cert1English settlers came to the “new world” at the same time they had begun to understand just how many different sorts of people made up humanity. Although a “science” of race only developed in the 19th century, race actions, such as the enslavement of Africans and the displacement of Indians to reservations, meant that Americans had worked out a complicated set of racial ideas over many centuries. This meant not only the development of ideas of what it meant to be “black” or “red”, but also what it meant to be “white.”


 

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Aaron Douglas, God’s Trombone

Racial interaction took many forms in the early twentieth century: articulate expressions of racism; self-conscious attempts to define “racial characteristics” and celebrate them; radical attempts to deal with the effect of racism.