THE UNSEEN TRUTH

An art and cultural historian spotlights racial propaganda fueled by willed blindness.

Drawing on abundant scholarship, Lewis investigates images that contributed to Americans’ conception of race from the Civil War through the Jim Crow era. She focuses particularly on the connection made between whiteness and the Caucasus, a region that waged a war against Russian incursion from 1817 to 1864. Americans were hugely sympathetic to the Caucasus, which a prominent 18th-century German naturalist had argued was the “homeland of racial whiteness.” In a society consumed by “the urgent need to shore up the idea of race,” Caucasian came to be conflated with white, a concept that persisted despite stark visual evidence to the contrary. Lewis examines a range of images—paintings, sculpture, and photographs—to reveal how “the tactics of unseeing” enabled this racial fiction to be “hardened into foundational fact.” Women from the Caucasus, for example, were reputed to be the most beautiful in the world, a belief that P.T. Barnum exploited by exhibiting “Circassian Beauties” in his various venues. Images of the Caucasus circulating after the Civil War revealed a racially mixed population, and by 1876, another conflict, which Americans called a “Mahomedan revolt,” recast the region as Muslim and Asian, “a place filled with ‘alien racial elements.’” Nevertheless, the definition of Caucasian as European white, at the pinnacle of the racial hierarchy, was underscored by many, including Woodrow Wilson. This arch-segregationist’s racist policies were abetted by what Lewis terms visual “racial detailing…assessment filtered through brutal stereotypes and narratives” and a malignant precursor to today’s racial profiling.

A fresh, authoritative historical inquiry.