Who's Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race

by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Editor), Andrew S. Curran (Editor)

Overview

“A fascinating, if disturbing, window onto the origins of racism.”
—Publishers Weekly

“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: A History of the United States

The first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of black skin—an indispensable chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism.

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. The authors ranged from naturalists to physicians, theologians to amateur savants. 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. Some affirm that Africans had fallen from God’s grace; others that blackness had resulted from a brutal climate; still others emphasized the anatomical specificity of Africans. All the submissions 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674244269
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/22/2022
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	88,887
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

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.

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.

Table of Contents

Preface: Who's Black and Why? ix

Note on the Translations xv

Part I Introduction: The 1741 Contest on the "Degeneration" of Black Skin and Hair 3

1 Blackness through the Power of God 44

2 Blackness through the Soul of the Father 47

3 Blackness through the Maternal Imagination 68

4 Blackness as a Moral Defect 70

5 Blackness as a Result of the Torrid Zone 82

6 Blackness as a Result of Divine Providence 89

7 Blackness as a Result of Heat and Humidity 96

8 Blackness as a Reversible Accident 99

9 Blackness as a Result of Hot Air and Darkened Blood 105

10 Blackness as a Result of a Darkened Humor 111

11 Blackness as a Result of Blood Flow 114

12 Blackness as an Extension of Optical Theory 121

13 Blackness as a Result of an Original Sickness 141

14 Blackness Degenerated 158

15 Blackness Classified 168

16 Blackness Dissected 184

Part II Introduction: The 1772 Contest on "Preserving" Negroes 193

1 A Slave Ship Surgeon on the Crossing 200

2 A Parisian Humanitarian on the Slave Trade 211

3 Louis Alphonse, Bordeaux Apothecary, on the Crossing 221

Select Chronology of the Representation of Africans and Race 231

Notes 245

Acknowledgments 291

Credits 295

Index 297

Editorial Reviews

11/29/2021

Harvard scholar Gates (Stony Road) and Wesleyan humanities professor Curran (Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely) analyze in this eye-opening and expertly contextualized collection the links between systemic racism and the Enlightenment. Presenting essays submitted to a 1741 prize competition held by Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences on the theme of “What is the cause of the Negro’s dark skin and hair texture?,” Gates and Curran showcase how Enlightenment thinkers “made use of the rhetoric of progress and humanitarianism in order to rationalize human bondage.” Contestants included theologians, natural scientists, and amateurs, whose explanations for “blackness” included the effects of heat and humidity on the skin, “humoral imbalances,” and evidence of a “perverse disposition of the mind.” In a lengthy introduction and insightful supporting materials, Gates and Curran provide the context for the contest submissions, describe the role such evaluations played in justifying Bordeaux’s involvement in the slave trade, and analyze how “scientific” explanations for human diversity gave credence to the erroneous view that racial characteristics indicated innate moral difference. The result is a fascinating, if disturbing, window onto the origins of racism. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

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.

London Review of Books - Catherine Hall

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.

Santa Fe Reporter - Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

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

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

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.

Public Books - Christy Pichichero

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

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.

Early American Literature - Mary McAlpin

A fascinating look into the eighteenth-century invention of the concept of race.

Foreword Reviews

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

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.

Chronicle of Higher Education - John Samuel Harpham

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

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

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

An invaluable historical example of the creation of a scientific conception of race that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Washington Post

2021-12-22
Enlightenment science and systemic racism meet in this probing account of a scientific competition nearly three centuries past.

Harvard African studies scholar Gates and Wesleyan humanities professor Curran join forces to examine the proceedings of the Bordeaux Academy of Sciences in 1739, when the organization decided that its members should address a compelling question: “What is the cause of the Negro’s dark skin and hair texture?” The question had corollaries: What does being Black mean? Why are some people Black and others not? The French scholars may have professed scientific detachment, but as Gates and Curran note, the Bordeaux of the time was deeply implicated as a slave port, bringing Africans in bondage to the French Caribbean—and responsible, write the editors, for “approximately 13 percent of the 1.2 million enslaved Africans who arrived alive in the French colonies.” As Gates and Curran show, the members of the academy were not innocent: Many of them had financial interests in the slave trade and overseas colonies, and one of their pressing concerns was to figure out physiognomic reasons why shipboard captives died of disease in such large numbers. Some of the essays that arrived in response to the competition addressed these issues of mortality, while other theses were pseudoscientific by modern lights—e.g., “Based on Newtonian optics, blackness results from the absorption of light”; “Blackness arises from vapors emanating from the skin.” Particularly interesting is the “belief in human consanguinity.” The scholars recognized that Black Africans were human, at least, if by their account degenerate or inferior. Some of the essays here even approach modern science in connecting skin pigmentation to environmental conditions. Still, most of the French authors of yore were content with the notion that the original and best color of humankind was a “pleasant whiteness,” with their science put to the job of supporting supremacism and servitude.

An important collection of documents on scientific racism.

Kirkus Reviews

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.

New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century - Jeffrey Merrick