Wednesday, September 28, 2022

Who's Black and Why? - Henry Louis Gates Jr and Andrew S Curran

 Sub-title: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race

This book is a review and a reprint of letters written in the late 1700s for a contest that asked the question in the title.  It illustrates the evolution of the opinions that existed at the time.  The author's review explains how the writers explanations predicated the concepts of race that exists today.  I read the intro and reviews and a few of the translated letters.  There is a good chronology of the representation of Africans and race from ancient times up through 1890s.

Quote:

"By the end of the eighteenth century, the era we have come to know as the Enlightenment, another 4,5000,000 Africans were forced to leave their home continent for a life of brutal enslavement in plantations on the other side of the Atlantic.  See https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates. "

Published: 2022  Read: September 2022  Genre: History


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