African-American Ideas about Race (with Mia Bay)

African-American Ideas about Race (with Mia Bay)

From Interventions | The Intellectual History Podcast by Interventions

September 17, 2025 · 1h 0m

About this episode

Mia Bay discusses the evolution of African-American ideas about race and their opposition to narratives of racial difference.

After the founding of the American Republic, African-American Intellectuals never accepted passively the narratives of racial difference maintained by the defenders of slavery and segregation. At a time when the belief in human equality was under attack from religious reactionaries and scientific innovators alike, Black thinkers succeeded in vindicating the unity of the human community as a divinely created whole, in constructing their own science of the races in opposition to white theories of human inequality, and eventually in brining about the demise of the idea of race as a legitimate object of scientific inquiry. Join Mia Bay, one of the most penetrating authors writing on American history today, as she leads us along the twisted paths which ideas of race have taken since the nineteenth century, pointing along the way to the place of Thomas Jefferson in Black American thought and the work of the great anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells.

People in this episode

Host: Interventions

Guest: Mia Bay

Topics covered

  • African-American intellectual history
  • race
  • slavery
  • segregation
  • human equality
  • scientific inquiry

Keywords

  • African-American
  • race
  • intellectuals
  • slavery
  • segregation
  • human equality
  • Ida B. Wells
  • Thomas Jefferson

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