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Seven Facts about Class, Race, and History that May Surprise You
1: Sometimes “white” just meant “English-speaking American”
In southern Arizona during the middle of the 19th century, “white” meant an American from the east—the people who were not white were Indigenous, Mexican, or Chinese. In The great Arizona orphan abduction, Linda Gordon noted,
James Young, a black man at the Contention mine in nearby Tombstone, remarked “Si White and I were the first white men in Tombstone after Gird and Schieffelin.”
2: In the 18th century, the rich cared about race and the poor did not
From The First Black Britons:
The black and white poor of this period were friends, not rivals. So much so, in fact, that Sir John Fielding, a magistrate and brother of the novelist Henry Fielding, complained that when black domestic servants ran away and, as they often did, found ‘… the Mob on their side, it makes it not only difficult but dangerous to the Proprietor of these Slaves to recover the Possession of them, when once they are sported away’.
3: Class trumped race for the Victorians
Even in the 19th century at the height of “scientific racism”, the British nobility knew class trumped race and nationality. From David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism: how the British saw…
