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Abraham Lincoln and White America (Paperback)
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Abraham Lincoln and White America (Paperback)
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As ""Savior of the Union"" and the ""Great Emancipator,"" Abraham
Lincoln has been lauded for his courage, wisdom, and moral fiber.
Yet Frederick Douglass's assertion that Lincoln was the ""white
man's president"" has been used by some detractors as proof of his
fundamentally racist character. Viewed objectively, Lincoln was a
white man's president by virtue of his own whiteness and that of
the culture that produced him. Until now, however, historians have
rarely explored just what this means for our understanding of the
man and his actions. Writing at the vanguard of ""whiteness
studies,"" Brian Dirck considers Lincoln as a typical American
white man of his time who bore the multiple assumptions,
prejudices, and limitations of his own racial identity. He shows us
a Lincoln less willing or able to transcend those limitations than
his more heroic persona might suggest but also contends that
Lincoln's understanding and approach to racial bigotry was more
enlightened than those of most of his white contemporaries. Blazing
a new trail in Lincoln studies, Dirck reveals that Lincoln was well
aware of and sympathetic to white fears, especially that of
descending into ""white trash,"" a notion that gnawed at a man
eager to distance himself from his own coarse origins. But he also
shows that after Lincoln crossed the Rubicon of black emancipation,
he continued to grow beyond such cultural constraints, as seen in
his seven recorded encounters with nonwhites. Dirck probes more
deeply into what ""white"" meant in Lincoln's time and what it
meant to Lincoln himself, and from this perspective he proposes a
new understanding of how Lincoln viewed whiteness as a distinct
racial category that influenced his policies. As Dirck ably
demonstrates, Lincoln rose far enough above the confines of his
culture to accomplish deeds still worthy of our admiration, and he
calls for a more critically informed admiration of Lincoln that
allows us to celebrate his considerable accomplishments while
simultaneously recognizing his limitations. When Douglass observed
that Lincoln was the white man's president, he may not have
intended it as a serious analytical category. But, as Dirck shows,
perhaps we should do so-the better to understand not just the
Lincoln presidency, but the man himself.
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