Reviewed by Joanne Pope Melish | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.4

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Reviewed by Joanne Pope Melish | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. By BRUCE DAIN . (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. x, 321. $29.95.) Reviewed by Joanne Pope Melish , University of Kentucky
Philosophers, religious and political thinkers, scientists, and crackpots have tried for centuries to explain human difference in terms of a category called "race." The ferocious single-mindedness of this project is baffling; rather than advancing our understanding of human development, it has retarded and sidetracked it. Tracing the evolution of "racial" thinking continues to attract an ever-growing number of scholars, but it is becoming increasingly clear that we have not yet developed an analytical language sufficiently distinct from the language of the racial project itself to stand completely clear of its assumptions. The persistent use of terms like "black writing" and "white newspapers" (as opposed to "blacks' writing") illustrates the point. Another difficulty is that the undeniable moral dimension of the study of race can tempt us to try to write the disempowered into retroactive equality by means of the analysis—a strategy that actually masks the radically unequal power relations that shaped and were shaped by racial thinking in the first place. "Race" is an intellectual tar baby made up of insufficiently precise conceptual frameworks, intersecting colloquial and formal vocabularies, and politics. In A Hideous Monster of the Mind, an ambitious effort to chart the intellectual history of theories of race in the early American republic, Bruce Dain grasps the tar baby confidently with both hands. This book offers an adventurous dialogic approach, much thought-provoking analysis, and several fresh interpretations in the course of tracking more than a half century of racial thinking, but it is not without some sticky spots.	1
Dain's goal is to trace the transformation of the "race" of the natural history debates of the late eighteenth-century Anglo-American Enlightenment into the scientific racism of the nineteenth century. His strategy is to present the evolving discourse of race as a kind of textual conversation between black and white intellectuals. This is the source of the greatest strengths as well as the serious weaknesses of this book.	2
After some preliminary discussion of evolving uses of the term "race" itself, Dain examines Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, devoting considerable attention to contesting "the common argument that Notes is the starting point for American scientific racism" (p. 3). Dain argues that both Notes and the writings of early black writers such as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano were products of an epistemology of natural history structured by the notion that nature reflected a harmonious and relatively static external order that could be perceived by the senses and understood by reason and imagination. In contrast, scientific racism based its natural categories on biology, on inner structures and essential truths, and on natural processes that allowed for adaptation and even permanent change. Hence, Jefferson was not a scientific racist; "the DNA does not match" (p. 3).	. . .

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