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.
An invaluable historical example of the creation of a scientific
conception of race that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
*Washington Post*
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*
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*
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*
A fascinating look into the eighteenth-century invention of the
concept of race.
*Foreword Reviews*
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*
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*
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*
An important collection of documents on scientific racism.
*Kirkus Reviews*
Eye-opening…A fascinating, if disturbing, window onto the origins
of racism.
*Publishers Weekly*
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, author of The History of White
People*
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*
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, author of the Booker Prize–winning At Night All
Blood Is Black*
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, author of Who We Are and How We Got Here*
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, author of The Lies That Bind*
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, author of A Thousand Small Sanities*
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, author of The Nature of Difference*
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