The White Man's Burden

Jordan, Winthrop D. The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States. New York. Oxford University Press, 1974.

Race is a mystifying thing. It appears on the surface to be a simple fact of life—skin coloring is, after all, readily apparent—but examine it a little more closely, and clarity rapidly gives way to confusion. What is the dividing line between white and black? If we can determine no precise measure, is it really a physical fact? Perhaps racial differences are more a matter of culture than physiology. If so, the waters are murkier still, for cultures are even more difficult to describe than physical features. The history of racialized slavery and segregation in the U.S. only deepens the mystery. Why white over black?

This is the burden Winthrop Jordan’s work on the historical origins of racism. His history denaturalizes something we consider to be a fact of life. And, as has become popular to point out, something that was historically constructed can also be deconstructed. Mental habits can be changed.

Jordan is principally concerned, then, with racism as complex of “attitudes,” lying somewhere “between ‘thought’ and ‘feeling’, between conscious and unconscious mental processes” (ix). His sources, as a result, tend to be more qualitative than quantitative. Letters and journals of planters and clergymen appear frequently, as do legislative documents toward the end of the book. But he supports his argument primarily with published works, from Shakespeare (most notably, Othello) to quasi-scientific explanations for physical differences (most extensively, Thomas Jefferson).

The White Man’s Burden is a “drastic abridgement” of Jordan’s opus, White Over Black; as a result of this compression and some very skillful rewriting, the book clips along at an astonishing pace (viii). In fifty pages Jordan takes us from first contact around 1550 to the establishment of North American slavery by 1700; in seventy more up to the American Revolution; in a hundred more to the end of his story in the early 1800s.

At the core of Jordan’s argument is racism as a sort of Jekyl and Hyde phenomenon, a psychological projection of white men’s anxieties onto blacks. “White men,” he writes “were attempting to destroy the living image of primitive aggressions which they said was the Negro but was really their own” (222). To cite perhaps the clearest example, Jordan contends that whites portrayed both male and female Negroes as libidinous creatures that required strict discipline because white men were unable to own up to their sexual passions. Here also is the hopeful side of Jordan’s grim tale: “if the white man turned to stare at the animal within him, if he once admitted unashamedly that the beast was there, he might see that the old foe was a friend as well” (226).

White men, of course, bear primary responsibility for this destructive set of attitudes. But Jordan also describes a whole series of tragic historical circumstances that played into the development of racial prejudice. When the English came upon Africans for the first time, their society was “in a state of rapid flux.” Their religion was becoming more inward and self-scrutinizing; their entrepreneurs were self-consciously “on the make.” The Africans were different. “From the first,” then, “Englishmen tended to set Africans over against themselves” as part of constructing their own identity (25). Through a similar combination of conscious and unconscious steps—their concept of slavery, the Spanish example, the necessities of the New World—English colonists came to accept the association of Africans with slavery. By the eighteenth century, the rapid influx of Africans induced a “thoroughgoing commitment” to slavery on the part of the British colonists, a “submission to the decrees of life in America” (57).

But this commitment to slavery coexisted with an equally strong belief in equality and natural rights—the principles that led to the American Revolution. The colonists dealt with this contradiction by continuing to emphasize the differences between themselves and Africans: they outlawed interracial sex, resisted the evangelization of slaves, and ascribed to various theories of Negro inferiority. “Slavery could survive,” after all, “only if the Negro were a man set apart” (89).

Still, in the Revolution and its aftermath, Americans became increasingly self-conscious about the contradiction between slavery and freedom. The anti-slavery movement gained traction, although only enough to end the slave trade at a time when it was becoming economically unviable anyway. The Haitian Revolution—the world’s only successful slave uprising—on the other hand, made slavery “entirely unsuitable for frank discussion,” which led in turn to a hardening of the racial landscape in America (148). “Many Americans,” Jordan concludes, “seemed unable to tolerate equality without separation” (161). This painful incongruity would find its ultimate expression in Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s writings represented “the most intense, extensive, and extreme formulation of anti-Negro ‘thought’” of his time, yet his racism was joined by “his prejudice for freedom and his larger egalitarian faith” (193). The latter tendency, Jordan suggests, would eventually prevail in America.

Jordan’s work has much to recommend it. Although this abridged version contains no notes, it is clear that he has mined some of the best available materials to support his argument. Strangely enough, at the center of The White Man’s Burden is an assertion that cannot be proven. The reader must accept Jordan’s psychoanalysis of white men in order to fully approve his argument that they dealt with their inner turmoil by projecting it onto Africans. The credibility of his contention, then, rests on beliefs about the nature of humans. Yet this explanation, as esoteric as it may seem, is remarkably resonant. For unlike interpretations that posit racism as little more than a justification for social or economic advantage, Jordan’s allows for inconsistency. People can be racist and yet remain human. This simple insight may be Jordan’s chief contribution.