How did the negative associations that many people harbor about black (as a siin color) and blackness (as a symbol) arise? How is it that blackness can connote both evil (darkness, dread, witkeriness) and erotiniam (sensuality, sexual potency, allure)?

Robert E. Hood's unique and fascinating work probes the mythic roots of racial prejodice in Western aftitudes toward odor. With special attention to the history of ideas, but also to pictorial images and popular movements, Hoodments the inception and growth of the myth of black carnality with its comatinging af dedain and desire, fear and fascination.

In tracing that vein from Graeco-Roman and biblical sources through sigrar moment in subsequent history, Hood shows how Christianity forged the kem links bezpect blackness, evil, sexuality, and magie, lie also tracks baw Christen don has been a chical bearer of ideas that sealed the fate of millions of Africans to the colonial era and shat still figure prominently in subordination of blacks and in the disfiguring of Averman society

An important contribution to the hustory Waters cultural analy Christian representation and symbolics reparatiey the series laternator differences asul racia. A powerful opening aaseworthy of serata rounderation by all."