Volume 21, Number 1 · February 7, 1974
Why Blacks Were Left Out
By George M. Fredrickson
The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States
by Winthrop D. Jordan
Oxford University Press, 229 pp., $1.95 (paper)
When it was published in 1968, Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black was at once praised as the definitive work on the history of American racism before 1812. The book clearly deserved its reception. Jordan uncovered much important source material and used it as the foundation for a subtle and broad new interpretation of the growth of anti-black attitudes in the United States. But some of his assumptions and conclusions might well have been the subject of sustained controversy. Any account of the origins of American racism, as Jordan himself would be the first to admit, necessarily involves evaluating data that are fragmentary and ambiguous. White Over Black was really too provocative a book to be treated as a scholarly monument, or, even worse, as an encyclopedia of early white prejudice and discrimination to be ransacked for fragments of insight and information. Instead it should have stimulated a vigorous debate on issues that are obviously of more than purely historical interest.
Review, 2547 words
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