From Savage to Negro

by Baker, Lee D.

• ISBN13: 9780520211681
• ISBN10: 0520211685
• Format: Paperback
• 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
Acknowledgments
Introduction	p. 1
History and Theory of a Racialized Worldview	p. 11
The Ascension of Anthropology as Social Darwinism	p. 26
Anthropology in American Popular Culture	p. 54
Progressive-Era Reform: Holding on to Hierarchy	p. 81
Rethinking Race at the Turn of the Century: W. E. B. Du Bois and Franz Boas	p. 99
The New Negro and Cultural Politics of Race	p. 127
Looking behind the Veil with the Spy Glass of Anthropology	p. 143
Unraveling the Boasian Discourse	p. 168
Anthropology and the Fourteenth Amendment	p. 188
The Color-Blind Bind	p. 208
Time Line of Major Events	p. 229
Notes	p. 239
Bibliography	p. 287
Index	p. 313
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