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By Root 1092 0

particularly when it manifested itself in lavish expenditures, provoked bitter responses in the black community. William J. Whipper, a northern-born black who settled in South Carolina after the war, berated the “worshippers of false gods” he found among his own people. “Fashion rules the hour,” he wrote in 1866, “and, like menial slaves, we do its bidding.… The street, the church, and the ball-room are the theatres for its display of presumptive impudence.” It simply made no sense. To obscure their lowly station in life, blacks were expending money on luxuries which they could ill afford, thereby compounding their poverty in a vain effort to hide it.

Our real condition is obscured by falsehood. In our attempts to cheat others, we cheat ourselves. We wear fine clothing, silks, satins, broadcloth, and trinkets, for the purpose of representing our wealth, while every person possessing a grain of common sense thinks quite to the contrary.

In their attempts to emulate whites, Whipper concluded, black people were totally ignoring the system of economy and industry that would ultimately enable them to achieve that objective. Making that point even more explicit, a black newspaper in Louisiana suggested that only the ownership of land would bring to blacks the respectability they now sought by indulging themselves in the white man’s fashions and follies.

Because we had to put up with a home-spun suit before emancipation we are determined to wear a silk one now no matter at what cost to our stomachs or our landlords. We are a poor people: everybody knows it: we are an ignorant people, the fact speaks for itself; we are an inexperienced people as every day’s transactions will prove, and yet it is a painful fact that we will spend more time and money to appear what we are not, than it would cost to be what we pretend to be.

And yet this same newspaper that scorned lavish dress and entertainments featured articles describing fancy balls of colored people, the finery of their clothes, and the excellence of their repasts; indeed, in the very same issue and on the same page as the editorial on “Extravagance Among Colored People” appeared “The Fashion Department,” with tips on “Summer Styles and Novelties.” Similarly, the same newspapers that extolled the virtues of blackness and eloquently appealed to race pride often included advertisements on how black people could make themselves more white.80

The paradox did not lend itself to any easy or immediate resolution. But the frank discussion of such questions did force blacks to examine critically who they were and the nature of their relationship to white society. If some were naturally drawn toward the models and values of that society, still others thought the loss of racial distinctiveness too heavy a price to pay for admission. To ape the ways of a people who mocked, degraded, and ostracized them, moreover, in the expectation they could gain the respect of such people, would most likely be an exercise in futility and reinforce their feelings of inferiority. To shed their Negroness, whitewash their culture, and deny their ancestral homeland would result in still more self-hatred and self-deprecation. “They seemed to think that by repudiating the word ‘colored’ they would become white,” a veteran black abolitionist observed; “that though they were as black a man as I, they, by rejecting that word colored would directly become as white as the natives of this country.” James Lynch, before embarking on his political career in Mississippi, thought he understood the type all too well—those who placed no value on the ability of men of their own race, who adopted the opinions respecting them that most whites held, who preferred white men as religious instructors, teachers, physicians, and lawyers because they were white, who disparaged their own color and thereby paid homage to the alleged superiority of the Anglo-Saxon. And invariably, if such individuals should be flattered, feted, or rewarded by whites, “they will kiss the hands of the oppressor and ally themselves with the enemies