i have often heard or read that no white american of the antebellum period did not harbor racist attitudes, and that this includes abolitionists. that is really utterly false. consider nathaniel peabody rogers: in 1840 he was saying that racism is not natural but produced socially, and a century and a half before people were diagnosing bigotry against gay people as originating in fear, rogers was labeling racism 'color-phobia': the title of the essay from which this is drawn.
Our people have got it. They have got it in the blue, collapse stage. Many of them have got it so bad, they can’t get well. They will die of it. It will be a mercy if the nation does not. What a dignified, philosophic malady! Dread of complexion. They don’t know they have got it - or think, rather, they took it the natural way. But they were inoculated. It was injected into their veins and incided into their systems by old Doctor Slavery.
The color-phobia is making terrible havoc among our communities. Anti-slavery drives it out, and after a while cures it. But it a base, low, and vulgar ailment. It is meaner, in fact, than the itch. It is fouler than Old Testament leprosy. It is a tasty disorder, a beautiful ailment, very genteel, and apt to go in first families. We should like to have Hogarth take a sketch of the community that had it - of ours, for instance, when the St. Vitus’ fit was on.
