Afterlives of Black Fugitive Resistance: Narratives of Colorism, Framing Blackness, and Gender in Runaway Advertisements

Abstract

To understand the foundations of Black life in the United States, it is necessary to confront the legacy of slavery. The enduring structural and racial impact of slavery and global colonialism in shaping contemporary society is at the core of my dissertation work. I employ innovative hand-coded data detailing runaway enslaved persons during colonial-era U.S. slavery as a vehicle to drive empirical and theoretical conversations about the connections between historical and contemporary processes of race, racialization, and intersectional Black identities. To this end, I work through three primary projects.In Manuscript 1 (Chapter 2), I explore processes of “color-coding” enslaved Black individuals through the establishment, standardization, and transmission of color-based terminology (e.g., “light,” “brown,” or “dark”). To detail these historical nuances of color, I conduct a scoping review of over 6,000 hand-coded runaway advertisements and advance historical documentation of the color terminology employed during U.S. slavery. My review provides evidence of an enduring transmission of color vocabulary from the era of U.S. slavery to shaping contemporary labels of skin, as well as suggesting the inheritance of color terminology across racial groups (i.e., from white enslavers to the Black community). Manuscript 2 (Chapter 3) challenges hegemonic bi-dimensional skin-color frameworks and suggests that processes used to label skin tones are inconsistent across the color spectrum. Through this chapter, I delve into a quantitative analysis of the relationship between perceived skin tone and the prices offered as rewards for the recapture of runaway individuals. My findings support historical and social science expectations that functions of colorism operate across a sliding gradient dependent on skin shade (i.e., significantly higher rewards offered for the recapture of lighter-skinned men). However, drawing from Black scholars’ discussions on hegemonic normativity, I argue that the absence of descriptors for medium-skin tones reflects a distinct form of “othering,” wherein existing cultural and social frames define and value identities in relation to historically white-centric standards. Manuscript 3 (Chapter 4) employs a mixed-methods approach to examine the intersection of gender and race. Employing an intersectional lens, my quantitative findings reveal that, relative to men, higher proportions of enslaved women ran away in groups. Further, the composition of these groups had higher odds of including children when women fled, highlighting the strong influence of gendered expectations shaping opportunities for resistance. My qualitative findings document the erasure of the agency of runaway enslaved women through enslavers’ frequent portrayal of runaway women as extensions of resistance efforts led by men (e.g., claiming that runaway women were “enticed away”). These findings challenge existing narratives by showing that Black women’s resistance is systematically minimized. This pattern parallels contemporary political debates about the visibility of Black women’s leadership and agency across resistance efforts.