Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Race Traffic: Antislavery and the Origins of White Victimhood, 1619-1819

Race Traffic: Antislavery and the Origins of White Victimhood, 1619-1819

Peck, Gunther

Hardcover

Series: Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American Histo

Black American HistoryColonial Period (1600-1775)General Racism & Ethnic Studies

ISBN10: 1469675145
ISBN13: 9781469675145
Publisher: Omohundro Institute and Unc Press
Published: Dec 10 2024
Pages: 512
Weight: 1.90
Height: 1.70 Width: 5.80 Depth: 8.70
Language: English
Fantasies of white slavery and the narratives of victimhood they spawn form the foundation of racist ideology. They also obscure the lived experience of trafficked servants and sailors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gunther Peck moves deftly between the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds to discover where and when people with light skin color came to see themselves as white. Separating fact from fiction, and paying close attention to the ideological work each performs, Peck shows how laboring women and men leveraged their newfound whiteness to secure economic opportunity and political power.

Peck argues that whiteness emerged not as a claim of racial superiority but as a byproduct of wide-ranging and rancorous public debate over trafficking and enslavement. Even as whiteness became a legal category that signaled privilege, trafficking and race remained tightly interwoven. Those advocating for the value of whiteness invoked emotionally freighted victimhood, claiming that so-called white slavery was a crime whose costs far exceeded those associated with the enslavement of African peoples across the Americas. Peck helps us understand the chilling history that produced the racist ideology that still poisons our politics in the present day.

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