Name: Bind Us Apart
ISBN: 9780198796541

Nicholas Guyatt

The study of USA's on-going failure to achieve true racial integration, Bind Us Apart shows how, from the Revolution through to the Civil War, white American anti-slavery reformers failed to forge a colour-blind society.

How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation

Bind Us Apart

The surprising and counterintuitive origins of America's racial crisis Why did the Founding Fathers fail to include blacks and Indians in their cherished proposition that "all men are created equal"? The usual answer is racism, but the reality is more complex and unsettling. In Bind Us Apart, historian Nicholas Guyatt argues that, from the Revolution through the Civil War, most white liberals believed in the unity of all human beings. But their philosophy faltered when it came to the practical work of forging a colour-blind society. Unable to convince others - and themselves - that racial mixing was viable, white reformers began instead to claim that people of colour could only thrive in separate republics: in Native states in the American West or in the West African colony of Liberia. Herein lie the origins of "separate but equal." Decades before Reconstruction, America's liberal elite was unable to imagine how people of colour could become citizens of the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, Native Americans were pushed farther and farther westward, while four million slaves freed after the Civil War found themselves among a white population that had spent decades imagining that they would live somewhere else.

Ron Bronson

Bind Us Apart has a lot of primary source information and quotes about the confusion many founding fathers of this country had with race, slavery and how to end it. I found it fascinating to learn how conflicted the landscape was politically in those days and how slow information moved relative to today. In many ways, little has changed despite our access to a bounty of data.

Fascinating to think of all of the alternate history scenarios that would have happened in the U.S., if different proposals would've gained more traction. Everything from a black settlement in the US West to a different one that considered annexing parts of South Carolina and Florida for a black colony. And of course, the money spent to annex Liberia, which enjoyed support from more than one sector of the population.

I think the premise that enlightened Americans invented racial segregation through their insistence on separating both First Nations Americans and Black Americans almost from the start. Attempts at assimilation weren't invested in any kind of belief of agency (at least it related to blacks) but were really married to notions of inferiority. Had the culture focused more on integration and collaboration, we'd be in a different place today.

Worth a read, it'll leave you wanting to read more about other aspects of history and figuring out who said what, why & better insight into how we ended up here.

Bind Us Apart How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation

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