Historical Ventriloquy:

There's more to anthropology's past than most of us know

“…That idea, so outrageous today, also accords closely with the earlier views of Black elites, as described by historian Guy Emerson Mount (2018). After centuries of enslavement, when Black people were subject to rape and reproductive coercion, and confined to legally disadvantaged “illegitimate unions,” the post‐Emancipation generation championed a Black person's right to choose a marriage partner freely and to build a family in full legal, “sanctified” wedlock (Mount 2018, 144). This family‐choice ideal was publicly crystallized in the 1884 marriage of the formerly enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass to Helen Pitts, a white woman; their marriage was hailed in the Black press as “one of the best things that could happen for the race in America” and “an example which will be followed, and which must be followed before the prejudice against color will die out” (144).…”

“…This background is helpful for understanding his thinking that anti‐Black racism in the United States might cease after Blacks and whites had intermarried extensively for several generations, since then the Black‐descended population would become so blended with the white one as to become indistinguishable phenotypically (Baker 2021, 138–39). That idea, so outrageous today, also accords closely with the earlier views of Black elites, as described by historian Guy Emerson Mount (2018). After centuries of enslavement, when Black people were subject to rape and reproductive coercion, and confined to legally disadvantaged “illegitimate unions,” the post‐Emancipation generation championed a Black person's right to choose a marriage partner freely and to build a family in full legal, “sanctified” wedlock (Mount 2018, 144).…”