IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS:

The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America
by Sarah Lewis
Harvard University Press, 2024

[Publication date: September 17, 2024]

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.

 
REVIEWS:

“A searing, important read that helps unpack the current moment and future of our country, and also a feat of detective work that uncovers historical events that profoundly changed the course of the world.”―Town & Country


“Drawing on abundant scholarship, Lewis investigates images that contributed to Americans’ conception of race from the Civil War through the Jim Crow era…A fresh, authoritative historical inquiry.”―Kirkus Reviews


“A work of searing perspective…exposes ongoing historical narratives about who belongs in American society, revealing the skewed perceptions behind fiction-based racial systems.”―Erika Harlitz Kern, Foreword


“Absolutely brilliant. Uniquely astute. Sarah Lewis grows The Unseen Truth from her superb Vision and Justice project into a work of stunning originality. There is so much here as Lewis ‘unsilences’ the past in a voice both informative and seductive. Her astonishing cast of characters stars Caucasians, Circassians, and most revealingly, Woodrow Wilson. Each chapter exposes the ‘racial detailing’ that has constructed a repressive racial regime that, once seen, can be undone.”―Nell Irvin Painter, author of the New York Times bestseller The History of White People


“Sarah Lewis’s The Unseen Truth isn’t just a groundbreaking work of visionary scholarship. It’s an earthquake. Here is the map key to seeing―or, as she shows, re-seeing―the fault lines of race and how, after the Civil War, they were buried beneath an onslaught of constructed American fictions diabolical in their details and devastating in what they taught generations to filter out, allowing them to see only in Black and white. All credit to Lewis for removing the blindfold.”―Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Box: Writing the Race


“Race is a fiction, even as it overwhelms and shapes our history. In The Unseen Truth, born of her long study of visuality, Sarah Lewis returns innovatively to the story of race as a creation of how we see or unsee. She beautifully illuminates an American and human tragedy―that we may be much better at seeing race than we ever are at understanding it. In a sweeping history from the Civil War to the Great War era, Lewis shows historically how Americans forged a lethal racial regime with their eyes as much as their minds.”―David W. Blight, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom


“In a work of great originality and scholarly imagination, Sarah Lewis opens our eyes to what we have been too blinded to see in the narratives of race that have defined our nation. Her insights are transformative and indispensable.”―Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

“In The Unseen Truth, it is almost as if Sarah Lewis has given us a new pair of glasses that allow us to see history in ways that were previously unclear. Every chapter is suffused with revelations that expand and clarify our understanding of the past. This book has changed the way I look at history. It has changed the way I observe the world. Lewis has provided us with an indispensable resource to better see ourselves.”―Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction


“An engaging, compelling read from a remarkable scholar. The Unseen Truth shines light on a long-silenced history, offering endless ways to realize the possibilities for justice.”―Deborah Willis, prizewinning photo historian and author of Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present

“Writing about race is like hunting for the origins of a lie. In this masterpiece of American history, written with verve, delicacy, and imagination, Lewis takes the color line and blows it up, capturing a moment in the late nineteenth century when the older rhythms of racial sight broke down and a new, pernicious attention to detail emerged. The supposed truth of tiny distinctions, she shows us, is a lie of enormous, heartbreaking consequence for the decades that followed.”―Matthew Pratt Guterl, author of Skinfolk


“A watershed in the study of art, social, and cultural history, The Unseen Truth is probing and brilliant, based on superb research and filled with remarkable discoveries. Sarah Lewis illuminates what it means to both ‘see’ and create race, deepening our ability to pursue justice.”―Imani Perry, author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, winner of the National Book Award


“Exhaustively researched, deeply original, and analytically brilliant, The Unseen Truth is a landmark in the literature on race. Sarah Lewis has uncovered elements that are both literally and metaphorically hidden in plain sight and offered a new way of seeing the racial fictions that surround us. The canon of indispensable books on the volatile alchemy of race has just grown by one.”―Jelani Cobb, author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress


“In this richly researched and capacious text, Sarah Lewis traces the fictions of race that subtend racial domination and the ways that their maintenance demands a simultaneous seeing and unseeing. With its sustained attention to art, photography, popular culture, and performance, The Unseen Truth enacts ‘a system break in the usual circuits’ of ‘racial sight’ and representation. This is necessary reading.”―Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes


