In 1656, a Maryland planter tortured and killed an enslaved man named
Antonio, an Angolan who refused to work in the fields. Three hundred
years later, Simon P. Owens battled soul-deadening technologies as well
as the fiction of "race" that divided him from his co-workers in a
Detroit auto-assembly plant. Separated by time and space, Antonio and
Owens nevertheless shared a distinct kind of political vulnerability;
they lacked rights and opportunities in societies that accorded marked
privileges to people labeled "white."
An American creation myth posits that these two black men were the
victims of "racial" discrimination, a primal prejudice that the United
States has haltingly but gradually repudiated over the course of many
generations. In A Dreadful Deceit, award-winning historian Jacqueline
Jones traces the lives of Antonio, Owens, and four other African
Americans to illustrate the strange history of "race" in America. In
truth, Jones shows, race does not exist, and the very factors that we
think of as determining it-- a person's heritage or skin color--are mere
pretexts for the brutalization of powerless people by the powerful.
Jones shows that for decades, southern planters did not even bother to
justify slavery by invoking the concept of race; only in the late
eighteenth century did whites begin to rationalize the exploitation and
marginalization of blacks through notions of "racial" difference.
Indeed, race amounted to a political strategy calculated to defend overt
forms of discrimination, as revealed in the stories of Boston King, a
fugitive in Revolutionary South Carolina; Elleanor Eldridge, a savvy but
ill-starred businesswoman in antebellum Providence, Rhode Island;
Richard W. White, a Union veteran and Republican politician in
post-Civil War Savannah; and William Holtzclaw, founder of an industrial
school for blacks in Mississippi, where many whites opposed black
schooling of any kind. These stories expose the fluid, contingent, and
contradictory idea of race, and the disastrous effects it has had, both
in the past and in our own supposedly post-racial society.
Expansive, visionary, and provocative, A Dreadful Deceit explodes the
pernicious fiction that has shaped four centuries of American history.
