilizing mission. That so-called savages ate their enemies was one of the most longstanding proofs of their barbarism. Taming Cannibals takes a fresh, provocative look at the modern controversy about the prevalence of customary cannibalism in Fiji. It positively re-evaluates missionary discourse, which, however it may have exaggerated such shocking customs for its own ends, was a central, if highly mediated, conduit for the Fijians’ own accounts of cannibalism. The instance of cannibalism aside, missionary writings, including those of the controversial George Augustus Robinson, notorious for his spectacularly failed attempts to save the last Tasmanians from extinction, deserve, Brantlinger argues, a more nuanced and careful rereading, one that doesn’t seek to summarily dismiss their evidence for its bias, but listens to what these amateur ethnologists can tell us about early colonial life and early forms of “colonial knowledge” (54). While making its own distinctive case, Taming Cannibals succeeds brilliantly in complicating as well as synthesising the now impressive body of work which approaches the history of empire from an anti-imperial and anti-racist stance. Brantlinger always prefers the historically specific reading to high levels of theoretical abstraction, although he draws judiciously on theory where he thinks it deepens an interpretation. Wide-ranging examples of imagined and actual Westerners adopting Eastern or indigenous identities—“going native”—confirm the difficulty of generalizing about the motives and meaning of such counterintuitive but numerous cross identifications (18). For the pervasiveness of racial thinking meant that Victorians feared degeneration as much as they championed the civilizing process; it was only too easy, many thought, for Westerners to slide down the evolutionary scale, and the abyss which threatens is countered by a compensatory celebration and defence of Aryanism. In Victorian fiction villains like Magwitch impersonate cannibals to frighten little children, and angry children—Jane Eyre and Heathcliff—imagine themselves as rebellious heathens or are so imagined by others. Kipling’s Kim may come close to an idealized hybrid, almost in spite of his creator’s “racial absolutism,” but Brantlinger demonstrates that it is moot whether such experiments in shape-shifting can ever be understood as anti-imperialist or anti-racist (212). This point is beautifully drawn out in his discussion of Benjamin Disraeli’s complex romance with the Orient throughout his dual career as writer and imperialist politician. A “brilliant bricoleur of the racial ideas of his era,” Disraeli’s version of philo-semitism in which the Jews are the so-called pure Caucasians was specifically devised, Brantlinger argues, to “outflank” Anglo-Saxonism and Teutonism, while reinforcing the salience of race (100). Disraeli’s emphasis on race as a central explanation of human difference, inequality, and conflict finds its apogee in the 1860s when it becomes almost a commonplace subscribed to by ethnologists, social explorers, cultural analysts, and political thinkers. As Brantlinger points out, Britain’s urban underclass, including the...

BLACKNESS IN GOBINEAU AND BEHN: OROONOKO AND RACIAL PSEUDO-SCIENCE

In this essay, Derek Hughes gives a wide-ranging illustration of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories which have moulded our modern understanding of race and racism, and warns against reading Oroonoko (1688) in the light of their assumptions. To be sure, it is impossible to erase from memory the way we nowadays understand racism, and earlier texts may contain half-conscious traces of attitudes which were fully elaborated only later. But Hughes gives a timely warning that it is anachronistic and unfair to import the racist preconceptions of later ages into Behn's fictional world. Pseudo-scientific reasoning about racial hierarchies is intimately connected with the new findings of archaeologists and biologists, and with the craze for classification at the end of the eighteenth century. Behn's contemporaries had no theories about innate racial inferiority and about biologically determined intellectual and moral differences between various human groups. Hughes makes clear the difference between a seventeenth-century understanding of “race” and later racist ideologies, and emphasizes that enslavement in the late seventeenth century was justified in terms of religion, not in terms of skin colour.

Boas on Race

Franz Boas, the German born anthropologist who emigrated to the United States in 1886 and became known as the Father of American Anthropology, was a transitional figure in a number of areas, including the issue of race in human beings. Although he was not the first to question the notion of a pure race, he was the most influential in changing the idea of race from what it was to a statistical artifact. The intellectual world into which he came in the late nineteenth century was dominated by influential intellectuals such as Fred Hoffman, Edmund Spencer and Joseph Deniker, all of whom wrote about the innate inferiority of the Negro. Through careful measurement, analysis and observation, Boas and his students transformed the issue. Although he never completely accepted the absolute equality of the Negro mind, he stated that the main obstacle to their progress was racism, and that African-Americans were perfectly capable of participating in the American democracy alongside whites.

