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Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America. By Sharon Block

In Colonial Complexions, Sharon Block aims to examine the symbolic meaning of words used to describe runaways, and to analyze the differences in word choice for various categories of runaways. She reviews advertisements placed in colonial newspapers for runaway slaves and servants alike. Using a linguistic lens, she criticizes “social historians [who] treat listing of physical features as objective representations rather than symbolically powerful choices” (146). Block shows that many of these words meant something entirely different to the 18th century colonists as compared to the modern reader—words that contemporary readers would assume are racial descriptors may not have had any racial connotations at all to the colonial readers. Reading these advertisements in line with their linguistic context, Block compiled a database of over four thousand advertisements spanning two dozen newspapers, eight original colonies, and twenty five years (1770-1775). Her methodological appendix does not indicate whether she read through physical newspapers to find the ads, conducted keyword searches in newspaper databases, mined publications by previous scholars, or some combination of the three approaches. Block coded various descriptors found in the ads, and conducted “descriptive statistical analysis” (147). However, she presents no statistical tables. Appendix 2 contains seven pie charts offering a visual representation of the distribution of categorical variables, but the diagrams offer no numeric percentages. Block alludes to her quantitative analyses throughout the book, but does not present any of the tables she must have constructed in order to make her quantitative arguments. Since her arguments are founded in quantitative analysis, it would have been useful to see the data behind her assertions. Chapter One presents various colonial-era meanings of the word “complexion” as it pertains to health, temperament, political groupings, religious status, and social class status–as well as how understandings of complexion reveal early notions of race. Chapter Two considers representations of age, height, and health in the ads. Block is especially interested in comparing the representation of slaves of African descent to that of indentured servants of European descent, and what the differences tell us about how these class categories were perceived in light of racial differences. For example, Block considers the use of common descriptive words such as “lusty” and “likely” to describe runaways. Block argues that “lusty” bore sexual connotations when applied to slave women, but the anecdotal evidence she offers does not support this hypothesis. Chapter Three returns to complexion, assessing descriptions of skin tone, as well as hair and eye color. Block observes that in the late colonial era, “black” was applied to some runaways of European descent, and that “Negro” more often denoted slave status than it did skin color. “White”, meanwhile, was applied most often to light-skinned slaves. She posits that other words that modern readers may assume as racial markers–words such as black, brown, red, yellow, and tawny—were applied more widely by the colonists, and should not be taken as racial categorizations. The words “fresh” and “pale”, on the other hand, nearly always applied to people of European descent. Pale, however, did not denote skin tone, but rather instead unhealthiness. Chapter Four addresses the particularities of geographic and national descriptors, as well as runaways’ names and sex descriptions. Block observes that runaways of European descent