Meanings Beneath the Skin

Meanings Beneath the Skin: the Evolution of African-Americans traces cultural and psychological transformations among Black people in America from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. By exploring how the meanings that African-Americans attribute to the concept of race contributed to distinctiveness in their psychological and cultural traits, this book reveals the social and political implications of these transformations for relationships between African-Americans and other groups during the twenty-first century.

Sherle L. Boone is a professor of Psychology in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at William Paterson University of New Jersey. He has published papers in the areas of human aggression, identity formation in people of African descent, and parenting strategies in African American families. Professor Boone is the founder and President of the W.E.B. DuBois Scholars Institute, Inc., housed on the campus of Princeton University. He has served on the Mellon Mays University Fellows Dissertation Grants Selection Panel sponsored by The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.