How did the negative associations that many
people harbor about black (as a skin color) and blackness (as a
symbol) arise? How it is that blackness can connote both evil
(darkness, dread, wickedness) and eroticism (sensuality,
sexual potency, allure)?
Robert E. Hood's unique and fascinating work
probes the mythic roots of racial prejudice in Western attitudes
toward color. With special emphasis to the history of
ideas, but also to pictorial images and popular movements, Hood
documents the inception and growth of the myth of black
carnality, with its commingling of disdain and desire, fear and
fascination.
In tracing that
vein from Graeco-Roman and biblical sources through signal
moments in subsequent history, Hood shows how Christianity
forged the key links between blackness, evil, sexuality, and
magic. he also tracks how Christendom has been a crucial bearer
of ideas that sealed the fate of millions of Africans in the
colonial era and that still figure prominently in subordination
of blacks and in the disfiguring of American society.
An important
contribution to the history of Western cultural, especially
Christian, representation and symbolics regarding the nexus
between color differences and racism. . . . A powerful opening
salvo worthy of serious consideration by all
|
Preface |
ix |
|
|
|
|
Acknowledgements |
xv |
|
|
|
|
Introduction |
1 |
|
|
|
| 1 |
Shades of Blackness in Greek and Roman Cultures:
Before Christ |
23 |
|
|
|
| 2 |
Africa and the Christian Tradition |
45 |
|
|
|
| 3 |
Blackness as Evil and Sex in Early Christian
Thought |
73 |
|
|
|
| 4 |
Blackness and Sanctity |
91 |
|
|
|
| 5 |
Christendom and Black Slavery |
115 |
|
|
|
| 6 |
Blackness in Europe and America |
133 |
|
|
|
| 7 |
Ham's Children in America: Blacks on Blackness |
155 |
|
|
|
|
Epilogue |
181 |
|
|
|
|
Index |
191 |
* * * * *
Begrimed and
Black
Color Prejudice and the Religious Roots of Racism
By Robert E. Hood
Bibliography
Roger Bastide, “Color, Racism, and
Christianity,” Daedalus 96 (Spring 1967): 315
Kenneth J. Gergen, “The
Significance pf Skin Color in Human Relations, Daedalus
96 (Spring): 397
Frank DikOtter, The Discourse of
Race in Modern China (London: Hurst, 1992),
10
Harold R. Isaacs, “Group Identity
and political Change: The Role of Color and physical
Characteristics,” Daedalus 96 (Spring 1967): 370
Basil Davidson, The African Slave
Trade, rev. ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 189
Hiroshi Wegatsuma, “The Social
Perception of Skin Color in Japan,” Daedalus 96
(Spring, 1967):407-408.
D.D. Kosambi, The Culture and
Civilization of Ancient India in Historical Outline (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 72.
Ainslie T. Embree, ed. Sources of
Indian Tradition, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press,
1988), 7.
Andre Beteille, “Race and Descent
as Social Categories in India,” Daedalus 96 (Spring 1967): 451
Bernard Lewis, Race and Color in
Islam (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) 9-10.
Edward Gibbon, The History of the
decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 8 vols., ed Felipe
Fernandez-Arinesto (London: The Folio Society, 1988), 6:81.
Uthman ‘Amir Ibn Gahr Al-Jahiz, The
Book of the Glory of the Black Race, trans. Vincent J.
Cornell (Waddington: N.Y.: Phyllis Preston Collection, 1981),
40-41
F. Anfray, “The Civilization of
Aksum from the First to the Seventh Century,” General
History of Africa, vol. 2: Ancient Civilizations of
Africa, ed. Gamal Mokhter (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ of
California Press, 1981, 375.
Arnold Rubin, Black Nanban:
African in Japan During the 16th Century
(Bloomington: African Studies Program, Indiana Univ., 1974), 8.
Jack D. Forbes, Black Africans and
Native Americans: Color, Race and caste in the evolution of
Red-Black peoples (Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 90.
