2022-03-10 LIVE from NYPL Henry Louis Gates and Andrew S. Curran: The Robert B. Silvers Lecture >> Tony Marx: Good evening, everyone. I'm Tony Marx. I'm the President of the New York Public Library and it is my absolute pleasure to welcome you to this year's annual Robert B. Silvers Lecture, and in particular, to welcome you back to the New York Public Library after two long years. [ Applause ] Talk about patience and fortitude. And what could be better than to bring us back than our partners and co-host tonight, The New York Review of Books, the -- the intellectual paper of record. [ Applause ] Tonight, we are joined by Henry Louis Gates, who is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the Hutchins Center at Harvard. He has -- you know, the resume just goes on and on and you wouldn't be here if you didn't know it, so I'm not going to read it to you. But my favorite, Skip, is 54 honorary degrees. Fifty -- where? Oh, it's 60. Did you keep all the hood -- never mind. The Skip is also a colleague, a friend, a trustee, a visionary in America's public intellectual and conscious, just that. And Skip is joined tonight by our also great friend, Andrew Curran, who is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan. He is a leading specialist of the Enlightenment as a topic we need to be reminded of these days, as well as the author of The Anatomy of Blackness and Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. We're delighted to have Andrew here. I'll bring him to the stage in just a minute. Together, Skip and Andy have edited a new book, Who's Black and Why? Which reveals a hidden chapter from the 18th century, Invention of Race. Tonight we'll have two complimentary lectures, so we're going to turn to Skip and Andy in just a minute. But first I want to acknowledge the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos, and Adam Bartos for making Live from NYPL possible. [Applause] And I'd also like to thank the Margaret and Herman Sokol Public Education Endowment Fund and of course, the support of you, the patrons and friends and tonight's special guests, our conservatoires. I also just want to take a minute to say what an honor it is to continue to have the Bob Silver's lecture here in honor of Bob. He was the Editor and Co-founder of the New York Review of Books, as you all know. He joined the library's Board of Trustees in 1997 and became a life trustee in 2005. In 2014, we named him a library lion for his extraordinary contributions to the world of letters. Bob was, I can say personally, always the steady hand, if you will, the editor of the library's vision, who kept our clarity, made it cleaner, made it focused, and served us in a way that no one else could to make sure that we were on the right path and that we were clear about it. His passing obviously continues to be a great loss. We began to honor Bob with the very first lecture with Joan Didion in 2002. We've had other speakers, including Oliver Sacks, Zadie Smith, Mary Beard, Masha Gessen, Daniel Mendelsohn, who now serves as Editor at Large of the review. So this is a distinguished group and we continue tonight. At the end of the lecture, Skip and Andy will be happy to answer some questions. We've put note cards and pencils by you. Please, write them at any point, wave them around. One of my colleagues or I will come and get them from you. And now, without further ado, please join me in welcoming Andrew Curran to deliver tonight's first lecture. [ Applause ] >> Andrew S. Curran: Well, thank you all so much for coming tonight. Thank you so much, Tony, well, for that wonderful introduction. I want to start with a couple more thank yous, if I may. I know that I'm speaking for Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and myself, that we want to recognize the wonderful and brilliant Emily Greenhouse at The New York Review of Books and we're really sorry she couldn't be here. It has been a real pleasure working both with The New York Review of Books past few months and also with the team here at the library, a really wonderful, wonderful team. Thanks also go to Max Pulaski who sponsors this event and of course, an event that recognizes the wonderful Robert Silvers. And finally, I have to say it's a real pleasure to share the stage with my friend and colleague, Skip Gates, whose idea it was to do a book on The Board of Academy of Sciences in the first place. And once again, thank you all for coming. Now, we've been asked to talk about the Invention of Race and to launch our book here. This is a -- you're actually the first people we've talked to about the book and we're very happy to share this with you. So I'm going to share my first slide here. And I gather there's some people who might be impaired, whose vision might be impaired tonight, so I'm going to actually describe some of the things on the screen as I go through this. So here, we're projecting an image of the book in 18th century script, done by a wonderful African American designer. So I want to begin by saying that the concept of the history of race, and that's what we're talking about here, is far less studied than either the history of slavery or racism itself. And from an American point of view, the origin of the idea of race may seem deceivingly clear. To justify the forced deportation of 400,000 Black Africans to North America