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Margo Hendricks, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran, ed. Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1310–1311, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae261
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Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race is an edited volume of translated essays submitted to the Royal Academy of Bordeaux for its 1741 essay contest on the nature/origin of Blackness. The academy’s contest is an annual event with a single prize awarded each year. What’s noteworthy about the 1741 contest is that it failed to produce a winner.
Editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew Curran begin with an informative introduction that summarizes the academy’s role in Bordeaux’s importance to French colonialism as well as Bordeaux’s centrality as a beneficiary of the French involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, which sets the background for the 1741 contest’s theme. In 1739, the academy issued a call and by 1741, it had received 16 submissions. Contestants ranged from “profoundly religious thinkers” to those attempting “more ‘scientific’ explanations” (5) for the “cause” of Blackness and, in doing so, the superiority of whiteness. That the contest fails is not surprising. The topic has perplexed philosophers, historians, physicians, and ordinary people for centuries. The 1741 competition proved that scientific reasoning still lacked a substantive or irrefutable explanation despite centuries of inquiry.
