In the chapters above, I have been concerned with tracing the formation of a racialist common sense in American culture, and in particular with exploring the role of a particular strand of literary culture in this process. As a result, some readers may find it frustrating how little I have focused on the forms of resistance to, or critique of, this dominant position – a situation perhaps exacerbated by my emphasis on how some of the putatively “progressive” literary works themselves helped to produce a distinct and entrenched form of racialism characterized by the discourse of benevolence and sympathy. If I have thus represented a stifling kind of unanimity on the question of race, it is only because I have been at pains to explain in explicit detail the pervasive power of a dominant ideology. Having said that, there were of course many sites and types of resistance to dominant racial ideology in nineteenth-century America.