Henry Marsh, Slavery and Race: The
Story of Slavery and its Legacy for Today (Newton Abbot,
England: David & Charles, 1974), 86.
Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black:
American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1968), 7.
David Nicholls, From Dessalines to
Duvalier: Race, Colour, and national Independence in Haiti (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979).
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, “The
Formation of Afro-Creole Culture,” in Creole New Orleans:
Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph
Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisianaa State Univ. Press, 1992),
58-87.
Lyla Hay Owen and Owen Murphy, Creoles
of New Orleans: Gens de Couleur (People of Color) New
Orleans: First Quarter Publishing Co., 1987), 2-3.
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
(New York: Washington Square Press, 1982), 239.
S.G.P. Brandon, Creation Legends
of the Ancient Near East (London: Hodder & Stoughton,
1963).
Charles H. Long, Alpha: The Myths
of Creation (New York: G. Braziller, 1963).
Babara Sproul, primal Myths: Creating
the World (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979).
Modupe Oduyoye, The Sons of the
Gods and the Daughters of Men: An Afro-Asiatic Interpretation of
Genesis 1-11 (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1984).
Harold Courlander, Tales of Yoruba
Gods and Heroes (New York: Crown Publishers, 1973), 15-20.
M.A. Fabunmi, A Traditional
History of the Ile-Ife (Ile-Ife, Nigeria: Kings press, n.d.)
Robert E. Hood, “Creation Myths in
Nigeria: A Theological Commentary,” Journal of Religious
Thought 45 (Winter-Spring 1989): 70-84
Charles S. Finch, “The Education of
the Caucasoid,” in African Presence in Early Europe,
ed. Ivan Sertima (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1985),
19.
Cheikh Anta Dip, The African
Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, trans. Mercer Cook
(Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1974), pp. 65-66.
Roland Oliver, “The African
Rediscovery of Africa,” Times Literary Supplement, 20
March 1981, 29.
Gerda Lerner, ed. Black Women in
White America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 161-63.
Estelle B. Freedman, “The
Manipulation of History at the Clarence Thomas Hearing,” The
Chronicle of Higher Education 38 (January 8, 1992), B2-B3.
Gunnar Myrdal, An American
Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York:
Harper & Row, 1962), 562.
St. Clair Drake, Black Folk Here
and there: An Essay in History and Anthropology, vol. 1 (Los
Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, Univ. of California,
Los Angeles, 1987), 63.
Robert T. Handy, A Christian
America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971).
Martin E. Marty, Righteous Empire:
The Protestant Experience in America (New York: Dial Press,
1970).
Kenneth B. Clark. Dark Ghetto:
Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1965)
225-26.
James H. Cone, Black Theology and
Black Power (New York: Seabury Press, 1969), 31.
William R. Jones, Is God
a White Racist? A Preamble to Black theology, C. Eric
Lincoln Series on Black religion (new York: Doubleday, 1973), xx
Klauspeter, Blaser, Wennn Gott
Schwarz ware. . . (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1972), 181-200,
284-92.
Note: The items in this bibliography
appear here in the same order that they occurs in Dr. Robert E.
Hood's "Introduction" to Begrimed and Black (1994).
Note his frequent use of the Spring 1967 issue of Daedalus, an
issue that deal entirely with "Color and Race."
| Robert E. Hood (1936-1994) was professor of
Religious Studies and Director of the Center for
African-American Studies at Adelphi University, Garden City New
York and author also of
Must God Remain Greek? Afro Cultures
and God Talk (Fortress Press 1990). Hood died at his
home in Forest Hills, Queens, on August 9, 1994, at age 58.
Cause was complications after an unspecified illness. |
 |
* * *
* *
* * * * *
 |
Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
|
* *
* * *
|
Hopes and Prospects
By Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger
In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of
American empire and class domination, at
home and abroad, Chomsky continues a
longstanding and crucial work of
elucidation and activism . . .the
writing remains unswervingly rational
and principled throughout, and lends
bracing impetus to the real alternatives
before us.—Publisher's
Weekly
|
 |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update
5 January 2012