“In this extraordinary book, Sarah Lewis opens our eyes to the centuries of sedimented prejudice that continue to shape our present. Taking us on a journey from the Caucasus to America, where new racial imaginaries were being forged, she shows how the instability of the Caucasus as a signifier of race reveals the fragile, spurious nature of racialized thinking itself.”―Rebecca Ruth Gould, author of Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus


“The Unseen Truth is a magnificent revelation. Lewis traces the precise historical moments when minute cultural obediences became sutured―a process she calls ‘detailing’―into American habits of seeing. She illuminates how insistent little distinctions quietly moved collective perceptions of difference, imposed borders, and built walls for or against the social risks of diminished status and civil death. To this day, these creepingly astigmatic distortions undergird laws that contradict themselves in every possible way except their consistent adherence to a vision of derogated black humanity. Sarah Lewis has written a brilliant and breathtaking exposé of an American tragedy: how we intentionally and repeatedly have found ways to blind our eyes and silence our souls as a way of proving what doesn’t exist”―Patricia J. Williams, author of The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law


“In this lyrically written and deeply learned book, Sarah Lewis excavates the repressed pasts and submerged narratives of racialization that have shaped American life. The Unseen Truth not only restores this fascinating history to vision, but also enables us to reconsider the American project from her passionate, critical, and necessary perspective.”―Huey Copeland, coeditor of Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World


“The Unseen Truth is a call to arms.”―Maurice Berger, author of For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights

 

 

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

 

 

Sarah Lewis is the founder of Vision & Justice and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press), the bestseller, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (Simon & Schuster), and the forthcoming book Vision & Justice (One World/Random House). Lewis is the editor of the award-winning volumes, “Vision & Justice” by Aperture magazine and the anthology on the work of Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press). She is the organizer of the landmark Vision & Justice Convening at Harvard University, and co-editor of the Vision & Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture. Her awards include the Infinity Award, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship, the Freedom Scholar Award (ASALH), the Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association, and the Photography Network Book Prize. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, and the New York Review of Books, and her work has been the subject of profiles from The Boston Globe to the New York Times. Lewis is a sought-after public speaker, with a mainstage TED talk that received over three million views. She received her BA from Harvard University, an MPhil from Oxford University, an MA from Courtauld Institute of Art, and her PhD from Yale University. She lives in New York City and Cambridge, MA.

 

 

Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership
by Brea Baker
‎One World, 2024

[Publication date: June 18, 2024]

 

Why is less than 1% of rural land in the U.S. owned by Black people? An acclaimed writer and activist explores the impact of land theft and violent displacement on racial wealth gaps, arguing that justice stems from the literal roots of the earth.

“With heartfelt prose and unyielding honesty, Baker explores the depths of her roots and invites readers to reflect on our own.”—Donovan X. Ramsey, author of the National Book Award for Nonfiction semi-finalist When Crack Was King

To understand the contemporary racial wealth gap, we must first unpack the historic attacks on Indigenous and Black land ownership. From the moment that colonizers set foot on Virginian soil, a centuries-long war was waged, resulting in an existential dilemma: Who owns what on stolen land? Who owns what with stolen labor? To answer these questions, we must confront one of this nation’s first sins: stealing, hoarding, and commodifying the land.


Research suggests that between 1910 and 1997, Black Americans lost about 90% of their farmland. Land theft widened the racial wealth gap, privatized natural resources, and created a permanent barrier to access that should be a birthright for Black and Indigenous communities. Rooted traces the experiences of Brea Baker’s family history of devastating land loss in Kentucky and North Carolina, identifying such violence as the root of persistent inequality in this country. Ultimately, her grandparents’ commitment to Black land ownership resulted in the Bakers Acres—a haven for the family where they are sustained by the land, surrounded by love, and wholly free.


A testament to the Black farmers who dreamed of feeding, housing, and tending to their communities, Rooted bears witness to their commitment to freedom and reciprocal care for the land. By returning equity to a dispossessed people, we can heal both the land and our nation’s soul.

