Nicholas Guyatt, "Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation" (Basic Books, 2016)

New Books in African American Studies · Nov 20, 2020 · 1h 8m

Why did the Founding Fathers fail to include blacks and Indians in their cherished proposition that “all men are created equal”? Racism is the usual answer. Yet Nicholas Guyatt argues in Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (Basic Books, 2016) that white liberals from the founding to the Civil War were not confident racists, but tortured reformers conscious of the damage that racism would do to the nation. Many tried to build a multiracial America in the early nineteenth century, but ultimately adopted the belief that non-whites should create their own…