Jenifer L. Barclay, "The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America" (U of Illinois Press, 2021)

New Books in African American Studies · Apr 5, 2022 · 1h 27m

Time and again, antebellum Americans justified slavery and white supremacy by linking blackness to disability, defectiveness, and dependency. In The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (University of Illinois Press, 2021), historian Jenifer L. Barclay examines the ubiquitous narratives that depicted black people with disabilities as pitiable, monstrous, or comical, narratives used not only to defend slavery but argue against it. As she shows, this relationship between ableism and racism impacted racial identities during the antebellum period and played an…