Intensely human: the health of the black soldier in the American Civil War

Black soldiers in the American Civil War were far more likely to die of disease than were white soldiers. In Intensely Human, historian Margaret Humphreys explores why this uneven mortality occurred and how it was interpreted at the time. In doing so, she uncovers the perspectives of mid-nineteenth-century physicians and others who were eager to implicate the so-called innate inferiority of the black body. In the archival collections of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, Humphreys found that the high death rate among black soldiers resulted from malnourishment, inadequate shelter and clothing, inferior medical attention, and assignments to hazardous environments. While some observant physicians of the day attributed the black soldiers' high mortality rate to these circumstances, few medical professionals-on either side of the conflict-were prepared to challenge the evidence of white superiority. Humphreys shows how, despite sympathetic and responsible physicians' efforts to expose the truth, the stereotype of black biological inferiority prevailed during the war and after.

The Mellah of Marrakesh, Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco's Red City (review)

Reviewed by: The Mellah of Marrakesh, Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco's Red City Raphael Israeli The Mellah of Marrakesh, Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco's Red City, by Emily Gottreich. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. 201 pp. $24.95. This admirably researched and written volume is a landmark in the growing historiography and ethnography of Moroccan Jewry in recent decades. From the outset, the author anchors the framework of her captivating story, which she collated from oral and written history and especially from her patient, long-term, inquisitive and penetrating field data-gathering, in the long and rather sorry history of the Muslims and the dhimmis who lived in their midst. It is significant that she chose to set the boundaries of that relationship in the anecdotal event of Sir Moses Montifiore's visit to Morocco in the 19th century, when the house he rented in the Muslim medina was sealed after he departure since it became "unclean and unfit to dwell for a true Believer" (p. 2). One can easily generalize about Muslim cities as a rule, where while the mosque, the public bath, and the market place were typical and unavoidable, [End Page 194] non-Muslim institutions of any sort, including other religions' houses of prayer, were saliently absent. Therefore, when the author states that the Jews were "assimilated" in Moroccan cities like Marrakesh on the political and societal levels (p. 2), she must be more reserved about dates and places. For while the Jews of the littoral and the north of Morocco were in constant relations with foreigners, which to some extent mitigated their misery under the Muslim regime, the Jews of Marrakesh and the high mountains stayed more aloof, were reluctant even to welcome the beneficial influence of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and were as a result much more acculturated to their Moroccan/ Berber environment. Chapter One, which lays out the history and the setting of the mellahs in Morocco, beginning with the first one in Fes and then delving into the detail of the Marrakshi Jewish quarter, is perhaps the most informative and innovative, though there too one needs to go into more specifics. For example, Gottreich again generalizes about the Muslim principle of "tolerance" towards the Jews as incorporated in the Umar pact, in contrast with the systematic persecution and mass murders of Jews in medieval Europe. But one ought not be swept away by the notion of tolerance (pp. 12–13), which in Islam did not signify equality or acceptance of the non-Muslims for what they were, but their sufferance despite their innate inferiority. For not only were fanatics like the Muwahhidun no less murderous than European, but sometimes their cruelty even surpassed that of the Christians. Even the more open and less ardent fanatics, such as the Sa'dis (16th–17th centuries), under whose aegis Jews finally settled and were protected in their ghettos, Jews continued to buy their lives by increasing their taxes and "donations" to the sovereign. Extortions from them were particularly pressing in the inter-regnum between dynasties and between various rulers in the same dynasty. When the author turns to "counting the Jews in Marrakesh" (Chapter Two, pp. 39–70) and calculating the respective Muslim and Jewish space in the Red City (Chapter Three, pp. 71–107), this is an extraordinarily detailed nitty-gritty of Jewish life in the mellah, where Jewish crafts, modes of life, demographic fluctuations, temptations/pressures to convert into Islam, and the mutual fears and suspicions from the others' space, mark the boundaries of uneasy and generally miserable coexistence between the host Muslim culture and the guest Jewish culture. Unlike other writers who either lent prominence to the Jewish existence under Islam or idealized the lot of the Jews under "tolerant" Islam in the maghrib, Gottreich produces an amazingly balanced study where both the rare moments of harmony and the extremes of abuses and humiliation can be comprehended in their context. Marrakesh was also the urban center of a vast rural hinterland, which meant that the mellah, together [End Page 195] with the rest of the city, became a focus of attraction to a medley of Arab, Berber...

