Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross tell the story of how the initiatives of enslaved and free people of colour in the Americas changed and shaped the laws of slavery and freedom. From a legal perspective Becoming Free, Becoming Black shows how people of colour used the flexibility of the law to create communities and freedom for themselves and their families that challenged slaveholders’ desire to make blackness synonymous with slavery.

Through this study of the Americas, de la Fuente and Gross challenge the traditional historiographical perception of Latin America being a racially fluid society and the British colonies having a harsher racial binary. Using a comparative framework, the research instead indicates the differences between the locations studied – Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana – come from how white elites successfully connected blackness with enslavement and whiteness with citizenship. De la Fuente and Gross present a bottom-up perspective by using the actions of enslaved and free people as a guide for their primary and archival research. The source used includes local court records, original trial records of freedom suits, free black and enslaved records, and petitions. By using a broad definition of law, codes and royal edicts are contrasted with local trials, statutes, and adjudications creating a broad net for source material. Gross and de la Fuente sum up their approach by assuming the “mutual constitutivness” of law and culture. The law is shaped by culture as culture is in turn shaped by the law.

Gross and de la Fuente present their argument well throughout the text. Each chapter points back to their main idea of people of colour using the law to navigate and negotiate for their own freedom. From chapter one they show the repressive legal regimes of all three locations rested on blackness becoming synonymous with enslavement. Using the issue of legal and social precedents, manumission, revolts, and colonization with examples from legal cases the authors prove by the 1850s all three studied areas were mature slave societies with legal gaps that free and enslaved people of colour could navigate. The differences in all three locations were the “regime” of race, not slavery, and the development of the law of freedom

Blackness being linked to degraded activities or social norms show that blackness has always been relegated as less than white within mixed societies. The association of blackness with incivility can be seen in society today. Blackness – whether it is the natural appearance of Black people, their pattern of speech, or any other aspect of a Black person – has been designated as less than their white counterparts. This study of Gross and de la Fuente shows that anti-blackness is written into the very legal code of the societies that are still around today. In the conclusion of Becoming Free, Becoming Black, it is stated laws regulating free people of colour served as legal templates during the post-emancipation era of these societies. Anti-blackness is built into the legal foundations of many societies today.