An intense public debate over the deaths of unarmed black persons has emerged at a time when the thesis of a postracial, colorblind America had inserted itself into mainstream thinking as evidence of the growing sentiment to move beyond race and erase its explicit, violent history. Among the findings arising from these killings is the split in the public reaction along distinctly racial lines. Othello’s dying speech raises related concerns insofar as he is anxiously aware of the possible outcome of having a white narrator tell his story. Such a narrator is a prototype for the modern scholar in a majority white field like Shakespeare studies who must confront new empirical data on whites’ diminished capacity to perform cross-racial reading and identification. Hazlitt and other critics appear to have little difficulty affirming that, “It is we who are Hamlet,” but the same has not been true of black Othello. By contrast, the chapter’s appeal, “We are Othello,” is meant to disrupt the silence around whiteness, to make visible and productively politicize the subject identities of critical practitioners in the field, and issue a call for a transformative, antiracist scholarship.

This chapter examines eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century visions of apocalypse regarding the future of black lives in the American body politic. It begins with readings of Jefferson’s fear of a black planet in Notes on the State of Virginia and Crèvecoeur’s depictions of racial terror in Letters from an American Farmer. The chapter then investigates the writing of an African American herald of the end times, Christopher MacPherson. The chapter reads the apocalyptic jeremiad of MacPherson’s pamphlet, Christ’s Millennium (1811), as a reparative response to the suppression of black voices and the annihilation of black lives.

The armed forces that fought against the Caste War rebels were a heterogeneous mix, including regular government units. The majority of those who fought against Caste War rebels, however, were drafted to the militia (or National Guard) battalions established in major Yucatecan towns. Furthermore, local vecino or Indian men waged their own war against the rebels. The coexistence of a variety of armed forces, the strong reliance on draftees, the presence of volunteers in military units and the participation of people who fought the rebels on their own led to several problems and became an obstacle to central strategic planning and the enforcement of military discipline. The role of Indians in the struggle against Caste War rebels has been consistently neglected or played down in much of the literature, possibly for its potential to question interpretations of the conflict as a racial or ethnic struggle. However, as the chapter shows, Indians, identified by their Maya surname, made up a substantial part of the army and National Guard units. Indian participation in the war was not limited to individual regions or a specific point in time.