African American, Hispanic, and White Beliefs about Black/White Inequality, 1977-2004

Do African Americans, Hispanics, and non-Hispanic whites differ in their explanations of the socioeconomic divide separating blacks and whites in the United States? Have such explanations changed over time? To answer these questions, I use data from the 1977 to 2004 General Social Surveys (GSS) to map race/ethnic differences in support for, trends in, and the determinants of seven “modes of explanation” for blacks' disadvantage. Trends over time indicate the continuation of a long-standing decline in non-Hispanic whites' use of an ability-based (innate inferiority) explanation. Non- Hispanic whites' beliefs in a purely motivational and a purely educational explanation are increasing, however, along with the view that none of the explanations offered in the GSS explain blacks' disadvantage. African Americans and Hispanics also evidence increases in a purely motivational explanation, but they differ from non-Hispanic whites in demonstrating clear declines in structural beliefs—especially the perception that discrimination explains blacks' lower socioeconomic status. These conservative shifts in blacks' and Hispanics' beliefs result in greater similarity with non-Hispanic whites over time. Notably, however, significant “static” race/ethnic group differences remain: non- Hispanic whites score highest, and blacks lowest, on a purely motivational explanation, while African Americans are more likely than both non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics to endorse a discrimination-based explanation. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for racial policy support.

Black, White, and Brown

WITH EVERY PASSING DECADE SINCE 1954 WE CONTINUE TO ASK OURselves how much the South and the nation have changed since the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision ended but equal education in public schools. The hallowed words of Thomas Jefferson that men are created equal, proclaimed at the nation's founding 178 years before Brown, seemed finally to include black men, women, and children, at least insofar as public schooling was concerned. Yet decades after court rulings ending segregation--in schools, restaurants, hotels, housing, swimming pools, and buses--the color line has hardly faded. In fact, it is beginning to look as if the line were drawn in permanent ink: black people and white people--Americans all, but still very differently situated educationally, economically, and socially. Even with massive immigration from Asia and Latin America in the last half of the twentieth century and the recent displacing of African Americans by Latinos as the nation's largest minority, we cannot seem to break free from our vision of America as fundamentally a nation of whites and blacks, with Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans playing supporting roles. In many ways we remain, as Andrew Hacker argued more than a decade ago, two nations, black and white, separate and unequal. (1) The future that the Brown decision augured and that Martin Luther King Jr. devoutly desired could only be described as a dream, given the deep divisions that separated black America from white America since the end of slavery. Yet no other court decision in our history has done more to bring an end to state-sanctioned white supremacy, to close the long era of Jim Crow, and to offer blacks the hope of achieving equality in all walks of life. That Brown and subsequent court rulings dismantling Jim Crow have not, fifty years later, significantly narrowed the gap between whites and blacks on many fronts continues to trouble most Americans. Part of the problem has to do with the negative role blackness has played throughout our nation's history. No other group in America traces its roots to the institution of slavery, when blacks were bought and sold as the property of their white masters. After the emancipation of slaves, the enactment of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments did little to change white southerners' attitudes toward their former property, and as soon as federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, ex-Confederates wasted little time before using local and state laws to deny blacks the very rights the newly enacted amendments were supposed to guarantee. The Supreme Court not only acquiesced in this reassertion of white supremacy (the way of life for the euphemistically inclined) but administered the coup de grace in 1896 when it ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that separating blacks and whites on public transportation (and by implication in all public places) does not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other. (2) The nation's highest court had shamelessly asserted that segregating blacks from whites had nothing to do with the pervasive belief in the innate inferiority of blacks, the fundamental principle of southern culture since the antebellum era. With the exception of the Dred Scott decision in 1857, no other Supreme Court ruling had done so much damage to the cause of equality for blacks; Plessy stood for fifty-eight years as the law of the land and was cited in hundreds of state and federal court cases as the constitutional basis for segregation in virtually all areas of life. The very premise of the way of life rested on the assumption that blacks and whites could peacefully co-exist, but only if the color line were scrupulously observed where it counted the most--in the bedroom. Even before 1896, former slaveholders and state legislators (often one and the same) enacted laws to forbid black-white marriage, not only to ensure that mulattoes would have no inheritance rights that a white man was bound to respect but more urgently to prevent black men from marrying white women. …

