Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America

The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America

Lewis, Sarah

Hardcover

Art History19th Century United States HistoryBlack American Studies

Publisher Price: $35.00

ISBN10: 0674238346
ISBN13: 9780674238343
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: Sep 17 2024
Pages: 400
Weight: 2.10
Height: 2.10 Width: 6.70 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

Finalist for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Chicago Tribune, 10 Best Books of 2024
A Hyperallergic Best Book of the Year

The award-winning art historian and founder of Vision & Justice uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation's racial regime.

In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation's racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen--until now.

The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War--the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War--revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive Caucasian for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them.

To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations--and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.

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