56 The New York Reviewtheir contest had not solved the ques-
tion of blackness. They themselves did
not know what the right answer was,
but they knew what the answer was not.
Some of the men surely thought that
the essays were not scientific enough;
others were perhaps put off by natural-
istic explanations that made no men-
tion of God.
At some point, the members agreed
that the contest was a failure. A short
note in the Mercure de France stated
that the Bordeaux Academy’s com-
petition on blackness had received
mediocre submissions. Following a
procedure established in the late 1720s
(after several other contests had con-
cluded without a winner), the academi-
cians presumably reallocated the prize
money and purchased shares in the
name of the academy from the Com-
pagnie perpétuelle des Indes (Perpet-
ual Company of the Indies). This new
trade conglomerate, which oversaw all
French slave trading in Africa after
1719, had been involved in the depor-
tation of 37,000 Africans to the Carib-
bean by the time the contest concluded.The Bordeaux contest, despite its fail-
ure and some especially fanciful sub-
missions—one essayist was convinced
that African mothers imprinted black-
ness on their fetuses through the power
of the maternal imagination—did at-
tract entries that anticipated the crys-
tallization of race during the coming
decades. In retrospect, one can see that
material causes, be they linked to the
environment or some humoral pathol-
ogy, were beginning to trump religious
explanations in many of the essays.
Several submissions hinted that human
phenotypes came about through some
form of mutation over time.
The one truly influential essay
among the submissions was an “empir-
ical” entry written by a physician and
botanist named Pierre Barrère. Unlike
the other contestants, Barrère had ac-
tual experience with Africans. Serving
as a plantation surgeon in Cayenne
(Guyana), Barrère had not only treated
the enslaved men, women, and children
who fell ill in the colony, but also con-
ducted autopsies on members of this
population when they died. Shortly
after the contest concluded, Barrère
published his Dissertation on the Phys-
ical Cause of the Color of Negroes, vir-
tually the same text as the one he had
submitted. In his short introduction, he
claimed that he was encouraged to do
so by the Bordeaux Academy itself.
To a certain extent, Barrère’s work
harked back to an earlier generation of
anatomists, especially Marcello Mal-
pighi, the seventeenth- century Italian
physician who discovered the rete mu-
cosum, or Malpighian layer, the basal
layer of skin where pigmentation re-
sides. But Barrère’s aspirations went far
beyond Malpighi’s; he was the member
of a new generation of anatomists seek-
ing out deeper (if fictional) physiologi-
cal structures in African bodies. In the
essay, Barrère declared that blackness
was far more than the effect of the sun
burning the skin; it was, he claimed to
have discovered, a jaundice- like excess
of dark bile that darkened the blood, a
pathology that led not only to a rapid
heartbeat but also to the extreme
“lecherousness” of the Negro.
Barrère’s ideas echoed for decades.
Seven or eight years after the contest
concluded, the most important natural-ist of the eighteenth century, Georges-
Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, read
Barrère’s text while developing his own
theory related to the African. Though he
admitted that Barrère’s research seemed
persuasive, Buffon attempted to down-
play the importance of anatomy when
discussing human varieties. Instead, he
proposed a far more genealogical un-
derstanding of humankind—the story
of a prototype group of white humans
that slowly mutated into the world’s dif-
ferent human varieties as they moved
into different climates. “All humans,”
Buffon wrote, “are little more than the
same man who has been adorned with
black in the torrid zone and who has
become tanned and shriveled by the
glacial cold at the Earth’s pole.”
