Alejandro de la Fuente

A lot of fascinating detail about how the laws surrounding freedom for enslaved people (including laws about interracial marriage, manumission and self-purchase) constructed the meaning of slavery and of race. Where there were more free people of color and a tradition of less-racialized slavery, in Cuba, enslavers found it harder to make race and slavery coterminous conditions, despite attempts to borrow from the British/Americans the concepts they developed to degrade blacks. The laws governing free people of color—suppressing churches, schools, and militias/ownership of firearms and dogs—became models for Jim Crow after the American Civil War. Tidbit that stood out to me most, showing the age of the argument “we wouldn’t have needed to deny you rights if you hadn’t been so mean to us!” is a quote from a New Orleans observer in 1856: “It is probable that the South would have continued merely to apologize but for the denunciations of the abolitionists, which led to the... consequent conviction that slavery, as it exists in the United States, in all its aspects, moral, social, and political, is not inconsistent with justice, reason, or religion.”… (más)