and another 11 million to other parts of the Americas between 1525 and 1866, Europeans and their American heirs debased and maligned their captives. Yet the vestigial racism that exists today is more than a malignant byproduct of the 19th century plantation system. It grew out of an elaborate and supposedly scientific European conception of the human species that began during the Enlightenment. And this is the context for the book that Skip and I are publishing this month, Who's Black and Why? For the past three years, Skip and I have been looking back at one of the key moments in this story to the year 1741, to a time when the members of the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Science announced a Europe wide essay contest on the subject of the cause of black skin and textured air -- hair, rather, among African populations. Now, believe it or not, this is one of the biggest anthropological questions of the day, linked as it was, to the larger question of how all of humankinds varieties, they were not yet called races, came into being and how they related to each other or not. It is hard now not to marvel at the audacity of this French provincial academy. And in my next slide here, I'm going be showing a photo of the beautiful Bordeaux townhouse that originally belonged to the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences at the time of the contest. Now explanations related to black skin had been circulating for 25 centuries before this context, but the 1741 competition was the first time that a scientific institution extended an invitation to Europe's best thinkers to envision an entire subspecies of humans in terms of separate genealogies and separate categories. And our book tells the story of the strange contest, its result, its organizers, and we also talk about the history of the port city of Bordeaux, whose slave trading vessels ultimately carried 150,000 Africans to the New World. This book also underscores the fact that slavery is, of course, the unstated link between the contest and the fascination with African skin. Now, to a certain extent, you might think that this is a micro-history of how race came about, but it's also a macro-history because the essays from the contest that we are publishing and they also -- they came from as far as Germany, Sweden, Ireland might also be seen as something of a European focus group or a core sample of what Europeans thought about what was considered humankind's most extreme variety, dark-skinned Africans. And in my next slide, I'm going to be showing you one of the Latin essays that was submitted to the contest and which we translated, actually, not me personally. Now, when looking at these essays, the Academy of Science was interested in naturalistic, not religious, explanations and they received many of them, most of them pseudo-scientific absurdities. One contestant maintained that blackness came from the vapors that clearly emanated from the skin. Another, that the power of a pregnant mother's imagination had imprinted a dark color on its child and its descendants. A third claim that blackness was passed on from person to person through darkened semen. A fourth, that the stifling heat and humidity of the Torrid Zone stained the skin and clouded the humus. Present in these essays, however, were also the three major tendencies that became the foundation for the new idea of race that was crystallizing. First is that of genealogy, namely that an original prototype human race moved around the globe and morphed into humankinds' many varieties as a result of climate and different types of food. Now, you might think that this migration story sounds like the out of Africa theory that we all know and accept as fact, a theory that maintains that an original group of dark-skinned homo sapiens moved out of East Africa and into Eurasia beginning some 200,000 years ago. And yet this 18th century genealogy was the exact opposite of natural selection. According to the so-called Degeneration Theory, as people moved from the temperate climates, their bodies did not adapt. They became the misshapen victims of the world's brutal climates. Degeneration Theory, which was incredibly popular, established both the qualitative and genealogical primacy of a white race, simultaneously identifying so-called Laplanders, Eskimos, and black-skinned Africans, rather as accidents, the unfortunate victims of the world's environment. The second tendency is the rise of supposedly empirical anatomical theories related to the source of blackness. This was best exemplified by the only contestant to the contest who ultimately published his essay after the competition was done, a surgeon by the name of Pierre Barrère. Barrère had served as a plantation doctor in French Guiana, where he had developed an interest in dissecting the bodies of enslaved Africans who had died under his watch. And in the next slide here, we will see Barrère in his -- back in France in Perpignan, dissecting the body in his laboratory. Now in his essay, Barrère claimed that he identified the elemental source of blackness coursing through the blood and bile of African bodies that he had examined. Now, although the idea of humoral imbalances had been around since Hippocrates, this was different. It was anchored in contemporary practice and immediately accepted by fact by a