Abstract

i thank denise james and charlene haddock seigfried for their thoughtful comments on my paper. Although they respond in different ways, they both picked up on questions and uncertainties that arose as I wrote the paper.For some years, I have been trying to write about essays Addams addressed to African American audiences. For this paper, I decided to deal only with Addams’s writings between 1900 and 1910 in order to compare her essays for African American audiences with what she wrote at the same time for wider audiences. This approach enabled me to sort out when Addams’s writing aligned with thinking in the dominant culture and when it departed from that.James questions my decision not to use the concept of white ..