Overview

"Activists in the earliest Black antebellum reform endeavors contested and deprecated the concept of race. Attacks on the logic and ethics of dividing, grouping, and ranking humans into races became commonplace facets of activism in anti-colonization and emigration campaigns, suffrage and civil rights initiatives, moral reform projects, abolitionist struggles, independent church development, and confrontations with scientific thought on human origins. Denunciations persisted even as later generations of reformers felt compelled by theories of progress and American custom to promote race as a basis of a Black collective consciousness. Reluctant Race Men traces a history of the disparate challenges Black American reformers lodged against race across the long nineteenth century. It factors their opposition into the nation's history of race and reconstructs a reform tradition largely ignored in accounts of Black activism. Black-controlled newspapers, societies, churches, and conventions provided the principal loci and resources for questioning race. In these contexts, people of African descent generated a lexicon for refuting race, debated its logic, and, ultimately, reinterpreted it. Reformers' challenges call into question the notion that race is a self-evident site of identity among Black people. Their ideas instead spotlight legal, political, religious, social, and scientific practices that configured human difference, sameness, hierarchy, and consciousness. They show how a diverse set of actions constituted multi-faceted American phenomena dubbed ""race."""

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9780195312973

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Reviews

In her thoughtful and impressive book, Joan Bryant mines the archives to uncover a rich array of African American historical figures who forged a black intellectual tradition of race thinking throughout the long nineteenth century. Bryant's chapters deftly trace the push and pull among these thinkers between ideologies of race consciousness and racial unity that served as a springboard to their activism. Countering white supremacist arguments, these black men (and a few women) debated varied-and often conflictual-ideas, among them racial distinctiveness and human brotherhood; African emigration and American citizenship; worldwide Negro nationality and the formation of a US based composite race. * Carla L. Peterson, Author of Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City * In Reluctant Race Men, Joan Bryant enters into the full complexity of US racial history- and, in doing so, she gets at the messy and often paradoxical work of advocating for African American rights and communities without further implicating Black Americans in the infernal logic used to control them. This is a fascinating and exemplary study of the challenging work of social and political advocacy in a nation engulfed by its elaborate and unstable fictions about race. * John Ernest, University of Delaware *

Author Information

Joan L. Bryant is Associate Professor of African American Studies at Syracuse University.

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