{"id":35046,"date":"2013-12-16T02:06:51","date_gmt":"2013-12-16T02:06:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=35046"},"modified":"2013-12-16T02:06:51","modified_gmt":"2013-12-16T02:06:51","slug":"%e2%80%9cdreadful-deceit%e2%80%9d-race-is-a-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=35046","title":{"rendered":"\u201cDreadful Deceit\u201d: Race is a myth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cDreadful Deceit\u201d: Race is a myth<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Salon<\/a>
\nSunday, 2013-12-15<\/p>\n

Laura Miller<\/a><\/strong>, Staff Writer<\/p>\n

A historian argues that one of the defining elements of American culture is merely a “social fiction”<\/em><\/p>\n

Jacqueline Jones\u2019<\/a> provocative new history, \u201cDreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race From the Colonial Era to Obama\u2019s America<\/a>,\u201d contains a startling sentence on its 265th page. It comes after Jones quotes Simon Owens, the last of five African-Americans whose life stories she describes in the book. Owens \u2014 an auto worker, labor activist and writer who died in 1983 \u2014 stated, \u201cI understood as a Negro first, in the South, the North, in the union, in the NAACP, in the C.P. [Communist Party] and in the S.W.P [Socialist Workers Party].\u201d Jones adds, \u201cBecause generations of white people had defined him and all other blacks first and foremost as \u2018Negroes,\u2019 he had no alternative but to acknowledge \u2014 or, rather, react to \u2014 that spurious identity.\u201d<\/p>\n

That racial identities are \u201cspurious\u201d is the foundational argument of this fascinating book. Race is a cultural invention, rather than a biological fact (on this scientists widely agree), and Jones, a history professor at the University of Texas and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, wants to show how pernicious and persistent this falsity is. In the book\u2019s epilogue, she points to an article from the 2012 edition of the New York Times<\/em> titled \u201cHow Well You Sleep May Hinge on Race,\u201d based on a study showing that living in high-crime neighborhood or having chronic conditions like diabetes or hypertension can cause insomnia. But, as Jones observes, these are problems deriving from poverty, not race, and so the article \u201cblatantly conflated socioeconomic status with the idea of race.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of the five people whose life stories are told in \u201cDreadful Deceit,\u201d the first is essentially voiceless: an enslaved man named Antonio, abducted from his homeland in Africa and murdered while being \u201ccorrected\u201d by a colonial landowner in 17th-century Chesapeake. As Jones relates, Antonio\u2019s race \u201chad no practical meaning\u201d to the man who purported to own him, Symon Overzee. Describing in well-researched detail the economic and political milieu of the time, she argues that what created Antonio\u2019s vulnerability to Overzee was not his skin color or any other physical trait but his uprootedness, \u201cwithout a tribe or a nation-state to protect and defend him in the Atlantic world.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…None of the life stories in the book supports this argument more forcefully than that of Richard W. White, a Civil War veteran elected to the office of clerk of the Chatham County Superior Court in Georgia. One of his opponents in the election filed suit against White, charging that he was ineligible to hold office in Georgia because he was \u201ccolored.\u201d White, who was relatively new in town and \u201cfrom unknown parts and of unknown lineage,\u201d appeared to be \u201cwhite.\u201d The evidence marshaled to prove that White was not white consisted, as the judge freely admitted, of \u201cthe reputation of the person in his community, that is what he says of himself \u2014 what others say of him \u2014 his associates and his general reputation.\u201d In other words, Jones underlines, a man\u2019s race in this community \u201cwould be a matter not of ethnicity or heritage or appearance or biology. It would be, purely and simply, a social fiction \u2014 one without any appreciable basis in physical reality.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cDreadful Deceit\u201d: Race is a myth Salon Sunday, 2013-12-15 Laura Miller, Staff Writer A historian argues that one of the defining elements of American culture is merely a “social fiction” Jacqueline Jones\u2019 provocative new history, \u201cDreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race From the Colonial Era to Obama\u2019s America,\u201d contains a startling sentence on its 265th […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,459,8,20],"tags":[14972,7449,10962],"class_list":["post-35046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-jacqueline-jones","tag-laura-miller","tag-salon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35046\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}