Racism: A Short History

Racism: A Short History. By George M. Fredrickson. (Princeton: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Pp ix, 216. Acknowledgments, introduction, epilogue, appendix, notes, index. $22.95.) Historian George M. Fredrickson, an eminent authority on race and ethnicity, has produced a highly readable, sharply analytical, and consistently provocative overview of the course of Western racism from the Middle Ages to the present. He focuses on the evolution of the two most virulent forms of racism, anti-Semitism and color-coded white supremacy, that came to fullest fruition in the racist that emerged in the American South, Nazi Germany, and South Africa. Fredrickson compares and contrasts these regimes and probes the connections between with consummate skill. He also maintains that racism, always nationally specific, invariably became involved in searches for national identity and cohesion and varied with the historical experience of each country. Despite such variations, all three overtly racist regimes possessed common features, including the implementation of an official racist ideology that severely proscribed the rights, privileges, and opportunities of blacks and/ or Jews. This volume traces the origins of Western racism to medieval Europe, during an of intense religiosity in which the increasing hostility of Christians toward Jews transformed the anti-Judaism endemic to Christianity into an anti-Semitism that made getting rid of Jews preferable to converting them. Anti-Semitism, in turn, became racism when Jews came to be considered innately malevolent beings in league with the devil rather than merely guilty of harboring false beliefs. Of particular importance in this development was Spain, where attitudes and practices toward Muslims and Jews served as a kind of segue between the religious intolerance of the Middle Ages and the naturalistic racism of the modern era (p. 40). Although Fredrickson recognizes that Europeans had long associated the color black with evil, he nonetheless questions whether Europeans in general were strongly prejudiced against Africans prior to the beginning of the slave trade. Initially, he points out, religion rather than race justified the European enslavement of Africans: only way to save African souls was to enslave them (p. 38). The dark skins of West Africans soon became a part of the equation, and the so-called Curse of Ham or Canaan was invoked to demonstrate that African slavery was divinely inspired. However, anti-black racism took root slowly because it ran counter to the Christian belief that the entire human race was of one blood and worthy of salvation. Only when emancipated from Christian universalism did colorcoded racism become an ideology. The volume explores the route by which this emancipation took place, beginning in the eighteenth century with the invention of the concept of races as basic human types classified by skin color and other physical characteristics. The scientific racism that ultimately emerged was used to determine those groups, notably Jews and blacks, who were unfit to possess the rights of full citizenship. Scientific pronouncements regarding the innate inferiority of blacks lent legitimacy to popular views long held in the United States, especially in the South. …

"The American of the Future": Fictional Immigrant Children and National Ethnic Identity in the Progressive Era

"THE AMERICAN OF THE FUTURE": FICTIONAL IMMIGRANT CHILDREN AND NATIONAL ETHNIC IDENTITY IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA Tim Prchal Oklahoma State University As the nineteenth century became the twentieth, the United States experienced an unprecedented surge in immigration. Some 3.8 million Italians, 3.4 million Slavs, and 1.8 million Russian and Eastern European Jews—along with still more from other ethnic groups—entered the country between 1899 and 1924.1 These numbers worried many native-born Americans, but the ethnic makeup ofthese newcomers was an even greater source ofanxiety. Unlikethe so-called "old immigrants," who had come from the northern and western regions ofEurope (and continuedto do so in declining percentages), the majority ofthese "new immigrants" were arriving from southern and eastern Europe. Descendants ofthe earlier immigrant groups often perceivedthe Italians, Slavs, Jews, and others entering the country as belonging to races that were different from and inferior to their own. Fervent debates over how the nation might deal with the perceived threat of cultural deterioration split Americans into four camps: one advocating immigration restriction ; one pressing for all immigrants to put aside their ethnic distinctiveness and assimilate into the dominant culture; one seeing the best traits ofthe world's peoples merging to create an ever-evolving, cosmopolitan American race in the national melting pot; and one introducing the radical notion ofwhat came to be called "cultural pluralism," avision ofa heterogeneous countrywhere ethnic difference is respected rather than erased. Each of these four camps was concerned with the nation's future as well as its present, and so immigrant children took on a special significance . This is especially evident in an essay titled "Whose Country Is This?" published in Good Housekeeping in 1921. Here, Calvin Coolidge, who was Vice President at the time, advocates carefully adding restrictions to immigration policies. After explaining the threats that immigration poses to national labor and market practices, he concludes by saying, "We must rememberthat we have not onlythe present but the future to safeguard; our obligations extend even to generations 1 90Timothy Prchal yet unborn. The unassimilated alien child menaces our children, as the alien industrial worker . . . menaces our industry."2 A much warmer welcome came from Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in Chicago to help newcomers adjust to their new environment. Adjustment, though, for Addams, involved assimilation into the dominant culture.3 Seeing interaction between immigrant and native-born populations as an efficient route to such assimilation, she depicted children as among the best mediators. In 1905, Addams asked about the urban isolation of ethnic groups, "What agency exists to acquaint them with each other, to span the gulfof language, religion and all that keeps them apart? It is the little children who play in the streets. They are doing the work which cultivated people ought to be undertaking consciously and doing better."4 Many restrictionists and assimilationists agreed that the nation's greatness was verymuch the product ofits old-immigrantheritage and that the inherited culture was well worth preserving. However , the assimilationists felt that new immigrants could conform to the culture developed by this stock while the restrictionists felt that barriers such as the new immigrants' innate inferiority, their vast numbers, or their ethnic pride were too overwhelming for assimilation to occur. These campaigns to preserve the dominant culture were challenged by those in the melting pot and cultural pluralism camps, who saw the new immigration as an opportunity to enhance the nation. Again, immigrant children play a role in the discourse of these camps. Representing the melting pot perspective is an essay titled "The American of the Future," first published in a 1907 issue of The Century. Here, ColumbiaUniversityprofessor and social commentatorBrander Matthews allays concerns about U.S. census records revealing a glut of unassimilated immigrants by saying, "The boys and girls ofLittle Italy speak English as fluently as they speak Italian, and while they salute the flag in school, in the street they amuse themselves . . . with the traditional games ofAnglo-Saxon youth." The children ofimmigrants, he continues, are attaining college degrees and forgetting theirparents' native languages. Rather than endorsing assimilation, however, Matthews is assuring readers that cultural change is alive in immigrant communities—just as it is in...

