1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910807279803321

Autore

Wayne Michael <1947->

Titolo

Imagining Black America / / Michael Wayne

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Haven, Connecticut : , : Yale University Press, , 2014

©2014

ISBN

0-300-20687-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (336 p.)

Classificazione

SOC001000SOC056000HIS054000

Disciplina

305.896/073

Soggetti

African Americans - Race identity - History

Race awareness - United States - History

Race - Philosophy

United States Race relations History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- A Personal Introduction -- A Word about Race -- 1. Birth of a Race -- 2. On Immigration, Citizenship, and Being "Not-Black" -- 3. The Negro, "Incarnation of America" -- 4. Color and Class -- 5. The Civil Rights Movement -- 6. Black Power -- 7. Black Americans: A Changing Demographic -- 8. The "Truly Disadvantaged" -- 9. The "Privileged Class" -- Reimagining America -- Acknowledgments -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Scientific research has now established that race should be understood as a social construct, not a true biological division of humanity. In Imagining Black America, Michael Wayne explores the construction and reconstruction of black America from the arrival of the first Africans in Jamestown in 1619 to Barack Obama's reelection. Races have to be imagined into existence and constantly reimagined as circumstances change, Wayne argues, and as a consequence the boundaries of black America have historically been contested terrain. He discusses the emergence in the nineteenth century-and the erosion, during the past two decades-of the notorious "one-drop rule." He shows how significant periods of social transformation-emancipation, the Great Migration, the rise of the urban ghetto, and the Civil Rights Movement-raised major questions for black Americans about the defining



characteristics of their racial community. And he explores how factors such as class, age, and gender have influenced perceptions of what it means to be black. Wayne also considers how slavery and its legacy have defined freedom in the United States. Black Americans, he argues, because of their deep commitment to the promise of freedom and the ideals articulated by the Founding Fathers, became and remain quintessential Americans-the "incarnation of America," in the words of the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph.