An important collection of documents on scientific racism.
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.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-674-24426-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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