Black ancestry in white Americans of colonial background
I stumbled upon striking photographs of “white slaves” while reading The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing. The backstory here is that in the 19th century abolitionists realized that Northerners might be more horrified as to the nature of slavery if they could find children of mostly white ancestry, […]
The servitude I saw
Many people are talking about the late Alex Tizon’s article in The Atlantic, My Family’s Slave. Much of the piece was as disturbing for me as it was for most Americans. But some of it was shockingly familiar. I’ll get to that. First, Tizon died unexpectedly before the article was published. We won’t be able to […]
The collapse of logic & human culture
Slavery’s last stronghold: Moulkheir Mint Yarba returned from a day of tending her master’s goats out on the Sahara Desert to find something unimaginable: Her baby girl, barely old enough to crawl, had been left outdoors to die. The usually stoic mother — whose jet-black eyes and cardboard hands carry decades of sadness — wept […]