From Savage to Negro

by Baker, Lee D.

• ISBN13: 9780520211674
• ISBN10: 0520211677
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

Lee D. Baker explores what racial categories mean to the American public and how these meanings are reinforced by anthropology, popular culture, and the law. Focusing on the period between two landmark Supreme Court decisions--Plessy v. Ferguson(the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine established in 1896) andBrown v. Board of Education(the public school desegregation decision of 1954)--Baker shows how racial categories change over time. Baker paints a vivid picture of the relationships between specific African American and white scholars, who orchestrated a paradigm shift within the social sciences from ideas based on Social Darwinism to those based on cultural relativism. He demonstrates that the greatest impact on the way the law codifies racial differences has been made by organizations such as the NAACP, which skillfully appropriated the new social science to exploit the politics of the Cold War.

Table of Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS	ix	(2)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	xi
Introduction	1	(10)
Chapter 1 History and Theory of a Racialized Worldview	11	(15)
Chapter 2 The Ascension of Anthropology as Social Darwinism	26	(28)
Chapter 3 Anthropology in American Popular Culture	54	(27)
Chapter 4 Progressive-Era Reform: Holding on to Hierarchy	81	(18)
Chapter 5 Rethinking Race at the Turn of the Century: W. E. B. Du Bois and Franz Boas	99	(28)
Chapter 6 The New Negro and Cultural Politics of Race	127	(16)
Chapter 7 Looking behind the Veil with the Spy Glass of Anthropology	143	(25)
Chapter 8 Unraveling the Boasian Discourse	168	(20)
Chapter 9 Anthropology and the Fourteenth Amendment	188	(20)
Chapter 10 The Color-Blind Bind	208	(21)
APPENDIX: TIME LINE OF MAJOR EVENTS	229	(10)
NOTES	239	(48)
BIBLIOGRAPHY	287	(26)
INDEX	313