Yellow Fever

“With acclimation [acquired immunity] serving as the difference between obscurity and wealth for white people, Blac, people’s alleged natural immunity increasingly had the opposite effect. It was used to justify slavery’s permanence and expansion. . . . recasting racial slavery as a health imperative provided a veneer of rationality, even respectability, to its violence” (Olivarius, 67-68; 80-84). “Black mortality, especially of the enslaved, was undercounted to an extraordinary, even conspiratorial, extent” ( 84).