White Over Black

Summary

A landmark study of the origins of anti-Black racism in Anglo-American thought, tracing English attitudes toward Africans from the late sixteenth century through the early national period in the United States. Jordan reads travel narratives, sermons, scientific writing, and law to show how associations of Blackness with sin, sexuality, and savagery hardened into the ideology of slavery. The book reshaped the historical study of race by treating racism as a cultural and psychological formation, not merely an economic byproduct.