You are invited to a Reading • Signing • Discussion
Dr. Carmen P. Thompson, Historian and Scholar, will discuss her new book:
The Making of American Whiteness: The History of Race in America
April 20 @ 1 PM • Vanport Room, SMSU 338
The Making of American Whiteness: The Formation of Race in Seventeenth-Century Virginia changes the narrative about the origins of race and Whiteness in America. With an exhaustive range of archival documents, Thompson demonstrates not only that Whiteness predates European expansion to the Americas—as evidenced by European participation in the transatlantic slave trade since the fifteenth century—but, more importantly, that Whiteness was the principal dynamic in the settlement of Virginia, the first colony in what would become the United States of America. And just as the system of White supremacy was the principal order that fueled the transatlantic slave trade, it was likewise the framework that drove the organization of civil society in Virginia, including the organization and structure of the colony’s laws, social, political, and economic policies, and its system of governance. This book shows what Whiteness looked like in everyday life in the early seventeenth century, finding it eerily prescient to Whiteness today.
Free and open to the public • Refreshments will be served