Additional Historical Sources

18th Century and a Bit Earlier

These lists illustrate a range of historical texts and evidence showing the complexity of interracial interaction even during the era of slavery. Amongst the lists, in addition to the typical pro-slavery rhetoric, is evidence of interracial marriages, ordinations of Black ministers, as well as journals of slave catchers who repented their role in imprisoning their fellow men. Included amidst the list of fiction are some well-recognised figures whose depictions of Blacks are worth revisiting. Both the nonfiction and the fiction reveal that even when chattel slavery was at the height of its trade, race was not the unbridgeable difference we often assume our ancestors believed it was.

19th Century

The sources listed here point to the assorted ways Europeans forcefully stabilised race, specifically blackness, as concept through a variety of means, including philosophy and pseudoscience. Yet even as Western thinkers were insisting that “Black” is a biological category, “Black” writers, philosophers, politicians, and innovators were constantly destabilising the fiction even as it was being insisted upon. Thus among the various items, this list includes entries from European “scientists” and naturalists meditating upon the root of racial difference as well as eye witness accounts of the slave masters’ brutality, signalling that the savagery associated with the enslaved was a projection of the master.

20th Century

The 20th century was an era of profound progress and struggle across a variety of interconnected socio-politcal issues. It was the era of Jim Crow and class warfare, of world wars and interracial armies, of race riots and peaceful protests, of the end of colonization and the rise of imperialism. This section is a mere introduction to the complex racial history of the century and the ways it intersects with numerous other political shifts.