Imagining Black America
Despite research asserting that race is a social construct, not a biological fact, since slavery black Americans have lived under a rigid classification—often embraced—with real-life consequences. Hoping to “initiate a conversation” on self-identity and race, Wayne explores the long and complicated history of race classification in the U.S. He examines the tumultuous history of white supremacy and the race identity of Native Americans, Mexicans, European immigrants, and Asians, as well as African Americans who settled on definitions favoring whites or those who claimed white status. For black Americans, definition also varied until the almost simultaneous introduction of Jim Crow laws and the adoption of the one-drop rule. Wayne traces changes in self-perception of blacks from slavery through the civil rights era, black nationalism, and Afrocentrism, detailing the tensions and alliances between slaves and freedmen, mixed-race and dark-skinned, and middle-class and poor blacks. Changing demographics and revisions in racial classification on census forms and other documents have also contributed to a splintering of any unified sense of what it means to be a black American. --Vanessa Bush