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The Worth Of The Black Disabled Body: An Excavation Of Black Disabled Legal History, Alyssa Mcleod

Undergraduate Research Awards

Slave law was overwhelmingly concerned with the state of individual bodies, from the earliest colonial iterations of race-based statutes through to the end of the antebellum era, becoming a key index in shaping the concept of race from that point forward. In this time, white legislators were trying to answer several burgeoning questions including: Are enslaved bodies inherently damaged, broken, criminal, or worthy of manumission? The answer, it seems, is that every enslaved person’s value was determined almost strictly on the value of their labor, and therefore, their ability to work (and thus, by implication, their value as salable property). …