


Nature knows no color line book we are not africans skin#
Even the numerous, often vicious, caricatures of her depict her with pale skin and large, pointed, upturned nose and chin. Numerous contemporaneous descriptions of her describe the same, and there are not more simply because few observers thought to make obvious statements about her appearance. Dozens of portraits of her, painted from life, depict her with pale skin and facial features typical of Northern Europe. Her ancestry is well-documented, consisting primarily of aristocratic ethnic German ancestors. There is overwhelming evidence that Queen Charlotte, born Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in present-day Germany, was a white woman according to contemporary racialization. While most of this work focuses on the evolution and variations of the myth, we will start with a brief overview of her. The life of Queen Charlotte is the epitome of white supremacy, no matter how keen her interest in art, botany, or Pomeranians might have been. At the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, during her reign with husband King George III, the British Empire controlled nearly a quarter of the world’s people and land, enabled the kidnapping of 3.5 million Africans to enslave (of at least 12.5 million among all colonial powers) along with Indigenous people in the Americas, and held colonial control over millions of other people. However, Charlotte has not been overlooked for memorialization because of either sexism or racism. One motivation for suggesting the memorialization of Queen Charlotte in Charlottesville and the adoption of her as part of a “compromise narrative” by Black residents of Charlotte, NC, has been the myth that she had recent African ancestry or would today be racialized as Black based on appearance. In her other namesake city of Charlottesville, Virginia, she has been largely ignored precisely because she was the political antagonist to the City’s historical patriarch, Thomas Jefferson, drafter of the Declaration of Independence, whose Monticello plantation is nearby. Queen Charlotte has long been used by White elites as matriarchal symbol to support white supremacy in her namesake city of Charlotte, North Carolina. Graham Weathers, Jr., Charlotte, NC statue in Queen Square, London, UK statue at Charlotte Douglas International Airport by Raymond KaskeyĬurrently, there is a wave of interest in re-evaluating who we chose to memorialize in our public landscape through monuments and statues. L-R, ‘Queen Charlotte Walks in Her Garden’ by B. Over time, like the telephone game, these claims morphed as they were misunderstood, misinterpreted, and expanded upon into the varied beliefs that Charlotte was “African”, “mixed-race”, “biracial”, or “Black.” When examined in context and with factual historical information, the evidence does not support these claims. Rogers, who intentionally used the false premises of scientific racism to refute the concept of a “pure white race” promoted by segregationists in the United States and the Nazi Party in Germany. These claims began as an antiracist contention by Jamaican-American author J. Since the 1940s, there has been a myth consisting of continually-evolving claims around the ancestry, ethnicity, and racial identity of Queen Charlotte. Peoples are governed by not by realities but by myths.Ĭlockwise from upper left: Thomas Frye, 1762, RCIN 604595 Johann George Ziesenis, 1761?, RCIN 403562 Allan Ramsay, 1762, RCIN 405308 Laurence Gahagan, 1818, RCIN 913891 Thomas Lawrence, 1789, NG4257 Introduction