African Americans in Currier and Ives's America: The Darktown Series

Today most Americans recognize them as creators of Christmas card and calendar Americana. In nineteenth century, however, and Ives called their company Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints. They proudly advertised themselves as the best, cheapest, and most popular firm in a democratic country, providing colored engravings for people. In process they created a legacy of over 7000 prints that sold in uncounted millions of copies-at one time 95% of all lithographs in circulation in United States (Currier and Ives I: xxxviii-xxxxi, Karshan 31). and Ives never intended to create or promote fine art, or even to produce prints of great value. Rather, they sought to produce images of nineteenth-- America that would be attractive to their largely middle-class clientele. As Harry T. Peters, most prominent collector of and Ives prints and related materials, wrote decades ago: Currier and Ives were businessmen and craftsmen ... but primarily they [were] mirrors of national taste, weather vanes of popular opinion, reflectors of American attitudes.... In their prints can be found whole florid panorama of our national life in mid-nineteenth century (Peters 7). and Ives created a pictorial record of nineteenth-century America, but not as conscious historians. They operated on terms buying public-certainly a huge number-would accept. By-and-large they avoided conflicting reality and controversy, and when persuaded to take a stand on such subjects, they chose the side of heaviest artillery. But they were not entirely positive, either. Many prints conveyed critical, negative, or at least cautionary messages, in obvious and subtle ways, again reflecting concerns or fears of their audience. This was especially true of and Ives's images of African Americans, few of which have been included in many published collections and retrospective exhibitions of past century. I do not have space-nor is it necessary-to review history of American attitudes toward African Americans in nineteenth century. Instead, I would like to briefly examine and Ives's representation of African Americans from 1840s through 1880s which, in fact, reflects that history in all its twists and turns and complexities. What we find in that fifty-year run of prints is an initial inclination to picture horror of slavery, from which company quickly retreated; withdrawal of African Americans into background of prints on life in antebellum America; their being summoned during 1850s, '60s, and '70s as cause of sectional politics and civil war; and finally, at end of century, their being pictured as completely incapable of advancing beyond their previous condition of servitude to live like civilized whites. My primary focus will be on final stage of this pictorial narrative as told in company's best-selling Darktown series-a large collection of prints all but unknown today. As one might expect, slavery was subject of hundreds of prints in antebellum period. The majority reflected prevailing stereotype, in North and South, of happy, contented slave, a laughing, simple-minded retainer who thrived under paternalism of his kindly master, and that, given his innate inferiority, was better off as part of South's institution than he would be in competitive, free-labor system in North (Thompson 283). Several artists were critical of South's peculiar institution. See, for example, David Claypoole Johnson's Early Development of Southern Chivalry (undated), in which a smiling Southern boy, much to amused admiration of his sister (holding a black doll by hair), whips a second black doll, stripped to waist and tied to chair (Williams 28). But they did not reflect majority opinion on slavery, even in North. …

