ARPS Media - The Enlightenment and the birth of scientific racism

One of the foundational tragedies of human history has been our recurrent temptation to treat designated victims among our fellow humans as less than us, to reify, exploit and “other” them. The cruel, flesh lacerating machinery of this sin against human solidarity was first turned against women and has, down the blood stained millennia, worked against them and variously defined “others.”

Racism has been one of the most poisonous examples of the ideology that has been developed to explain and promote exploitation of one group by another. But this is not always an easy sell. As Rogers and Hammerstein knew, people must be taught to ignore our common humanity. The tale of the emergence of scientific racism and the efforts of those who struggled against it is an important part of modern history.

So called “scientific racism” is one important form of this corrosive mental poison, and Andrew S. Curran’s new book, Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson investigates the significant Enlightenment figures who played a role in creating a new rationale for subjugation, a set of ideas built to purpose to justify the atrocities of imperialism in the 18th and 19th century, often enough by intellectuals who had material incentives to justify the slavery that enriched them.

Here in the West , we have been encouraged to see the Enlightenment as a uniquely wonderful moment in intellectual history that elevated reason and debate over bias and superstition. But Curran, like many current scholars, takes more nuanced and intellectually honest approach, recognizing the advances and reforms inspired by Enlightenment thinkers but also drawing the reader’s attention to the ways that these same thinkers provided a cover story for racist oppression and the mass murders and torture committed under the aegis of their new, improved justifications for racial inequality.

Curran recognizes that his approach is “top down” history, with a focus on the intellectuals and the politically and economically powerful, but he contends that this approach allows him to give the reader a broad strokes account of how the toxic lie of scientific racism was developed and deployed. At this he succeeds, providing an instructive and important history of ideas overview that spans several centuries and touches on many of the countries and urban centres where the Enlightenment was developed.

In a 2021 article co-authored with the eminent Black historian Henry Louis Gates Junior, which addresses many of the themes of his new book, Curran wrote:

“In 1712 King Louis XIV of France signed the lettres patentes that formally established Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences, Belles Lettres, and Arts, a social club of intellectual inquiry and public edification. In contrast to the more conservative University of Bordeaux, whose primary objective was to educate the country’s priests, doctors, and lawyers through lessons compatible with Scripture, the Bordeaux Academy saw itself as “enlightened”: its objective was advancing scientific truth as part of a larger program intended to promote “mankind’s happiness.” Every year, the academy organized an essay contest that it publicized throughout Europe. In 1739 the members announced the subject of the competition for 1741: “Quelle est la cause physique de la couleur des nègres, de la qualité de leur cheveux, et de la dégénération de l’un et de l’autre?” (“What is the physical cause of the Negro’s color, the quality of [the Negro’s] hair, and the degeneration of both [Negro hair and skin]?”) Embedded in this question was the academy’s assumption that something had happened to “Negroes” that had caused them to degenerate, to turn black and grow unusual hair. In short, the academy wanted to know who is Black, and why. It wanted to know, too, what being Black signified”

In 1741—the year when the essays arrived at the academy—62,485 African men, women, and children in chains were trafficked from Africa to the deadly labour they were destined to perform until they died in European colonies in the Americas. There were 9,454 who died en-route that year. Already over four million had been shipped from their African homes to the colonial killing fields, and by the end of the Enlightenment century, another 4.5 million had been kidnapped. One online source estimates that by the end of the legal trade, over 12 million Africans had been abducted and nearly two million had died in the nightmare ships of the Middle Passage. The “scientific racism” elaborated by Enlightenment intellectuals provided rationales for this murderous atrocity.

Tracing the development of this new racism, which extended earlier, faith-based excuses for racism and created secular excuses that did not rely on dubious Biblical texts, Curran addresses the work of Francois Bernier, who he calls the “first classifier” and that of Carl Linnaeus, “the botanist who transformed man into an animal.” He then moves on to thinkers like Buffon, Voltaire and the key theoreticians of the Scots and German Enlightenments like David Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, William Robertson, Immanuel Kant and Johann Blumenbach. While these Enlightenment figures often disagreed with each other about the causes of racial differences, they were united in providing arguments that supported one form or another of racial superiority and rationalized the horrors of slavery, as did figures we have learned to revere as exemplary champions of civil liberties and free thought like Voltaire and Jefferson. We still live today in the bloody ruins of the world the “scientific racists” created.

But while all this racist bilge was being hailed as the Next Big Thing in progressive thought, voices who spoke from lived experience of slavery, like Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Tubman and Fredrick Douglass began to be heard, and some white intellectuals and politicians joined them in creating anti-slavery societies and abolitionist papers. A movement was being born around the world, a story brilliantly told in the lifework of the American historian David Brion Davis, work that should be read in tandem with Curran’s magisterial volume.

But as usual, the price of freedom was paid in blood as well as words. The battlefield performance of the Haitians who conducted the first anti-racist revolution in world history from 1791 to 1804 and created Latin America’s first independent country, as well as the Black Union soldiers in the American Civil War refuted scientific racism’s claims that African ancestry people were by nature passive, natural slaves.

Curran’s lucid work of intellectual history is timely today, as new variants of racism, both pseudo-scientific bilge like Trump’s “poisoning our blood” claims and variants based on twisted versions of religious faith, like white Christian nationalism, and Islamic, Hindu and Judaic fundamentalisms crowd the public square and shout down calls for unity and human decency. I recommend this book to anyone who is concerned with the crisis we are currently enduring, its causes and possible (hope springs eternal) cures.

Source: The Enlightenment and the birth of scientific racism – rabble.ca