Synopses & Reviews
Rooming in the Master's House is an analytical narrative of the origins, evolution, and development of a political and cultural sector of the African American community that abandoned the idea of collective liberation for the idea of individual salvation. It is a penetrating examination of the psychological and social disorders of self-negation, self-hatred, and group disdain that have affected the most extreme elements of the black community, especially as seen in those who share identification with the oppressing class more than with the oppressed. Discovering the seeds of this attitude and accompanying behavior in the antebellum period the authors, Asante and Hall, demonstrate that the legacy continues today in the modern day black conservatives who espouse versions of the arguments offered by house Negroes during the enslavement. Using Malcolm X's notion of a dichotomy between the house Negroes and the field Negroes the authors show how the current black conservative movement is organically linked to this social division.