Buffon’s unease with the temptation
of anatomy did not prevent a new gen-eration of physicians from following
Barrère’s lead. In 1755 the German
anatomist Johann Friedrich Meckel
announced that his dissection of a
Negro man had revealed that Africans
had bluish brains and darkened pineal
glands; ten years later Claude- Nicolas
Le Cat, a French anatomist working
in Rouen, claimed that his own dissec-
tion studies had allowed him to iden-
tify an elemental black fluid, which he
called oethiops, that coursed from the
African’s brain through to the nerves,
organs, skin, and even sperm. These
and other “breakthroughs,” which
were generally received as fact, were
quickly disseminated in scientific jour-
nals. They even appeared in Diderot’s
Encyclopédie.The anatomical explanations of black-
ness that emerged in the 1750s and
1760s coincided with a more essential-
ized, or racialized, classification of Af-
ricans. In 1758, in the tenth edition of
his Systema Naturae, Carl Linnaeus re-
duced Americans, Europeans, Asians,
and Africans to specific zoological
phenomena based on pigmentation,
humoral tendencies, physical traits,
temperament, clothing, and political
orientation. Linnaeus’s classification
of the so- called Homo africanus was
withering; among other things, he de-
scribed Black Africans as flat- nosed
and thick- lipped, lazy and phlegmatic.
He wrote that African women had
elongated labia and profusely lactating
breasts. He also claimed that, while
European society was based on law,
the governing principle of the African
people was caprice.
Classifiers and anatomists were not
the only thinkers contributing to afar more deterministic understanding
of the African (including the “Afri-
can mind”) in the 1750s; two of the
era’s most celebrated Enlightenment
philosophers, David Hume and Vol-
taire, chimed in as well. Both of these
sworn enemies of intolerance identified
“Negroes” as a distinct and inferior
species. Hume’s most notoriously rac-
ist screed came in an endnote that he
added to the revised 1753 edition of his
essay “Of National Characters.” In ad-
dition to asserting that human beings
come in “four or five different kinds,”
Hume—who was recently revealed to
have facilitated the purchase of several
plantations in the Caribbean—main-
tained that one could survey the entire
African continent and find “no arts, no
sciences” among its peoples—a state-
ment that not only denied Black Afri-
cans the ability to reason, but reason’s
necessary corollary, civilization. To
further his point, Hume belittled Fran-
cis Williams, the free Black poet from
Jamaica who had become well known
in London for his Latin- language odes.
Though Hume had never met Williams,
he described the poet as a “parrot, who
speaks a few words plainly.”
Three years later, Voltaire added his
own eerily similar indictment of Afri-
cans’ ability to think and to reason in
his 1756 Essay on Universal History,
the Manners, and Spirit of Nations. As
he put it:The race of Negroes is a species
of man different from our own,
in the same way that the breed of
spaniels is different from that of
greyhounds... one could say that
if their intelligence is not of a dif-
ferent species from our own, it is
far inferior. They are not capable
of much attention. [Negroes] com-
bine few ideas and do not appear
to be made for either the advan-
tages or the disadvantages of our
philosophy.It was in Germany, however, where the
idea of a national character or spirit
reached its full expression—where rea-
son was ultimately painted white. This
process began when Immanuel Kant
responded directly to Hume’s musings
on national character in his 1764 Obser-
vations on the Feeling of the Beautiful
and the Sublime. Ranking human races
by their supposed cognitive aptitudes,
the German philosopher declared that
black- skinned Africans lacked any
“feeling that rises above the trifling.”
This, he maintained, was directly re-
lated to the fact that being “black from
head to foot” was not simply a matter
of pigmentation, it was clear proof that
Africans were, by definition or a priori,
“stupid.”
In his subsequent anthropological
writing, Kant continued to assert that
black skin corresponded to a lower cog-
nitive potential, a lack of reason, and
an inferior and unchanging moral char-
acter—all of which prevented Africans
from reaching the state of civilization.^2
These views became the foundation of
his seminal 1777 essay, “Of the Dif-
ferent Human Races,” in which KantThe thumb and two pieces of skin of an
African woman; colored mezzotint by Jan
L’Admiral, from Bernhard Siegfried
Albinus’s Second Dissertation on the Origin
and Cause of the Color of the Ethiopians
and of Other Men, 1737Wellcome Collection, London(^2) See N. G. Jablonski, “Skin Color and
Race,” American Journal of Physical
Anthropology, Vol. 175, No. 2 (June
2021). The authors would like to thank
Professor Jablonski for her generous
clarification of a number of issues in
this article.
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