Who’s Black And Why?: A Hidden Chapter From The Eighteenth-Century Invention Of Race, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew S. Curran

What thanks do we owe to Gates and Curran for editing this immensely obscure collection of 18th century essays written to answer two questions about blacks? The essays included in this section–many of which are redacted–are the real stars of the show. While the answers to the first question, devoted to answering a question about the supposed degeneration of black skin and hair and its origins, are generally disappointing, the answers to the second question, which sought practical advice on how to better preserve the lives of African slaves being transported to the New World, were quite intriguing to this reader at least, even if none of them met the satisfaction of the organizers of that 1772 contest from the Royal Academy of Sciences of Bordeaux, France. While the essays themselves represent the views of people who considered themselves to be Enlightened intellectuals of their time–and the style and approach of some of the essays was one that reminded me of many of my own essays relating to scientific, philosophical, and practical matters–the editorializing of this book is a real weakness. The essays are worth reading, not least because they give us a picture of what thoughtful but obscure people thought about serious questions of their day, but Gates in particular is deeply clueless about how his unsympathetic portrayal of the essays and their writers undercuts his own Enlightenment-based perspective.

The contents of this book consist of two parts. After a preface and a note on the translations from French and Latin (the languages the essays were originally written in), the first part of the book discusses the 1741 contest that the Royal Academy of Sciences or Bordeaux held for essays that would best explain the supposed “degeneration” of the skin and hair of blacks. The academy received sixteen responses to this question, and the editors of the book spend about 40 pages introducing the context and then another 140 pages or so providing the sixteen essays in translation, organizing the essays by their arguments, so that we have armchair theorizing about blackness as the result of the power of God (1), the soul of the father (2), maternal imagination (3), moral defect (4), living in tropical climates (5), divine providence (6), heat and humidity (7), reversible accident (8), hot air and darkened blood (9), darkened humor (10), blood flow (11), optical theory (12), original sickness (13), degeneration (14), classification (15), and dissection (16). The second, and shorter, part of the book begins with an introduction of the 1772 contest on preserving the life of blacks being transported through the Middle Passage from Africa to lives in slavery in the New World, and the three essays included are from a slave ship surgeon sympathetic to blacks (17), a Parisian humanitarian (18), and a local apothecary who sought to better preserve the lives of both blacks and whites involved in the slave trade (19), a view which the authors (especially, presumably Gates) ridicule as an exercise in “white lives matter,” as if that was a bad thing.

The worst thing about this book is the editorializing that the editors do in seeking to frame the authors as being some sort of racists whose biases remove them from the sympathies of contemporary mankind, which is undercut by the casual anti-white racism of the editorializing itself which demonstrates the hypocrisy and double standard of the editors. Given the lack of scientific knowledge, especially that of genetics, during the late 18th century, it is remarkable to this reader at least that those answers to the first essay which commented on heredity and divine providence in being involved with skin color answered the question as well as could be expected given the knowledge at the time. The three essays in part two of this book are all excellent and demonstrate a real concern for the well-being of those unfortunate people caught up in the slave trade, and the fact that the editors seek to ridicule a local 18th century citizen of Bordeaux for his efforts in arguing for conditions that would improve the health of both whites and blacks demonstrates that he was more humane and enlightened than the anti-white racists who edited this book, a rebuke they should be keen to take to heart and repent thereby. The value of this book is in presenting the views of the original authors, who struggle within the knowledge of their time to answer questions of general scientific, philosophical, and practical interest. In seeking to give a revisionist account of the 18th century French Enlightenment, the editors of this book demonstrate themselves to be less enlightened than those they hold up to ridicule and scorn.