Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

everything Berlin has argued here about a new type of descendants of Africa—some Black, many mixed race—is almost equally true of the whites who would come to populate the New World. They were just as much transformed by intercourse with new “others” as Black people, and would be no more “European” as a result than the people with a dominant African ancestry in the New World would continue to be “African.” More than anything else, it was these contacts and the resultant brassage, or mixing, culturally, racially, socially, economically, through innumerable dislocations, unions, and traumas, that made the Americas a new and utterly distinctive realm, a truly New World, and ultimately the most powerful engine of modernity there’s ever been. Processes like these were at the origins of everything unique and original about the Americas, down to jazz and the blues.