Dr. Martin Robison Delany, 19Th-Century Africana Womanist

Past and contemporary researchers' evaluations of Martin Robison Delany's (born May 6, 1812; died January 24, 1885) achievements are glowing and quite impressive. Scholars refer to him as a Renaissance Man who was able to cram at least a half dozen lifetimes into one (Clark, 1974, p. xxv). He was a dentist, writer, editor, medical doctor, theorist, abolitionist, explorer, scientist, philosopher, diplomat, civil rights activist, ethnologist, and politician and, during Civil War, an army major, surgeon, and recruiter. Yet, scholars do not simply commend him for his multidisciplinary achievements. Delany is paid tribute particularly for his vigor and mastery of these professions in his mission to strive toward restoration, reclamation, redevelopment, and enhancement of African peoples' lives. In 19th century, Frances Rollin Whipper, author of book The Life and Public Service of Martin Delany,1 lauded him for his lifelong commitment to upliftment of Black people and rejection of any assertions about African's innate inferiority. Whipper described him as being a man who soared above prescribed limits and stood proudly before country, the blackest of black presenting in himself a giant's powers warped in chains, and evidencing in his splendid career fallacy of old partisan theory of Negro inferiority and degradation (Rollin,

Access to the Divine: Gender and Votive Images in Moldavia and Wallachia

In Orthodox Last Judgements in sixteenth-century Moldavia, both Adam and Eve appear as saintly intercessors on behalf of mankind. The presence of these suppliant figures, on either side of the throne of hetimasia (Plate i), suggests that Orthodoxy and Catholicism differed significantly in their evaluations of the gender implications of the Fall. In medieval Catholicism the portrayal of a nimbed figure of Eve, or even of Adam, was inconceivable. In the West the ideas of the Fall as the cause of the crucifixion and of Mary as the antithesis of Eve produced a powerful set of negative views of women’s nature. The weaker sex was inherently vulnerable to temptation, flattery, and persuasion, endangering not only women’s souls but those of all mankind. The veneration of Mary tempered this negative image, but Mary’s extraordinary nature could never entirely erase the assumptions of innate female inferiority based on the role of Eve in the Fall. The depiction of Eve as a saint in Orthodox wall painting appears to offer an unexpected challenge to the view that such gender associations are the only possible outcome of the Genesis account. It is also tempting to relate the presence of such representations in Moldavia to the highly unusual social position of women in Moldavian society, based on inheritance customs which divided estates equally between both sons and daughters.

Trends in Whites' Explanations of the Black-White Gap in Socioeconomic Status, 1977-1989

Whites' explanations for the black-white gap in socioeconomic status are examined using General Social Survey data for 1977 to 1989. While there has been a significant decline in the percentage of whites attributing the gap to innate inferiority of blacks, individualistic explantions of the gap still predominate. Most individualistic explanations stress lack of motivation among poor blacks, and are widely held among whites who otherwise express little or no traditional prejudice. Whites' explanations for the racial economic gap influence their attitudes toward government policies to improve the status of blacks, independent of sociodemographic characteristics and prejudice. These results help explain a paradox of contemporary racial attitudes, and suggest that white public opinion has reached an era of stable acceptance of the black-white economic gap.

Black Males and Social Problems

Most Americans are aware of the high rates of social problems among Black Americans. For example, Blacks are disproportionately represented among Americans experiencing academic failure, teenage pregnancy, female-headed families, chronic unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction, and criminal victimization (Poussaint, 1983; U.S. News and World Report, 1986). Consequently, there is a great deal of debate among politicians, journalists, academics, and ordinary citizens concerning the etiology of these problems. Those who attempt to explain the prevalence of these conditions among Blacks tend to argue one of three positions: genetic inferiority, culture of poverty, or racial oppression. Advocates of the genetic inferiority perspective argue that the high rates of social problems among Blacks is a product or expression of Black peoples' innate inferiority to Caucasians and other racial groups. Moreover, advocates of this perspective argue that Blacks possess genetic traits and characteristics that predispose them to engage in problematic behavior at higher rates than White (Garrett, 1961; Jensen, 1973). A major problem with genetic inferiority theories is that advocates of this perspective tend to differentially apply it in explaining the causes of social problems among various racial and ethnic groups. For example, White Americans have higher rates of academic failure, teenage pregnancy, female-headed families, drug addiction, and criminal involvement than do Europeans (Archer and Gartner, 1983; Time Magazine, 1985). However, the rate dif-