It's impossible to read Becoming Free, Becoming Black without thinking about Frank Tannenbaum's classic Slave and Citizen (1946), the book that inaugurated the field of comparative slavery and race relations in the Americas. Like Tannenbaum, Ariela Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente raise broad questions as they seek to understand the persistence of race inequalities, mostly in the United States, by comparing the US slave past with other slave societies in the Americas. Also like Tannenbaum, they offer comprehensive explanations.
But the similarities end there. By examining the development of the legal regimes of slavery and race in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana, de la Fuente and Gross focus on changes in each society over time, emphasizing a historical approach lacking in Tannenbaum's book and rejecting his strict opposition between Anglo-Saxon and Latin American societies. In that sense, their choice of the jurisdictions analyzed was crucial: the inclusion of Louisiana, with...
