Black people is a racialized classification of people, usually a political and skin color–based category for specific populations with a mid to dark brown complexion. Not all black people have dark skin; in certain countries, often in socially based systems of racial classification in the Western world, the term "black" is used to describe persons who are perceived as dark-skinned compared to other populations. It is mostly used for people of Sub-Saharan African descent and the indigenous peoples of Oceania. Indigenous African societies do not use the term black as a racial identity outside of influences brought by Western cultures. The term "black" may or may not be capitalized. The AP Stylebook changed its guide to capitalize the "b" in black in 2020. The ASA Style Guide says that the "b" should not be capitalized.
Mulatto is a racial classification to refer to people of mixed black African and white European ancestry. A mulatta is a female mulatto.
Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of human chattel enslavement, primarily of Africans and African Americans, that existed in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From early colonial days, it was practiced in Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies which formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property and could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until 1865. As an economic system, slavery was largely replaced by sharecropping and convict leasing.
The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was historically prominent in the United States in the 20th century. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry is considered black.
The Albert J. Beveridge Award is awarded by the American Historical Association (AHA) for the best English-language book on American history from 1492 to the present. It was established on a biennial basis in 1939 in memory of United States Senator Albert J. Beveridge (1862-1927) of Indiana, former secretary and longtime member of the Association, through a gift from his wife, Catherine Beveridge and donations from AHA members from his home state. The award has been given annually since 1945.
Edward Franklin Frazier, was an American sociologist and author, publishing as E. Franklin Frazier. His 1932 Ph.D. dissertation was published as a book titled The Negro Family in the United States (1939); it analyzed the historical forces that influenced the development of the African-American family from the time of slavery to the mid-1930s. The book was awarded the 1940 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the most significant work in the field of race relations. It was among the first sociological works on blacks researched and written by a black person.
Black pride is a movement that encourages black people to celebrate black culture and embrace their African heritage. In the United States, it was a direct response to white racism especially during the Civil Rights Movement. Related movements include black power, black nationalism, Black Panthers and Afrocentrism.
Neoabolitionist is a term used in historiography to characterize historians of race relations motivated by the spirit of racial equality typified by the abolitionists who fought to abolish slavery in the mid-19th century. They write especially about African-American history, slavery, the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era.
Carl Neumann Degler was a United States historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. He was the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History Emeritus at Stanford University.
Leon F. Litwack is an American historian whose scholarship focuses on slavery, the Reconstruction Era of the United States, and its aftermath into the 20th century. He won a National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for History, and the Francis Parkman Prize for his 1979 book Been In the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) is a book written by American statesman, philosopher and planter Thomas Jefferson. He completed the first version in 1781, and updated and enlarged the book in 1782 and 1783. Notes on the State of Virginia originated in Jefferson's responding to questions about Virginia, posed to him in 1780 by François Barbé-Marbois, then Secretary of the French delegation in Philadelphia, the temporary capital of the United Colonies.
Racial whitening, or "whitening" (branqueamento), is an ideology that was widely accepted in Brazil between 1889 and 1914, as the solution to the "Negro problem." However, racial whitening specific to Brazil also encompasses the perception of individuals as being white in relation to their position in the class system. Supporters of the Whitening ideology believed that the Negro race would advance culturally and genetically, or even disappear totally, within several generations of mixed breeding between white people and black people. This ideology gained its support from two scientific racism beliefs that were prominent during this time. One being social Darwinism, which applied Darwin's theory of natural selection to a society or race, and the other being Aryanism, the belief that the "white" "Aryan" race was superior to all other cultures. By combining these two ideas, the white elites of the time believed that because "white" blood was superior it would inevitably "whiten" the inferior races' blood.
Racial democracy is a term used by some to describe race relations in Brazil. The term denotes some scholars' belief that Brazil has escaped racism and racial discrimination. Those researchers contend that Brazilians do not view each other through the lens of race and do not harbor racial prejudice towards one another. Because of that, while social mobility of Brazilians may be constrained by many factors, gender and class included, racial discrimination is considered irrelevant.
The breeding of enslaved people in the United States was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners to systematically force the reproduction of enslaved people to increase their profits. It included coerced sexual relations between enslaved men and women, forced pregnancies of enslaved people, and favoring women who could produce a relatively large number of children. The objective was to increase the number of enslaved people without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the termination of the Atlantic slave trade.
There is no single system of races or ethnicities that covers all modern Latin America, and usage of labels may vary substantially.
The sociology of race and ethnic relations is the study of social, political, and economic relations between races and ethnicities at all levels of society. This area encompasses the study of systemic racism, like residential segregation and other complex social processes between different racial and ethnic groups.
Blanqueamiento, branqueamento, or whitening, is a social, political, and economic practice used in many post-colonial countries in the Americas and Oceania to "improve the race" towards a supposed ideal of whiteness. The term blanqueamiento is rooted in Latin America and is used more or less synonymously with racial whitening. However, blanqueamiento can be considered in both the symbolic and biological sense. Symbolically, blanqueamiento represents an ideology that emerged from legacies of European colonialism, described by Anibal Quijano's theory of coloniality of power, which caters to white dominance in social hierarchies. Biologically, blanqueamiento is the process of whitening by marrying a lighter-skinned individual to produce lighter-skinned offspring.
Today, there are more than 75 million people of African descent living in Brazil, which currently gives it, based on the one drop rule, the second largest black population in the world. However, despite its large black population it was also, officially, the last country in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888. Brazil proudly refers to itself as a "Racial Democracy," originally coined by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in his work Casa-Grande & Senzala, published in 1933. Additionally, racism has been made illegal under Brazil's anti-discrimination laws, which were passed in the 1950s after Katherine Dunham, an African-American dancer touring Brazil, was barred from a hotel. Nonetheless, race has been the subject of multiple intense debates over the years within the country.
The treatment of enslaved people in the United States varied by time and place, but was generally brutal, especially on plantations. Whipping and rape were routine, but usually not in front of white outsiders, or even the plantation owner's family. An enslaved person could not be a witness against a white; enslaved people were sometimes required to whip other enslaved people, even family members. There were also businesses to which a slave owner could turn over the whipping. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again. There were some relatively enlightened slave owners—Nat Turner said his master was kind—but not on large plantations. Only a small minority of enslaved people received anything resembling decent treatment; one contemporary estimate was 10%, not without noting that the ones well treated desired freedom just as much as those poorly treated. Good treatment could vanish upon the death of an owner. As put by William T. Allan, a slaveowner's abolitionist son who could not safely return to Alabama, "cruelty was the rule, and kindness the exception".
Slavery in Latin America was an economic and social institution which existed in Latin America from before the colonial era until its legal abolition in the newly independent states during the 19th century, although it continued illegally in some regions into the 20th century. Slavery in Latin America began in the precolonial period, when indigenous civilizations including the Maya and Aztec enslaved captives taken in war. After the conquest of Latin America by the Spanish and Portuguese, over 4 million enslaved Africans were taken to Latin America via the Atlantic slave trade, roughly 3.5 million of those to Brazil. The large Afro-Latino populations which remain in these regions today are the legacy of colonial slavery.
