“Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On” by J.M.W. Turner 1840 / Wikimedia This is the the third installment of a three-part series that explores legal, religious, and racial dimensions of American slavery. Part I explored some of the reasons why white Europeans selected Africans, out of all racial and…
“Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On” by J.M.W. Turner 1840 / Wikimedia This is the the second installment of a three-part series that explores legal, religious, and racial dimensions of American slavery. Part I explored some of the reasons why white Europeans selected Africans, out of all racial and…
“Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On” by J.M.W. Turner 1840 / Wikimedia This is the first installment of a three-part series that explores legal, religious, and racial dimensions of American slavery. Part I will explain some of the reasons why white Europeans selected Africans, out of all racial and…
This article is adapted from the authors’ forthcoming book: Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (2020) from Cambridge University Press. By the time the English settled Virginia in the early seventeenth century, the enslavement of Africans had already spread across the New World. Yet the Virginia colonists lacked the…
Racism is the lingering effect of the American holocaust of slavery. In this talk, Savage argues that the reason for the persistence of racism is embedded in the founding of America. By compromising on the issue of slavery, the Founding Fathers established a national civil religion based on racism.