Who’s Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race
Who’s Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race Who’s Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race OTHER ARTICLES A fascinating, if disturbing, window onto the origins of racism.--Publishers WeeklyThe 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: A History of the United StatesThe first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of black skin--an indispensable chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism.In 1739 Bordeaux's Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the ...