A Dreadful Deceit

Starred review from October 7, 2013
MacArthur Fellow and Bancroft Prize–winning historian Jones’s aim in this heartfelt book is to redefine our ideas of what constitutes “race” while arguing that the entire foundation of racial categorizing is unscientific and deeply injurious historically. While that argument is widely held by scientists and scholars, it still lacks widespread acceptance. So in what is the most persuasive and satisfying feature of this authoritative book, Jones relates the stories of six “black” Americans across different eras spanning nearly half a millennium. These riveting tales emerge from Jones’s deep knowledge of African-American history and her brilliant use of previously unexploited sources. If at times unsubtle—Jones finds it necessary to keep reminding us that “race” is mythic, not real—she leaves no doubt that ever-changing racial mythologies “have nothing to do with biological determinism and everything to do with power relations.” Racial ideologies, she shows, have long been a pretext for injustice, are always in flux, and while they deeply affect us all, have never extinguished the robust determination of the oppressed to gain safety, dignity, and a rightful place in the nation’s civic life. Agent: Geri Thoma, Writers House.

Starred review from October 15, 2013
A powerful exploration of an enduring myth that has haunted America over the centuries, from one of our best chroniclers of America's struggle with racial inequality. Jones (History and Ideas/Univ. of Texas; Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War, 2008, etc.) claims that race is a construct that has little meaning in biology even if it has had tremendous and deleterious force in historical reality. Instead of a sweeping overview, the author focuses on six biographical sketches that illustrate the pernicious force of the myth of race that has nonetheless manifested in the realities of racism from the Colonial era onward. Thus, a Dutch master's killing of one of his slaves reveals the increasing tensions in a globalizing world. A fugitive slave in South Carolina embraces the teaching of religion in a Revolutionary era in which men spoke of ideals of freedom while protecting the institution of slavery. A free black businesswoman in post-Revolutionary Rhode Island navigates the treacherous waters of freedom in a world still deeply committed to perpetuating her subservience. A light-skinned black man in the Union Army becomes a loyal Republican in the postwar era and experiences the frustrations and disappointments of white racial solidarity. A Tuskegee Institute graduate founds his own vocational institution for blacks in Jim Crow Mississippi and manages to survive and sometimes thrive in arguably the most oppressive state in an oppressive region. And a black writer and union advocate in Detroit utilizes his relationships in organized labor to bridge racial divides. A graceful writer and natural storyteller, Jones draws meaning from these six tableaux, maintaining the thread of her argument without hammering away at it. She brings the story up to the present by revealing the ways in which the election of Barack Obama has hardly served to mask the ways in which the racial myth has done real harm. From the "dreadful deceit" of race comes a masterful book about its history.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 15, 2013
Despite the long, tortured American history surrounding race, the thing itself is mythology, a social construct used to rationalize exploitation and abuse of power, argues historian Jones. Focusing on the lives of six African Americans, she traces the use of race to exploit from the seventeenth to the late-twentieth centuries. Jones asks the question, Who benefits from racial difference?, as a focusing point for her portraits of Antonio, an enslaved African living in colonial Maryland, killed by his master because he refused to work in the fields; Boston King, a fugitive slave who sought spiritual equality among all men and women in Maryland; Elleanor Eldridge, a nineteenth-century Rhode Island businesswoman engaged in land-owning disputes as she defied stereotypes; Richard W. White, a Union veteran who appeared white but pushed for civil rights for freed slaves; William H. Holtzclaw, a Tuskegee Institute graduate who founded his own small vocational institute in rural Mississippi; and Simon P. Owens, a Detroit labor organizer who developed a Marxist-humanist collective challenging new assembly-line technologies that threatened the humanity of workers. Through these six individuals, Jones offers a provocative analysis of race and the abuse of power.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)