a hideous monster of the mind

A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic
Bruce Dain

As he makes clear in the preface to his book, Dain's work is based on the assumption that racial theory and slavery debates revolved around the question of whether blacks could truly participate in citizenship or were incapable, whether such incapacity was due to genetic inferiority or the damages of slavery. To show this, Dain presents what he calls "an integrated intellectual history…of these first major rationalizations of race" (viii). While Dain's discussion of writings on race illustrates the variability in views both over time and within the same eras, as well as the connections and differences between racial theories, he does not spend much time addressing what impact these theories had on the general public or how much these theories reflected prevailing cultural attitudes.

The explanation of Dain's theoretical approach is provided only in the few pages of the preface, and both an extension of the preface and some sort of conclusion would have helped a great deal in tying together the evidence he presents. There are three primary points that I would have liked to see more discussion of in Dain's work.

First, as I mentioned above, while Dain contextualizes the theories of race he presents in relationship to other theories of race, he does not contextualize these theories in relationship to overall cultural attitudes. Thus, when we begin by discussing Jefferson's Notes, Dain states that his intent is to "begin to present a fresh interpretation of late eighteenth-century Enlightened American discourse on race" (6), but what I wanted to know was: Who was part of this discourse and what impact did it have on those who were not part of it? The institution of slavery existed prior to the beginning of this discourse; what "explanations" were used then? What was the rationale of those slaveholders who were not part of this discourse?

Similarly, although many of the racial theories Dain delineates purport to be scientific, and Dain casts doubt upon the credibility of their claims to scientific approaches, dismissing the majority of "early polygenists" as "just sloppy thinkers" (74). Despite this seeming willingness to take on the role of assessing scientific rigor, however, he avoids any real consideration of the ways that "scientific objectivity" has been constructed as a neutral although in reality the concept has consistently and historically been used to reinforce cultural structures of domination. Instead, Dain implies that there is a way to address race scientifically, or at least does not deny it as a possibility.

This brings us to my second issue with the text: It is at no point clear to the reader what Dain's theoretical stance is in racial theory. While it may be that his intent was to let the facts speak for themselves, or, in other words, to simply present the progression of theories as a set of historical ideas, this, again, presumes that it is possible to create a non-ideological narrative. Dain includes the writings of a number of black racial theorists and in fact asserts that Jefferson is responding to Phillis Wheatley, an interesting claim; taken together, these suggest that he might believe previous histories of racial theorists have been lacking, but since he chooses not to address this other than to note in the preface what he is including, it's hard to be sure what his reasons were.

Additionally, Dain varies between referring to blacks as "Negroes," "African-Americans," and "blacks." Given that choices of racial descriptions have a significant amount of baggage and history attached to them, I would have liked an explanation of Dain's rationale for his choices.

At the end of Hideous Monster, the question that stuck with me was: What did Dain hope to accomplish with this book? This is not, as it might seem, a suggestion that nothing was accomplished; Dain provides a comprehensive, well-written, informative review and analysis of racial theories. The problem is that I'm not sure whether this is provided as an effort to correct the record of such histories—and if so, what Dain's objections to them might have been—or is an indication of a new theoretical approach, or perhaps leads to new conclusions about the current state of racial theory in the United States.