Alienable Rights: The Exclusion of African Americans in a White Man's Land, 1619-2000 - Hardcover

Adams, Francis D.; Sanders, Barry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 006019975X ISBN 13: 9780060199753

Publisher: Harper, 2003

Synopsis

In a devastating narrative that spans more than three centuries, from colonial times to the present day, Alienable Rights reveals how whites have excluded blacks from virtually every area of American life, denying them full citizenship and equality.

Brought to America early in the seventeenth century, the first slaves were treated in much the same way as indentured white servants who had come from England. After only a few years, however, whites ostracized blacks, who were viewed as an inferior race, and passed laws making their enslavement permanent, denying even free blacks the most basic rights enjoyed by whites. Though many slaves fought honorably in the Revolutionary War, earning their freedom, the Constitution (1787) sanctioned slavery, making it -- in the words of one of the signers -- the document's "most prominent feature." Three years later, Congress passed the nation's first naturalization act, limiting citizenship to "free white persons" only.

Throughout the country, a popular colonization movement developed, attracting whites who hoped to make the United States a purely white nation by transporting all blacks to Africa or the Caribbean. Though the Civil War ended slavery, the subsequent congressional attempt to remake southern society during Reconstruction failed because whites in both the North and the South were unwilling to accept blacks as equals, with the same rights to vote, to attend school, and to move freely throughout American society. Instead, the Supreme Court approved the subterfuge of "separate but equal," which allowed state governments to maintain racial segregation by providing blacks with inferior institutions of their own.

The "Jim Crow" system was overturned by the civil rights movement that followed World War II, but much of the progress of the 1960s and 1970s was blunted by an angry backlash in the 1980s.

The authors contend that the drive for African American equality has never had the support of the majority of white Americans. Racial progress has come in brief historical bursts when a committed militant minority -- abolitionists, radical Republicans, civil rights activists -- stirred the nation to action, pressuring it to change; but, invariably, advances have been followed by concerted efforts to restore white privilege.

About this title

About the Author

Barry Sanders teaches at Pitzer College, The Claremont Colleges, in California. He lives in Southern California.

Reviews

Adams and Sanders trace what they see as the "continuous arc of animosity" between blacks and whites in the United States, contextualizing and shedding light on the racism that that they find persists in the "dark recesses of the nation's heart." Adams, an independent scholar, and Sanders, a professor of English and the History of Ideas at Pitzer College, find obvious malignity in the constitutional debate among the founders over whether slaves should be counted as people or property, while Thomas Jefferson, in their view, was a rapist as well as a racist, since Sally Hemmings was 14 at the time of their first relations. The American colonization movement that led to the founding of Liberia was, for Adams and Sanders, a "draconian" plot hatched by whites of the American Colonization Society to rid the country of blacks. (While the concept did originate with ACS, well-regarded studies show strong support, culminating in Garveyism, for emigration among blacks.) Throughout, White America is painted in varying shades of bigotry, with crusaders like William Lloyd Garrison cast as stark exceptions. Scant attention is paid to the remarkable struggles of the freedmen during Reconstruction to build political power for blacks in the south; the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers emerge as sources of resistance. Often, the hard truth at the core of the authors' critique is obscured by totalizations on the order of White America Thinks This, Black America Thinks That: "most whites perceive blacks as equals, but fully culpable for their economic and social ills," while at the same time, despite an increasing number of elite and moneyed black citizens, "most blacks understand that though they live in the same nation as whites, they do not live within the same system." The sociological data needed to buttress such assertions is decidedly missing here; Adams and Sanders cite, repeatedly, a small number of secondary sources. That slavery was wrong and that America's treatment of its black citizens has been appalling should be obvious to readers; Winthrop Jordan, Cornel West and others, including those the authors cite, have produced far more innovative works on the same subject.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Adams and Sanders explore the dichotomy between our nation's expressed ideals and the denial of black rights in this fascinating look at American domestic policy from the 1600s to the present. The authors contend that intentional suppression of the rights of blacks for the economic benefit of whites remains central in American history and precludes sincere efforts to achieve racial justice. Yet, they point out, racism as we know it was not preordained; many of the chartered Africans in America were indentured servants, with rights similar to those of indentured whites, rights that early freed slaves and freedmen also exercised. However, from the Constitutional Convention until the present, the suppression of the rights of blacks with a corresponding denial of that suppression has been the norm. From unpaid slave labor through Jim Crow, the peonage system, and formal and informal segregation, through current conditions of economic underprivilege, black rights have been sacrificed for the economic well-being of white citizens. A disturbing look at racial disparity. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 006019975X
• ISBN 13: 9780060199753
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384