Description
Book SynopsisThe Making of American Whiteness: The Formation of Race in Seventeenth-Century Virginia changes the narrative about the origins of race and Whiteness in America. With an exhaustive array of archival documents, Carmen P. Thompson demonstrates not only that Whiteness predates European expansion to the Americas as evidenced in their participation in the transatlantic slave trade since the fifteenth century, but more importantly that it was the principal dynamic in the settlement of Virginia, the first colony in what would become the United States of America. And just as the system of White supremacy was the principal framework that fueled the transatlantic slave trade, it likewise was the framework that drove the organization of civil society in Virginia, including the organization and structure of the colony’s laws, social, political, and economic policies as well as its system of governance. The book shows what Whiteness looked like in everyday life in the early seventeenth century, in a way eerily prescient to Whiteness today.
Table of ContentsChapter One: The International System of Slavery and the Formation of American Whiteness
Chapter Two: Duty Boys, Company Tenants, Slaveholding Ladies and Wealthy Planters: How the International System of Slavery Made European Emigrants White, 1619–1650
Chapter Three: From Slave Pen to Plantation: The Making of American Whiteness in the Built Environment, 1618–1634
Chapter Four: From Freedom Suits to Fictive Kin: African Resistance to White Supremacy in Colonial Virginia, 1619–1660
Conclusion: The International System of Slavery and the Making of American Whiteness
