In Colonial Complexions, historian Sharon Block examines how
Anglo-Americans built racial ideologies out of descriptions of
physical appearance. By analyzing more than 4,000 advertisements
for fugitive servants and slaves in colonial newspapers alongside
scores of transatlantic sources, she reveals how colonists
transformed observable characteristics into racist reality.
Building on her expertise in digital humanities, Block repurposes
these well-known historical sources to newly highlight how daily
language called race and identity into being before the rise of
scientific racism. In the eighteenth century, a multitude of
characteristics beyond skin color factored into racial assumptions,
and complexion did not have a stable or singular meaning. Colonists
justified a race-based slave labor system not by opposing black and
white but by accumulating differences in the bodies they described:
racism was made real by marking variation from a norm on some
bodies, and variation as the norm on others. Such subtle
systemizations of racism naturalized enslavement into bodily
description, erased Native American heritage, and privileged life
history as a crucial marker of free status only for people of
European-based identities. Colonial Complexions suggests
alternative possibilities to modern formulations of racial
identities and offers a precise historical analysis of the beliefs
behind evolving notions of race-based differences in North American
history.
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