Whos Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race
English
A fascinating, if disturbing, window onto the origins of racism.
Publishers Weekly
The eighteenth-century essays published for the first time in Whos Black and Why? contain a world of ideastheories, inventions, and fantasiesabout 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 skinan indispensable chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism.
In 1739 Bordeauxs 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 Gods 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 Bordeauxs 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.