Description:
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
"This book, I suspect, will detonate over certain corners in America.... Darkology is a major and thrilling work of American history." --Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review, cover story
As Heard on NPR's Fresh Air: "Quite enlightening." --Terry Gross
"Tremendous.... Barnes has corralled the chaos, contradiction, and surprise of American social reality; evaded mythology; and made... the 'unwritten' legible.... [A] painfully necessary autopsy of the nation's soul." --Walton Muyumba, Boston Globe
Named one of the Best Books of the Month by the New York Times, TIME, and Kirkus Reviews
A groundbreaking history, decades in the making, that chronicles how blackface dominated American society culturally, financially, and racially for nearly two centuries.
Brief description: Rhae Lynn Barnes is an assistant professor of American cultural history at Princeton University and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
Review Quotes: Rhae Lynn Barnes's Darkology is not only exemplary scholarship for its sharp original material, precision, and care, its vivid and engaging storytelling recreates a shameless world where the most popular forms of American entertainment treated the demeaning of Black people as the most natural of things.--Howard French, author of Born in Blackness and The Second Emancipation