October 26, 2017
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
It’s pretty common knowledge, though, that when chattel slavery was being practiced in the United States, light-skinned people—often the offspring of land owning men and the women they held enslaved—were more likely to work in the house or have some other form of privileged status, while those with darker skin labored outside, doing demanding physical work in the fields. This caste system is one of the many ways that white supremacy rooted itself in American culture at large; colorism persisted well into the twentieth century, and a residue lingers even today.
