{"id":62425,"date":"2022-03-22T15:11:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-22T15:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=62425"},"modified":"2022-03-22T15:11:30","modified_gmt":"2022-03-22T15:11:30","slug":"whos-black-and-why-a-hidden-chapter-from-the-eighteenth-century-invention-of-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=62425","title":{"rendered":"Who\u2019s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who\u2019s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Harvard University Press<\/a>
\n2022-03-22
\n320 pages
\n6-1\/8 x 9-1\/4 inches
\n21 photos, 1 table
\nHardcover ISBN: 9780674244269<\/p>\n

Henry Louis Gates Jr.<\/strong><\/a>, Alfonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor; Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research
\nHarvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts<\/em><\/p>\n

Andrew S. Curran<\/strong><\/a>, William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities
\nWesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux<\/a> essay contest on the cause of \u201cblack\u201d skin\u2014an indispensable chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1739 Bordeaux\u2019s<\/a> Royal Academy of Sciences<\/a> announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of \u201cblackness.\u201d 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<\/a>. The authors ranged from naturalists to physicians, theologians to amateur savants. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why.<\/p>\n

Looming behind these essays is the fact that some four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic<\/a> by the time the contest was announced. The essays themselves represent a broad range of opinions. Some affirm that Africans had fallen from God\u2019s 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<\/a>-era thinking that normalized the sale and enslavement of Black human beings.<\/p>\n

These never previously published documents survived the centuries tucked away in Bordeaux\u2019s 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<\/a> in the West<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n