The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

by Mechal Sobel and Michal Sobel

Book Overview

In the recent past, enormous creative energy has gone into the study of American slavery, with major explorations of the extent to which African culture affected the culture of black Americans and with an almost totally new assessment of slave culture as Afro-American. Accompanying this new awareness of the African values brought into America, however, is an automatic assumption that white traditions influenced black ones. In this view, although...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691006083
• ISBN13: 9780691006086
• Release Date: October 1989
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 388 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Black, white, shades of grey, but just a little too rosy.

Substantially, I agree with the other reviewer. Sobel argues successfully that there existed in the South (at any rate in Virginia) during the Antebellum period a culture that displayed African influences, and that these influences were visible not just among blacks but among whites, who increasingly were raised by slaves, learned to walk and talk from slaves, and in some cases were unable to function emotionally or physically without slaves.What's missing from the picture is the abuse and cruelty inherent to the slave system. And, one could argue, appropriately: it's not what the book is about. My concern would be that if this were the *only* book one read about the Antebellum South, one could emerge with a skewed picture.

The World They Made Together

Sobel uses the concept of "world views" to support her argument that although the English and the different cultures in West Africa had separate world views, the close interaction between 18th-century Virginian whites and blacks resulted in these separate world views deeply influencing each other. In the 18th century, black and white children played together, white children often had a black woman as a "surrogate mother", and blacks and whites often worshipped together. This close interaction reinforced perceptions, values, and identities (world views) that were common between the two world view systems and, with time, the differences between the world views resulted in each world view being influenced by the other until they developed a symbiotic relationship.