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Who’s Black and Why?
A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race
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Edited by:
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2022
About this book
2023 PROSE Award in European History
“An invaluable historical example of the creation of a scientific conception of race that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.”
—Washington Post
“Reveals how prestigious natural scientists once sought physical explanations, in vain, for a social identity that continues to carry enormous significance to this day.”
—Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People
“A fascinating, if disturbing, window onto the origins of racism.”
—Publishers Weekly
“To read [these essays] is to witness European intellectuals, in the age of the Atlantic slave trade, struggling, one after another, to justify atrocity.”
—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
In 1739 Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of “blackness.” What is the physical cause of blackness and African hair, and what is the cause of Black degeneration, the contest announcement asked. Sixteen essays, written in French and Latin, were ultimately dispatched from all over Europe. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why. Looming behind these essays is the fact that some four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic by the time the contest was announced.
The essays themselves represent a broad range of opinions, which nonetheless circulate around a common theme: the search for a scientific understanding of the new concept of race. More important, they provide an indispensable record of the Enlightenment-era thinking that normalized the sale and enslavement of Black human beings.
These never previously published documents survived the centuries tucked away in Bordeaux’s municipal library. Translated into English and accompanied by a detailed introduction and headnotes written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran, each essay included in this volume lays bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism in the West.
Author / Editor information
Contributor: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the author of numerous books and has written extensively on the history of race and anti-Black racism in the Enlightenment. His most recent works include Stony the Road and The Black Church. He is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
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Contributor: Andrew S. Curran
Andrew S. Curran is a leading specialist of the Enlightenment era and the author of The Anatomy of Blackness and Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. He is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University.
Reviews
An invaluable historical example of the creation of a scientific conception of race that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
-- Washington Post
-- Washington Post
Curran and Gates have done admirable work…There is an elegant preface [and] a thorough contextual introduction…As soon as one starts to read the essays collected in this book, one cannot avoid the impression that one has entered an alien intellectual world. It seems more medieval than modern.
-- John Samuel Harpham Chronicle of Higher Education
-- John Samuel Harpham Chronicle of Higher Education
A book worth reading and contemplating to understand the genesis of our current racial and indeed racist society, with its intersectional forms of minoritization, exclusion, exploitation, and violence…Reading this book does more than reveal ‘the master’s tools.’ Thankfully, it offers us a chance to come together in shared knowledge and, if we so choose, in a shared mission: to break the chains of an abominable history and continue paving the way to a better future.
-- Christy Pichichero Public Books
-- Christy Pichichero Public Books
The sixteen essays submitted for the essay prize remained, untouched, in the Bordeaux archives. They have now been recovered, translated, contextualized and published with a thoughtful and informative introduction by Henry Louis Gates and Andrew Curran, who discuss the city, the academy and ways of reading the range of bizarre explanations offered for black skin and hair…Putting together the Bordeaux texts, Gates and Curran argue, helps us to understand the emergence of the concept of race.
-- Catherine Hall London Review of Books
-- Catherine Hall London Review of Books
A fascinating look into the eighteenth-century invention of the concept of race.
-- Foreword Reviews
-- Foreword Reviews
The essays, the various editorial materials, and the excellent notes make this collection of great use to any scholar interested in this topic. Clearly presented with both rigor and sensitivity, this collection would also be a welcome addition to undergraduate or graduate classes.
-- Mary McAlpin Early American Literature
-- Mary McAlpin Early American Literature
Insightful and instructive…The nineteen essays edited by Gates and Curran remind us that eighteenth-century Europeans extracted multiple messages from nature, which has no voice of its own. The legacy of the Enlightenment includes ‘scientific’ arguments about inferiority based on differences in race, sex, and more, as well as unfulfilled aspirations for equality and humanity.
-- Jeffrey Merrick New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century
-- Jeffrey Merrick New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century
The relative obscurity of these essays and the absence of anything akin to Gates and Curran’s volume highlights the role of selective memory in French historical writing and makes this book necessary reading.
-- Marlene L. Daut New West Indian Guide
-- Marlene L. Daut New West Indian Guide
The roots of the false science behind race and the spread of virulent racism run in parallel. The essays collected in Who’s Black and Why? show that race is a hierarchical form of classification…[The book] has enhanced my appreciation for the tragic absurdity of racial hierarchies.
-- Darryl Lorenzo Wellington Santa Fe Reporter
-- Darryl Lorenzo Wellington Santa Fe Reporter
An important collection of documents on scientific racism.
-- Kirkus Reviews
-- Kirkus Reviews
Eye-opening…A fascinating, if disturbing, window onto the origins of racism.
