Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom

“This valuable work expands the understanding of the development of 'racial' ideas in the colonial period, provides insight into how and why concepts of 'race' and 'mixed-race' continued and developed into the 19th and 20th centuries, and encourages readers to understand and celebrate American diversity. . . . Highly recommended.”—CHOICE Reviews

“Readers of this book will value Wilkinson’s engagement with his sources and his engrossing, overarching narrative to make sense about how ideas about racial mixture were not simply invented, but rather reified in everyday exchanges, language, labor systems, and legislation. . . . [His] timely and thoroughly engaging analysis deftly narrates the calcification of racial hypodescent ideology, white supremacy and institutionalized racism’s entrenchment in nearly all aspects of society, while effectively reinforcing that the unnaturality of racism and racial inequality are historically contingent and flexible.”—Journal of Social History

“A useful and well-researched addition to the literature on race in early America, packed with intellectual complexity and sophistication that brings new ideas on race and mixedness to the conversation in a readable and engaging way.”—American Indian Culture and Research Journal

“Wilkinson innovatively mines colonial legal archives to claim persuasively that there were likewise variations of acceptance for mixed-ancestry peoples within the British Empire."—Early American Literature

“This is a superior book. Most histories of mixed-race communities focus on the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, and Wilkinson’s attention to the prerevolutionary period is a much-needed addition.” — Gary Nash, University of California, Los Angeles

“A. B. Wilkinson’s history of mixed-race identities and resistance in colonial English slave societies is extensively researched and insightfully argued.” — Heidi Ardizzone, Saint Louis University

“In this deeply researched and readable book, A. B. Wilkinson effectively complicates monoracial categorizations in British colonial America for people of combined African, Indigenous, or European descent. Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom foregrounds the perspectives of mixed-heritage people who strove for freedom, faced the criminal justice system, and navigated the social positions assigned to them in a society increasingly reliant on racial hypodescendence. A must-read for anyone interested in the historical background of the one-drop rule or the ongoing effect of racism in U.S. history.” — Sharon Block, University of California, Irvine