{"id":19825,"date":"2013-12-17T14:52:43","date_gmt":"2013-12-17T19:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theredphoenixapl.org\/?p=19825"},"modified":"2013-12-17T14:52:43","modified_gmt":"2013-12-17T19:52:43","slug":"dreadful-deceit-race-is-a-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/2013\/12\/dreadful-deceit-race-is-a-myth\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cDreadful Deceit\u201d: Race is a myth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"dreadful_deceit-620x412\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A historian argues that one of the defining elements of American culture is merely a “social fiction”<\/span><\/h2>\n

by<\/span>\u00a0LAURA MILLER<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Jacqueline Jones\u2019 provocative new history,<\/span>\u00a0\u201cDreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race From the Colonial Era to Obama\u2019s America,\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0contains 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<\/span><\/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 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<\/span><\/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<\/span><\/p>\n

In the revolutionary era, Jones singles out Boston King, born into bondage but able to escape the many designs on his freedom laid by opportunistic American and British whites during and after the revolution. He emigrated to Nova Scotia and ultimately to Sierre Leone. King was part of a group of black men and women who supported the Crown during the Revolutionary War in exchange for their liberty, although holding onto it could be tricky. But Jones is perhaps most interested in conveying the rationales that the wealthy South Carolinians of King\u2019s day offered for holding onto their slaves. They \u201cfelt no need to justify human bondage by invoking race-based differences; they framed the issue of slavery as a matter of their own self-interest, one they could defend by force without bothering to explain themselves.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It was only when whites felt real pressure to repudiate slavery on moral grounds that they began to concoct theories about how the \u201cnature\u201d of blacks rendered them suitable only for menial labor under the total control of white elites. Sometimes the challenge came from within, as was the case with Thomas Jefferson, whose desire to maintain his luxurious lifestyle forced him to reconcile \u201cEnlightenment theories of liberty with self-interested theories of the limits of liberty.\u201d Most propaganda about \u201crace,\u201d however (Jones frequently puts the word between quotation marks to emphasize its artificiality), came from the slave-owning classes trying to fend off abolitionists. The consistent refrain in \u201cDreadful Deceit\u201d is just this: that the very idea of distinct races is a fabrication designed to provide the rich and powerful with a cheap, docile labor force.<\/span><\/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<\/span><\/p>\n

The other individuals Jones profiles include a woman who managed to amass enough real estate in antebellum Providence, R.I., to become the the town\u2019s wealthiest black woman and William H. Holtzclaw, who founded a school, modeled after Booker T. Washington\u2019s Tuskeegee University, in rural Mississippi in 1908. At times, her thesis gets lost in the particulars of their stories, but this isn\u2019t a flaw. The strength of \u201cDreadful Deceit\u201d lies in its wealth of detail and the precise picture it offers of specific places and times, towns where white workers embraced the ideology of race because it gave them an edge or, conversely, white shopkeepers turned out to be perfectly willing to countenance a black school in their area if good money could be made from doing business with it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jones\u2019 central argument on the fictitious nature of \u201crace\u201d proves slippery, in no small part because many of the people she writes about don\u2019t seem to have examined their own beliefs very closely. Many of them, for example, lacked a concept of the \u201cscientific\u201d and therefore couldn\u2019t have made scientific claims about race even if they were so inclined. She clearly admires Owens for his belief that the shared interests of the working class and poor ought not to be divided by the fiction of race. (Owens rejected black separatists and nationalists as well as labor unions that failed to challenge their white members\u2019 racism.) According to Jones, he thought of race as \u201csimply a smokescreen \u2014 one that clouded the efforts of all people to secure justice and equality for themselves and their fellow sufferers.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Jones is right, of course, that too much investment in racial division does disempower groups who need all the power they can get. Yet human beings amount to more than just their economic and political interests, and often a person\u2019s cultural identification is what feels closest to his or her heart. At the same time, cultural divisions can be as bitter as racial ones.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jones doesn\u2019t address the rise of culture-based identity politics over the past several decades \u2014 a large gap in her account \u2014 but some critique is implied in her embrace of Owens\u2019 idea that class identification should take precedence. Race may be a biological myth, but it has become a cultural reality, and it\u2019s hard to regard the glories of African-American culture as merely the side effects of deplorable smokescreen. I doubt Jones would argue that they are, but just at the point where you expect her to tackle this knotty issue, \u201cDreadful Deceit\u201d ends. Fortunately, the reader is left with the stories Jones has told, and they are more than enough.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A historian argues that one of the defining elements of American culture is merely a “social fiction” by\u00a0LAURA MILLER Jacqueline Jones\u2019 provocative new history,\u00a0\u201cDreadful Deceit:..<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37710,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[149,152,18,183,43,97],"tags":[357,227,350,347],"class_list":["post-19825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-discrimination","category-economy","category-history","category-literature","category-media-culture","category-us-news","tag-racism","tag-racist-oppression","tag-united-states-history","tag-workers-struggle"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redphoenix.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/dreadful_deceit-620x412-1.jpg?fit=620%2C412&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}