Sharon Block, "Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018)

New Books in African American Studies · Nov 28, 2018 · 1h 1m

Today we have a certain idea of "race"; it's socially constructed, conventional, and not really biological-grounded in any sense. Yet we commonly use the idea of "race" in our everyday lives to identify ourselves and others. We even have a typology of "races" that we use in official contexts. Yet, as Sharon Block shows in her book Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), our way of putting people in "racial" buckets is not the same as that of our ancestors. Listen in as we talk about the often surprising ways in which…