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[Editor's note: Before Stephanie M. H. Camp's untimely death in April 2014, the Journal of Southern History and its readers benefited from her insights and collegiality, first when she published her much-cited article, "The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830-1861," in the August 2002 issue of the Journal and later during her service on the board of editors from 2008 to 2011. At the time of her death, she had made significant progress toward a book manuscript on beauty and race. The Journal editors are pleased to present her overview of the argument she was making in that book. We expect it will be both useful in its own right and an inspiration for future work by other scholars. The editors would like to acknowledge the initiative and assistance of three of Camp's former colleagues at the University of Washington: Jordanna Bailkin, Chandan Reddy, and Lynn M. Thomas.]
In 1962 THE BLACK AMERICAN WRITER AND CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST James Baldwin reflected on the time he spent as a younger man, hanging "with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways" where he grew up. Thinking about how many of his friends' lives would ultimately be lost to drink or drugs or other trouble, Baldwin had wondered, "What will happen to all that beauty ?" "For black people," he wrote with a sadness that echoed the melancholy of some black thinkers from a century before, "though I am aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it yet, are very beautiful."1 How did it come to be that we did not know that in 1962? Where did the idea that black is less than beautiful come from? How far back in time does it reach? How have black people disputed it? What has beauty meant to black writers at different moments in the past? Why does this particular prejudice even matter?
We might answer these questions (and more) by tuning into the cacophony of voices-English, white American, and black American- who debated them over the five centuries between English contact with Africa in the sixteenth century and the historic election of Barack Obama, the West's first black head of state, in the early twenty-first. This is...