Description
Book SynopsisIn
Trafficking in Antiblackness Lyndsey P. Beutin analyzes how campaigns to end human trafficking—often described as “modern-day slavery”—invoke the memory of transatlantic slavery to support positions ultimately grounded in antiblackness. Drawing on contemporary antitrafficking visual culture and media discourse, she shows how a constellation of media, philanthropic, NGO, and government actors invested in ending human trafficking repurpose the history of transatlantic slavery and abolition in ways that undermine contemporary struggles for racial justice and slavery reparations. The recurring narratives, images, and figures such as “slavery in Africa,” “Arab slave traders,” and “Black incapacity for self-governance” discursively turn Black people across the diaspora into the enslavers of the past and present in place of white Americans and Europeans. Doing so, Beutin contends, creates a rhetorical defense against being
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Reparations and the Rise of Antitrafficking Discourse 31
2. Blaming Black Mothers 61
Interlude: #FreeCyntoiaBrown 93
3. When Slavery’s Not Black 101
4. Deceptive Empiricism 133
Interlude: #Charlottesville 165
5. History Is Antiblackness 173
Afterword 193
Notes 197
Bibliography 237
Index 257