REVIEWS:


“A deeply personal story . . . Even as it teems with decades of policy and sociological research, Rooted unfolds like a yarn passed down through the generations. Baker pulls off the trick of remaining an authoritative narrator while holding onto the same sense of wonder that thickened the air during her formative trips down south.”—The Guardian


“In her vigorous debut history . . . [Baker] writes evocatively about Black farmers’ relationship with the land and argues passionately for Black Americans to return to family farms (she’s unabashedly utopian on this point, and her frustration with Black people uninterested in rural life is palpable). Baker keeps tightly focused on the topic and writes in a conversational prose that casually draws on a wide range of thinkers. Educators in particular will find this invaluable.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“With Rooted, Brea Baker takes us on an inspiring journey through the complexities of identity, the modern movement for Black land ownership, and the pursuit of belonging. With heartfelt prose and unyielding honesty, Baker explores the depths of her roots and invites readers to reflect on our own.”—Donovan X. Ramsey, author of the National Book Award for Nonfiction semi-finalist When Crack Was King

“Brea Baker’s Rooted is a moving, insightful, and intimate account of the history of Black land ownership and land theft in the United States. It is a must-read for anyone interested in advancing racial justice and equity.”—Keisha N. Blain, co-editor of the #1 New York Times bestseller Four Hundred Souls


“Brea Baker roots her own family history in the long and often violent story of American land theft and land possession. Rooted details the plight and promise of Black American land ownership through time. This is a crucial and compelling study of race and wealth in America.”—Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden


“A well-documented study of land ownership among Black Americans and the accompanying land theft . . . A passionate, engaging combination of history, memoir, and examination of income inequality.”—Kirkus Reviews



ABOUT THE AUTHOR:



Brea Baker has been working on the front lines for more than a decade. She believes deeply in nuanced storytelling and Black culture to drive change, and she has commented on race, gender, and sexuality for Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Refinery29, Them, and more. Her writing has been featured in the anthologies Our History Has Always Been Contraband and No Justice, No Peace. A Yale alumna, Baker has been recognized as a 2017 Glamour Woman of the Year, a 2019 i-D Up + Rising, and a 2023 Creative Capital awardee. She has spoken at the United Nations’ Girl Up Initiative, Yale Law School, the Youth to Youth Summit in Hong Kong, the Museum of the City of New York, and elsewhere.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

When I close my eyes, I imagine a world where Black people are joyful and the Earth is safer and thriving. —Leah Thomas

Mother Earth is not a resource, she is an heirloom. —David Ipina, Yurok Tribe

In the beginning, there was the Land and the Land was no one’s because the Land was everyone’s—an extension of us. The Land was living—taking as much as She gave. She spoke to us and we helped to cherish and cultivate Her. She listened, held, and fed us. And when other living things died, the Land took them in. She let the dead help us keep on living and learning, evolving and teaching.

In the beginning, “generational wealth” was the planet and all that She bears. Surplus was an opportunity to lead a happier, healthier life. Everyone had access to the same air, water, and right to housing. That is not to say that certain tribes and communities didn’t succumb to greed but that capitalism was not the normative social order. Before outsiders tried to outsmart the Land, whose wisdom and memory reached further back than theirs, the people learned from and tended the Land, in a loving exchange.


In the beginning, the Americas were just as populated as any other continent. However, the people were far less extractive in their relationship to the land. The first Europeans to cross the Atlantic did not find wilderness. Rather, the eastern coastline of what we now call the United States of America was lined with Indigenous-designed irrigation systems rivaling Venice and terraced fields à la Vietnam, though home to different seeds. Pastures fed herds of bison, which in turn fed the tribes who sustainably hunted them. The coasts of North Carolina made for great fishing, and the (then) forested barrier islands, now known as the Outer Banks, sustained a biodiversity we can only imagine now. Roanoke-Hatteras Algonquin, Chowanog, and Poteskeet peoples filled their bellies with oysters, flounder, and trout, and their communities retained a strong sense of interdependence. Everything and everyone existed in a finely tuned balance, taking as much as they gave.

Scientists in the United Kingdom have studied the impact that European “arrival” to the Americas had on our planet, and it is painfully clear that Earth mourned and suffered the loss viscerally. An estimated 56 million Indigenous people were killed across the Americas—either by these new viruses or the violence committed by those who transported them. Ninety percent of the population that tilled and nourished the land died; and the land did more than rewild. Stone pyramids and temples lay hidden under layers of vegetation. Trees and brush took over. Approximately 55.8 million hectares of land—about one-third of Russia’s landmass—overtook itself and reforested.

The last time Earth went through a period of cooling—in contrast to the global warming we’re currently experiencing—was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the decimation of Indigenous populations led to a drastic drop in CO2 levels. It ultimately sent the planet deeper into the Little Ice Age, where northern harbors closed their ports and famines traveled from continent to continent.

