Gunther Peck, Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, has dedicated his career to exploring the ethical stakes of historical inquiry and inspiring students to become transformative leaders. A recipient of the Bass Chair for excellence in teaching and scholarship, his work connects the past to pressing ethical dilemmas of the present. His latest book, Race Traffic: Antislavery and the Origins of White Racial Victimhood (UNC Press), examines the historical intersections of human trafficking and race.
About the book
Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
Fantasies of white slavery and the narratives of victimhood they spawn form the foundation of racist ideology. They also obscure the lived experience of trafficked servants and sailors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gunther Peck moves deftly between the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds to discover where and when people with light skin color came to see themselves as white. Separating fact from fiction, and paying close attention to the ideological work each performs, Peck shows how laboring women and men leveraged their newfound whiteness to secure economic opportunity and political power.
Peck argues that whiteness emerged not as a claim of racial superiority but as a byproduct of wide-ranging and rancorous public debate over trafficking and enslavement. Even as whiteness became a legal category that signaled privilege, trafficking and race remained tightly interwoven.
Those advocating for the value of whiteness invoked emotionally freighted victimhood, claiming that so-called white slavery was a crime whose costs far exceeded those associated with the enslavement of African peoples across the Americas. Peck helps us understand the chilling history that produced the racist ideology that still poisons our politics in the present day.
Alongside the book release, Peck penned this op-ed for TIME about the racial ideologies in our current political conversations, particularly the 2024 presidential campaign.
Read the TIME commentary here: