«Noi abbiamo creato la schiavitù, e la schiavitù genera il pregiudizio»: Lydia Maria Child, abolizionismo statunitense e razzismo nella costruzione dell’impero della libertà

The essay examines the antislavery thought of U.S. writer and activist Lydia Maria Child, aiming to highlight a distinctive dimension of American abolitionism: its ongoing negotiation with racial fractures that continued to structure American society, even in contexts – such as the Northern states – where slavery had been formally abolished. Drawing on primary sources, particularly An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), alongside her minor essays, children’s literature, and correspondence, the first section reconstructs Child’s critique of U.S. institutions, which from their inception had embedded slavery as a structural component of the national project, exacerbating the division between North and South, consolidating the power of slaveholding states, and creating conditions for the persistence of racial hierarchies even in nominally free regions. The second section focuses on Child’s reflections on racism, conceived as a direct product of the slave system. It demonstrates how discrimination and inequality in the Northern states were closely linked to the political and social structures designed to sustain slavery, while also showing how Child employed abolitionist children’s literature as a pedagogical instrument to challenge and dismantle these prejudices among young white readers. The third section explores Child’s critical engagement with the American Colonization Society, an organization established with the stated goal of relocating freed African Americans to Africa, but which, in practice, reinforced racism by presuming the impossibility of coexistence between Black and white populations within the United States. From this vantage, Child’s Atlantic perspective extended beyond Africa to include Haiti and the Caribbean, where slave revolutions and the creation of Black republics posed a fundamental challenge to the racial foundations of the American Republic. Through the study of Child’s work, racism in the Northern states serves as an interpretive lens to reveal how the U.S. abolitionist movement was not merely a series of political and moral campaigns against slavery, but also a critical laboratory in which the contradictions of U.S. universalism were interrogated, exposing the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion embedded in the political culture on which American democracy was constructed.