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.
