December 16, 2021 57provided the first philosophically rig-
orous definition of race, one that not
only asserted the biological perma-
nence of racial categories—“(1) the
race of the Whites, (2) the Negro race,
(3) the Hunnish (Kalmuck or Mongo-
lian) race, (4) the Hindu or Hindustani
race”—but positioned the African race
as seemingly less than fully human, a
group whose fundamental liabilities
were “unchanging and unchangeable.”^3
This was no longer the dusk before the
dawn of race; it was the first light of sci-
entifically rigorous racism: an era when
naturalists and taxonomists divided the
world’s peoples into discrete subspecies,
when skin color and category became
synonymous with racial destiny.
The human classification schemes
that came into existence in the 1770s
and 1780s lent tremendous authority
to scientific falsehoods—especially
those related to Black Africans, peo-
ple of African descent, and black skin.
Nowhere is this more evident than in
Thomas Jefferson’s discussion of the
Black people whom he had come to
know in his capacity as plantation and
slave owner. Commenting on a litany
of anatomical information on Afri-
cans—some of which comes directly
from the essay that Barrère submitted
to the Bordeaux Academy—the future
president of the United States wrote in
his 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia:The first difference [between
Blacks and Whites] which strikesus is that of color. Whether the
black of the negro resides in the re-
ticular membrane between the skin
and scarf- skin, or in the scarf- skin
itself; whether it proceeds from the
color of the blood, the color of the
bile, or from that of some other se-
cretion, the difference is fixed in
nature, and is as real as if its seat
and cause were better known to us.
And is this difference of no impor-
tance? Is it not the foundation of
a greater or less share of beauty in
the two races?Like many eighteenth- century think-
ers, including the members of the Bor-
deaux Academy, Jefferson remained
unsure just what constituted the phys-
ical essence of blackness. Yet he shared
the belief that the “fixed nature” of
black skin was undoubtedly rich with
taxonomical and political significance.
The debate had shifted from the cause
of blackness to its effect.As the notion of biological races
began coalescing throughout Europe,
the Bordeaux Academy of Sciences
began thinking about Africans from a
supposedly more enlightened point of
view. In 1741 the Academy presented
the riddle of blackness as a strictly sci-
entific problem—an almost apolitical
quandary having nothing to do with
the fact that millions of Africans were
enslaved in European colonies at the
time. Thirty years later, the institu-
tion finally acknowledged the reality
of slavery. In 1772 it organized a prize-
problem focused on the dangers of the
deadly Middle Passage: “What are thebest ways of preserving Negroes from
the diseases that afflict them during the
crossing to the New World?”
The motivation behind this appall-
ing contest reflects a forgotten trend
during the first years of the abolitionist
era: the notion that, through science,
slave traders and planters could re-
form, rationalize, and “improve” ex-
isting enslavement practices, moving
the colonies toward a form of bondage
that was supposedly more benevolent.
Emblematic of the academy’s belief in
both philanthropy and practicality, this
contest was clearly designed to pro-
mote a more “humane” crossing for the
slaves who were enriching Bordeaux’s
economy—while also helping ship cap-
tains and their owners decrease mor-
tality and thereby increase profits. Such
were the limits of the era’s humanism
and universalism: the Enlightenment’s
quest to improve the human condition
seemed perfectly compatible with the
economic imperatives of African chat-
tel slavery.
Though the academy ultimately ex-
tended the entry dates for the contest,
it received only three submissions. Two
had abolitionist leanings that the mem-
bers probably did not find suitable. The
reliability of the third, which had been
sent in by a Bordeaux apothecary, was
called into question by someone inside
or outside the academy. In 1778, the
academicians decided to abandon the
Middle Passage contest as well.
For the next fifteen- odd years, the
academy went back to its business of
organizing public events and com-
petitions. In 1793, however, France’s
revolutionary government abolished
institutions that, like the academy,were bastions of aristocratic privilege
and power. Bordeaux’s Royal Academy
of Sciences was no more.
This was the least of the city’s prob-
lems at the time. In the 1790s, upris-
ings in the richest colony in the world,
Saint- Domingue, disrupted the critical
economic ties that Bordeaux had main-
tained with the Caribbean. At the end
of 1793 more than half of the remain-
ing colonists from Saint- Domingue re-
turned to France, most of them to the
Bordeaux region. Eleven years later,
the revolutionary leader Jean- Jacques
Dessalines declared Haiti an indepen-
dent republic. Bordeaux’s “golden cen-
tury” had come to a close.
The legacy of the Bordeaux Acad-
emy’s failed contests remains a foot-
note—largely forgotten during the
eighteenth century, even less remem-
bered today. The only prominent traces
of the first international contest on
blackness, in fact, are found in the most
famous book of the eighteenth century,
Volt a i re’s Candide, published in 1759.
Candide, who is traveling with an enor-
mous red sheep that he had acquired in
the utopian country of El Dorado, ar-
rives in Bordeaux on his way to Paris.
Candide realizes that he can no longer
take care of his exotic pet and donates
the animal to the Bordeaux Academy
of Sciences. The academy, according to
Voltaire’s story, saw the sheep’s unusual
color as an excuse for yet another com-
petition and quickly “proposed a prize
competition for that year on the subject
of why the wool of this sheep was red.”
The winning scholar, as the story goes,
“demonstrated by A plus B, minus C,
divided by Z, that the sheep had to be
red and would die of the mange.” Q(^3) Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, “The Color
of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s
Anthropology,” The Bucknell Review,
Vol. 38, No. 2 (1995), p. 219.
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