Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora - Diet, Disease and Racism (Hardcover)

This is an engrossing study of black disease immunities and susceptibilities and their heretofore unrealized impact on both slavery and racism. Its pages interweave the nutritional, biological, and medical sciences with demography. The book begins with an examination of the preslavery era in Africa and then pursues its subject into the slave societies of the West Indies and the United States. This truly interdisciplinary approach permits the blending of two distinctive concepts of racial differences, that of the hard sciences based on gene frequencies and that of the social sciences stressing environmental factors. The authors demonstrate how the presence of malignant malaria and yellow fever in West Africa encouraged the development of resistance to these diseases, and conversely how the scarcity of certain nutrients may have shaped many susceptibilities. They examine the transmission of disease through the slave trade, revealing how the West African disease environment accompanied blacks to the Americas and affected both the aboriginal population and the European colonizers.