That racial categories were hardening at this moment put Boas’s statements directly at odds with an increasing public desire to believe in racial purity. White southerners were hysterical over the threat of “social equality” or what they took to mean the apocalyptic possibility of black men “ravishing” white women and passing on their “degenerate” traits to a “pure” white race.
In the preface to Southern Horrors, she wrote, “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so. The Afro-American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service.
New statistical and racial identities forged out of raw census data showed that African Americans, as 12 percent of the population, made up 30 percent of the nation’s prison population. Although specially designed race-conscious laws, discriminatory punishments, and new forms of everyday racial surveillance had been institutionalized by the 1890s as a way to suppress black freedom, white social scientists presented the new crime data as objective, color-blind, and incontrovertible.
The captives were also forming a new identity, a diasporic Blackness, forged out of their collective fate, as they found strength in one another with every miserable day that passed.
New Orleans became the Walmart of people selling.
There is something idyllic about the landscape, but there is nothing innocent about the history of this place, where human beings corrupted nature to do great harm to humanity.