Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America by Sharon Block (review)

Sharon Block's Colonial Complexions makes for a welcome addition to the scholarly reassessment of race in early America that over the last quarter century has supplanted the previously dominant but anachronistic black-white dichotomy. Delving deeply into advertisements for runaways published from 1750 to 1775 in British North America, Block carefully assesses the evidence this archive offers, finding that the runaways were not conceived in terms of race and color, but in more complex and surprising ways. Prior scholars, Block suggests in a helpful appendix, have assumed that such advertisements were practical and therefore self-explanatory, which has limited their examination of this corpus of evidence for cultural understandings. Instead, Block reveals the surprising ways human differences were described in these advertisements. As has been demonstrated by David Waldstreicher in Runaway America (2005), "runaways" were much more various in the period than we might assume, given our primary association of the word with race-based slavery. But in fact advertisements were often used in efforts to locate absconded apprentices and servants as well as slaves. Combining these with the category of the companions mentioned for runaway slaves, Block draws on a database of over four thousand runaway advertisements for people of African, European, and native descent on which to conduct a revealing study.

Finding that our current dominant taken-for-granted racial categories by skin color—black, white, and red—had not yet obtained their status as transparent common sense in the middle quarter of the eighteenth century, Block attends closely to the precise descriptors that were employed by the advertisers, and finds rich evidence for the ongoing power of the seemingly antiquated categories of humoral constitution in shaping perceptions of people. While the terms black, white, and red were in use, Block shows that were employed in the advertisements as relative descriptors (or terms for humoral complexion, not skin color) rather than to invoke settled racial categories. Hence, African-descended people were noted to be "not very" or "very" black," but not simply called "blacks" (62). Indeed, even 4 percent of European-descended people were described as "black," referring either to their swarthiness or, perhaps, to their dispositions, following the definition of "a cloudy countenance, sullen," offered by a 1760 dictionary (64). The terms brown and yellow similarly could denote relative complexion, indicate humoral categories, or at times hint at racial mixing. Color terms could sometimes serve as racial markers, but Block demonstrates, above all, that their meanings were unstable and highly dependent on context.

Two statistical observations on her archive get across Block's case about the barely emergent state of a racialized color vocabulary. A designation of "brown" complexion was ten times more likely to be applied to a person of European rather than African descent. Designations of whiteness, similarly, occurred four times more frequently for those of African than European descent (65). This counterintuitive finding makes quite plain that such color designations were much more often used to describe variations within groups rather than to mark stable identities. People of European descent sometimes were described as "white," but this was primarily when they were accompanying runaways of color, not when they were alone or with others from their group.

Again surprising to twenty-first-century Americans accustomed to seeing shades of skin color as an objective fact useful in identifying individuals, Block shows that advertisers paid less attention to the coloration and complexion of people in the African-descended group, even those described as "mulattoes," than to those of European descent. Block suggests that advertisers simply did not perceive (or did not expect others to perceive) variations among their slaves: "as with other bodily details, it was also likely that advertisers genuinely did not notice the precise complexion of their property" (64). In general, Block finds, accounts of European-descended people contained much more specific detail, supporting the notion that familiarity had a strong effect on which details stood out to advertisers and their readers...