Category: Slavery

  • Deep Roots and Tangled Branches The Chronicle of Higher Education 2006-02-03 Troy Duster, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology University of California, Berkeley Also Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge New York University People who know their biological parents and grandparents typically take the information for granted.…

  • Afroargentines The Argentina Independent 2007-03-23 Laura Balfour As a descendant of two slaves, Maria Lamadrid has a hard time biting her tongue when airport officials think her Argentine passport is not real because ‘there are no blacks in Argentina’.   And that was in 2002.   The 25th of March marks the landmark 200th anniversary…

  • The reawakening of Afro-Argentine culture Global Post 2009-08-30 Anil Mundra Descendants of slaves are starting to assert their identity but it’s not easy in South America’s whitest country. BUENOS AIRES — “Liberty has no color” read the signs held outside a Buenos Aires city courthouse. “Arrested for having the wrong face,” and “Suspected of an…

  • When Family Trees Are Gnarled by Race The New York Times 2012-09-08 Brent Staples My paternal grandfather, Marshall Staples (1898-1969), was one of the millions of black Southerners who moved north in the Great Migration. Those of us in the family who were born Yankees in the years just after World War II were given…

  • “Slave genes” myth must die Salon 2012-07-24 Amy Bass, Associate Professor of History The College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, New York Michael Johnson links African-American sprinters to slavery, and revisits a particularly ugly pseudo-science In 1988, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder (in)famously stated that the prowess of African-American football players could be traced to slavery,…

  • Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimke Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders Penguin Press December 2002 432 pages Paperback ISBN 9780142001035 Mark Perry A story of race consciousness and the fight for equality told through the lives of one extraordinary American family In the late 1820s Sarah and Angelina Grimké traded their elite…

  • Obama is a Descendant of Nefertiti & Confucius Too Dominion of New York 2012-07-31 Alondra Nelson, Associate Professor of Sociology Columbia University There was breaking news yesterday in the lively world of presidential genealogy. Barack Obama–who is regarded as an inauthentic African-American by some because his late mother, Stanley Anne Dunham, was a white woman…

  • Ancestry.com Discovers President Obama Related to First Documented Slave in America Ancestry.com Provo, Utah 2012-07-30 Research Connects First African-American President to First African Slave in the American Colonies PROVO, UTAH – July 30, 2012 – A research team from Ancestry.com (NASDAQ:ACOM), the world’s largest online family history resource, has concluded that President Barack Obama is…

  • Obama Has Ties to Slavery Not by His Father but His Mother, Research Suggests The New York Times 2012-07-30 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Washington Correspondent WASHINGTON — President Obama’s biography — son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas — has long suggested that unlike most African-Americans, his roots did not…

  • “May she read liberty in your eyes?” Beecher, Boucicault and the Representation and Display of Antebellum Women’s Racially Indeterminate Bodies Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism Volume 26, Number 2, Spring 2012 pages. 127-144 DOI: 10.1353/dtc.2012.0007 Lisa Merrill, Professor of Speech Communication, Rhetoric, Performance Studies Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York Prelude In 1856 Reverend Henry…