When those boats disappeared into the hazy horizon, the Land and Her stewards were already forever changed.

The modern concept of private property went against everything Black and Indigenous people knew about life. As Matthew Desmond wrote in his essay on capitalism for The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, “[Private property] is what enables a private landowner to fence off natural resources and forests and rivers, assets that originally belonged to no one and were stewarded by the surrounding community, transforming common goods into commodities controlled by a single person or business entity.” Land in the Americas had become politicized since the arrival of the first European colonists in the fifteenth century, and that only snowballed into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Settler colonialism, the violent replacement of Indigenous peoples by (often European) outsiders, created deep inequity as land became a chess piece for the powerful. Access to land meant so much more than purely where you laid your head or where you kept your things. In I’ve Been Here All the While, Dr. Alaina E. Roberts writes, “Native peoples have long established their connection to the lands they occupied . . . through medicinal, food, and spiritual traditions that utilize plants and animals indigenous to the area . . . Removal meant that [Indigenous people] were not only physically uprooted but also spiritually uprooted.” And when it came to Black people, Desmond continues reminding us that “slavery, then, required ‘the magic of property.’ ”

The more land Europeans could push Indigenous people off of, the more demand for forced labor to produce ecologically unsustainable, yet highly lucrative, amounts of cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugarcane.

Men with alabaster skin and bleached worldviews wanted a monopoly on life itself. They literally and figuratively lassoed their surroundings into submission. They did not realize that their existence depended on the health of the entire ecosystem, nor did they understand what Black and Indigenous peoples, no matter which continent we’ve called home, inherently understood—that one’s relationship with the land should be familial, spiritual. Marilyn Berry Morrison, of the Roanoke-Hatteras Tribe, in an interview with the Island Free Press, offered, “Long before conservation efforts were ever dreamed of—or needed—stewardship was simply an innate part of everyday life . . . We lived with nature, and everything that we had came from nature . . . and we were appreciative of that.”

Freedom for both enslaved African people and dispossessed Native Americans relied on alliances against the imperialism that had already transformed the African and American continents. Freedom was community in the face of violent individualism, which makes it no surprise that some of the first acts toward Black liberation were marronage—the art of stealing oneself and building community with other self-liberators—rather than more individualized approaches to getting free. To put it plainly, maroons are escaped Black people, and their descendants, who fled plantations and established new communities just under the noses of their former enslavers. Oftentimes, maroons found refuge with nearby Indigenous tribes and forged a new society together, one that resisted capitalism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and anti-Indigeneity. Which is to say that their societies didn’t let the lust for profit get in the way of prioritizing connection: to one another, to the living things all around us, and to the land.


Dr. Neil Roberts, professor and author of Freedom as Marronage, explored the sociological, political, and economic structures underpinning marronage, which he defines in his introduction as “a group of persons isolating themselves from a surrounding society in order to create a fully autonomous community.” He goes on to remind readers that marronage existed across the Americas, in Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Suriname, Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico. In Brazil, where more than 50 percent of the nation’s population is Black, quilombo is the word used to describe rural communities of Black escapees, and over three thousand of them exist to this day. Clébio Ferreira, who founded Quilombaque, a quilombo in the Perus neighborhood of São Paulo, explained why he invests in modern-day marronage: “When we build a quilombo, we are coming together to build a new world.”


Despite being continents away, these maroon, cimarrón, and quilombo societies were structured very similarly: always situated in rural areas, defended through guerilla warfare, spiritually grounded, and noticeably equitable. Before the existence of modern technologies, without ways of knowing and replicating what was transpiring thousands of miles away, maroon communities across the Americas tapped into a common ancestral feeling and let that be their North Star.


Maroon communities were not formed haphazardly, and their intentionality can and should be a beacon for those committing to justice in the twenty-first century and beyond. According to Dr. Neil Roberts, “Marronage is a multidimensional, constant act of flight that involves what I ascertain to be four interrelated pillars: distance, movement, property, and purpose,” with movement being the central principle. Movement, defined as autonomy and control over one’s motion, is an obvious component of freedom for a group of people previously transported against their will to work for others. What made distance, property, and purpose critical is that autonomy and access to land were so interconnected. As Dr. Neil Roberts describes, “Land is a space of cultivation. It is where one can work and rest.”