Book Discussion and Signing with Dr. Carmen P. Thompson

In honor Women’s History Month, Dr. Thompson centers the experiences of free and enslaved Black women in early America in a discussion titled "Laboring Bodies: Black Women's Resistance to White Supemacy since 1619," which is explored in her newly published book, The Making of American Whiteness: The Formation of Race in Seventeenth Century Virginia, to show how gender relations with White women and White men reveal the resiliency of Black people and the contours of race during the era.

About the Book

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, Carmen P. 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.

Learn More about the Author, Dr. Carmen P. Thompson and here new book by clicking here, or heading over to our news  page.