White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812

by Winthrop D. Jordan

Book Overview

The paperback edition of Jordan's classic and award-winning work on the history of American race relations. "The author has put simple solutions and flashy theories aside and brought to his task a patience, skepticism, thoroughness, and humility commensurate with the vast undertaking. He combines these qualities with imagination and insight. The result is a massive and learned work that stands as the most informed and impressive pronouncement on the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080781055X
• ISBN13: 9780807810552
• Release Date: January 1968
• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and Unc Press
• Length: 671 Pages
• Weight: 2.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Superiority Trumps Morality

This work is a well-crafted, non-polemical theoretical chronology of the history of race and racism in Western and American culture. Winthdrop Jordan, now a professor at the University of Mississippi, is a careful writer and respected historian. His treatment, although non-polemical, still is very much a white-centered rendition of the formation of racism, with an historical bent and a heavy flavor of the "blacks are still a White Man's Burden" genre. He sets forth the thesis that racism was not caused by slavery but in fact preceded it by at least a century. Attitudes and myths about dark skinned people formed by European sailors during the era of sea exploration to Africa, gelled and cross-fertilized upon reaching the "New World," where an abundance of land and a scarcity of labor conspired to reduce the Negro to the bottom of the American social and economic heap. Negroes as slaves were always morally problematic, and American whites were forced to continue fashioning, revising and updating the rationalizations needed to justify their mistreatment and continued enslavement of them. The most stable result was an ideology of racial superiority that melded together the sailors' myths and attitudes about blacks, and a self-serving rendition of white, mostly Protestant, religion. This ideological concoction was so successful that over time maltreatment of blacks was pretty much taken as normal. Primarily to avoid endangering their souls, only a handful of well-off religious zealots, the abolitionists, failed to accept these rationalizations. They chose adherence to higher moral and religious principles over racist ideology. But interestingly, they did not give up notions of superiority and continued to despise and would not consort with Negroes. The strength of the book, in addition to being well-written, is that Jordan uses his keen psychological insights to touch on all of the very sensitive issues such as interracial sex, America being a white man's country, founding fathers attitudes towards Negroes, racism in the Caribbean, etc., and does so with a great deal of academic facility. This is a very worthy effort and its very scholarly nature sets it apart from other books on this topic. Four stars

Highly recommended--especially the first half of the book.

This book was written in 1968 during a time of tremendous turmoil concerning race and race relations, but this book is still valid for anyone interested in the development of slavery and race relations in North America. Granted, his work is not without flaws. Jordan seems to overemphasize the "unthinking decision" aspect of slavery, and sometimes he has a tendency to repeat himself, but this book should not be dismissed simply as "politically correct" unless one wants to dismiss the fact that, for some reason, slavery and segregation were a part of our history.

The Birth of Racial Attitudes from "First Impressions"

Winthrop D. Jordan answers the question, "what were the attitudes of white men toward Negroes during the first two centuries of European and African settlement in what became the United States of America?" in his book, White Over Black: Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812 (vii). Jordan answers this question comprehensively; his book is sectioned off chronologically into six parts. The first part covers the evolution of the American attitudes regarding the Negroes with references to English perspectives, interpretations, and hypotheses, and topics of enslavement. The second part, "Provincial Decades," involves topics on freedom and control in a slave society, interracial sex, and of the spiritual and physical nature of a Negro. This is followed with an overview on the revolutionary era in which the Americans impose self-scrutiny on their behavior. Part four, "Society and Thought," gives in-depth descriptions on economic interest and national identity, limitations of antislavery, revolution, and result of separation. The last section involves Thomas Jefferson's actions and his impact on society, the "chain of being of the Negro," erasing Nature's "Stamp of Color," and actions toward a white man's country. The organization of these topics demonstrates analytically to the reader the development of racial "attitudes" as time passes.Jordan's basic perspective of this issue was that slavery was not caused by racism or vice versa, these two factors both attributed to each other's development. This book is predominantly focused on how the Americans and their historical encounters formed and were fashioned by people different from themselves. The impression one seemed to receive upon reading this book was not biased, but of understanding and sympathy for both the whites and blacks; the author wished for equal treatment for the Negroes while having an accepting tone of the white's treatments of black people. The content of this work is mostly theoretical; Jordan used many opinions of white men, such as their initial expression after exposure to Negroes, and he described the outlooks of various religious groups, such as the Puritans and Quakers. Jordan's theorizing is also well rounded from many aspects, involving political, economic, social, and cultural perspectives of both the black and white men. These theories and facts are organized chronologically, which support the thesis effectively as the reader can see how the different racial attitudes develop over time.Jordan concludes that this debate over the Negro's racial standing stands within each white American's conscience. The cultural conscience of a white man insists the Negro be treated as his equal based on religious traditions and humanitarianism, whereas the strong feelings of domination and identity demanded the Negro be treated as inferior. He explains, "At a closer view, though, the duel appears more complex than a conflict between the best and worst in the white man's nature, for in a variet

the best book in the field

I write to refute the reviewer who gave Jordan's great book one star. White Over Black is probably the best single work of scholarship in any field on race in American history--still current and trenchant after more than thirty years. Jordan's Jefferson chapters remain definitive, his examination of Europeans' "first impressions" of Africans is classic, and his basic perspective--that one cannot say that slavery caused racism or vice versa, but intertwined--completely persuasive. His insistence that racial attitudes intertwine with sexual stereotypes, prejudices, and self-doubts reshaped the field. The book is brilliantly written and rests on an unmatched mastery of literally thousands of sources. Anyone interested in the history of race in America should read it.

couldent put it down

Winthrop D. Jordan wrote an extrudinary book on the culture of blacks in America."Long before they found that some men were black, Englishmen found in the idea of blackness a way of expressing some of their most ingrained values," historian Winthrop D. Jordan wrote in his 1968 book White Over Black. To the English, the color black meant something foul wicked, deadly, filthy and sinister. White denoted beauty, purity and virtue. English travelers to Africa commented at length on the Africans' lack of clothing, their "heathen" religious beliefs, their seemingly lusty nature. They described Negroes as "beastly," compared them to apes and speculated that their skin color was the manifestation of an ancient Biblical curse.