Who's Black and why? A hidden chapter from the eighteenth-century invention of race

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.)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.