-- Publishers Weekly
-- Publishers Weekly
In 1741 the Royal Academy of Bordeaux (a city of slave-trading wealth) sought the essence of human Blackness: in the climate, in the blood, in the bile, in the semen, in Divine Providence and the curse of Ham, in the size of the pores, or in ‘tubes’ in the skin. Now, after some 300 years of frustrating searches, definitive answers still elude us. Who’s Black and Why? reveals how prestigious natural scientists once sought physical explanations, in vain, for a social identity that continues to carry enormous significance to this day.
-- Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People
-- Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People
The eighteenth-century essays published for the first time in Who’s Black and Why? contain a world of ideas—theories, inventions, and fantasies—about what blackness is, and what it means. To read them is to witness European intellectuals, in the age of the Atlantic slave trade, struggling, one after another, to justify atrocity.
-- Jill Lepore, author of These Truths
-- Jill Lepore, author of These Truths
An indispensable book for anyone who is interested in the origins of racism. In this essential volume, Gates and Curran reveal how science itself played a major role in the construction of race during the eighteenth century.
-- David Diop, author of the Booker Prize–winning At Night All Blood Is Black
-- David Diop, author of the Booker Prize–winning At Night All Blood Is Black
There is nothing inevitable about modern understandings of race. Gates and Curran have given us unprecedented access to forgotten eighteenth-century conversations that established a moral and intellectual basis for enslaving Black people. This extraordinary book reveals how Europeans learned to think about groups of people as profoundly different from each other simply based on their ancestry. It also provides an important lesson for those who study human variation in our own time. To what extent are we vulnerable to the same intellectual traps?
-- David Reich, author of Who We Are and How We Got Here
-- David Reich, author of Who We Are and How We Got Here
The essays translated—and brilliantly contextualized—in this book provide a window into how European thinkers in the eighteenth century struggled with the legacy of religious ideas about human difference as they began to shape a new scientific understanding of race. They give us a fascinating insight into the early stages of the Enlightenment, reminding us that, whatever we owe to this period, we live now in a radically different intellectual world.
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of The Lies That Bind
-- Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of The Lies That Bind
In Who’s Black and Why? Henry Louis Gates and Andrew Curran do the work of archival historians, and to a very available end: making us understand—through documents at times appalling, at times appallingly comic—a subject all too often hived off to abstractions, that is, how we construct a racial group, and how we come to treat as truths what we know to be inventions. An invaluable historical study, with all too many applications today.
-- Adam Gopnik, author of A Thousand Small Sanities
-- Adam Gopnik, author of A Thousand Small Sanities
Who’s Black and Why? is essential reading for all who want to undo and repair the harm caused by the entanglement of notions of racial difference and the injustices such differences have been used to sustain.
-- Evelynn Hammonds, author of The Nature of Difference
-- Evelynn Hammonds, author of The Nature of Difference
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Preface: Who’s Black and Why?
ix -
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Note on the Translations
xv - Part I
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Introduction: The 1741 Contest on the “Degeneration” of Black Skin and Hair
3 -
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1. Blackness through the Power of God
44 -
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2. Blackness through the Soul of the Father
47 -
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3. Blackness through the Maternal Imagination
68 -
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4. Blackness as a Moral Defect
70 -
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5. Blackness as a Result of the Torrid Zone
82 -
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6. Blackness as a Result of Divine Providence
89 -
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7. Blackness as a Result of Heat and Humidity
96 -
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8. Blackness as a Reversible Accident
99 -
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9. Blackness as a Result of Hot Air and Darkened Blood
105 -
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10. Blackness as a Result of a Darkened Humor
111 -
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11. Blackness as a Result of Blood Flow
114 -
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12. Blackness as an Extension of Optical Theory
121 -
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13. Blackness as a Result of an Original Sickness
141 -
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14. Blackness Degenerated
158 -
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15. Blackness Classified
168 -
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16. Blackness Dissected
184 - Part II
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Introduction: The 1772 Contest on “Preserving” Negroes
193 -
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1. A Slave Ship Surgeon on the Crossing
200 -
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2. A Parisian Humanitarian on the Slave Trade
211 -
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3. Louis Alphonse, Bordeaux Apothecary, on the Crossing
221 -
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Select Chronology of the Representation of Africans and Race
231 -
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Notes
245 -
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Acknowledgments
291 -
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Credits
295 -
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Index
297
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
March 2, 2022
eBook ISBN:
9780674276130
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9780674276130
Keywords for this book
History of race; History of ideas; Colonialism; Postcolonial; History of Medicine; Slave Trade; Eighteenth century; Enlightenment; Middle Passage; Plantation diseases; Kant; Montesquieu; Abolitionism; Abolition; Enslavement; Enslaved Africans; Caribbean studies; Caribbean Africans