number of naturalists. His so-called findings were republished and republished and cited in numerous journals and even made their way into Diderot's encyclopedia. More important, his writing and methods inspired a generation of anatomists to hunt for specific and, of course, bogus physiological structures in African bodies. By the 1750s and 1760s, a number of young anatomists had followed Barrère's lead and announced new breakthroughs in the area of African physiology. By the 1750s, these same practitioners asserted that Africans not only had black blood and black bile, but black brains and black pineal glands, all of which pointed to diminished cognition in their opinion. And there was a third tendency as well present in these essays. In addition to genealogical theories and anatomical theories, the essays hinted at the coming classification of humankind into discreet subspecies. This would happen primarily in the 1770s by people like Blumenbach and Kant. Now Professor Gates, Skip, will be talking about this. I'll be leaving the post-1750 world to him. As for me and during the rest of my talk, I actually will move back in time and talk a little bit more about the history of classification because classification, human taxonomy, is the intellectual infrastructure for race, the most understandable way of passing on centuries of misinformation and propaganda about Africans and people of African descent in a highly intelligible and rationalized fashion. To do so, I want to introduce you to an astonishing human being named Francois Bernier, an intrepid traveler and physician who set off from Marseille in 1656 for the Orient. Bernier's trip began in Rosetta, Egypt, where he quickly contracted the plague, Black Death, but recovered. He then made his way down the Arabian Peninsula to present day Yemen and crossed over the sea to India where he secured a position as a personal physician to the Padishah or emperor of Hindustan, otherwise known as the Grand Mughal of India. The story is amazing and by the way, India at the time had the largest economy in the world, a huge population of 150 million people. Now in the next slide, we're going to see a 17th century Indian painting of a French doctor sitting calmly under a tree. This may or may not be Bernier, some people claim it is Bernier. But I put it up here because I thought it'd be nice to have an image of a French doctor moving to India in the 17th century. So by the time that Bernier gets back to France, he had traveled from one end of the Indian subcontinent to the other, from what is now Southern Afghanistan and Pakistan to Southern India. And during his voyages, Bernier recorded his encounters with an astonishing palette of human phenotypes, East Africans, Arabs, so-called Bohemians or Roma, Kashmiris, Chinese, Dutch, Georgians, variously complexioned Indians, Jews, Pashtuns, Persian, Poles, Portuguese, Tartars, Turks, and Uzbeks, among other human groups. Now, other travelers to these parts of the world had certainly recorded their contact with different types of humans. Now what was different about Bernier, and this is really important, was that he was a free thinker and a religious skeptic who was profoundly uninterested in biblical explanations of humankind. He decided to think about humankind in a new way and much of this had to do with the fact that Bernier was one of the world's first true empiricists. In fact, he had trained under one of the world's first people to think about this was Pierre Gassendi. And from Gassendi, Bernier had learned a four-step, rather, empirical approach known as "ars bene cogitandi," the art of thinking well, and he followed this method thinking about humankind. First, he envisioned the question of human phenotypes from an open and even skeptical point of view, without affirming or denying anything, including scripture. Second, he put forward solid propositions regarding the data based on evidence from the census. Thirdly, he deduced a theory from the available evidence. And finally, he ordered his findings. It was this method bringing together observation, experience, and the desire to rationalize the world, these of course became Enlightenment mantras a century later that allowed the race genie to escape its bottle. And upon his return to France, 13 years after he left, Bernier wrote a travelogue and became a fixture at a famous Parisian salon run by Madame de la Sablière. And here, Bernier hobnobbed with the likes of La Fontaine, Fontenelle, Racine, Molière, and Madame de La Fayette, truly the varsity team of 17th century France. And Bernier was a headliner as well. He was affectionately known by Parisians as the Grand Mughal. He was funny, he was gallant, and had a waggish and daring sense of humor. He famously quipped to a friend, in my opinion, abstaining from pleasure is a mortal sin. And one fateful day at the salon, and it could have been any time between 1671 and 1679, his hostess who was a brilliant woman, apparently prompted him to read a short essay that he had been working on entitled, A New Division of the Earth. To understand what was at stake in Bernier's schematic separation of humankind in an era where the concept of separate human races remained as foreign as yet undiscovered theory of gravity, I should go over a couple of concepts. The first thing I want to do is a quick foray into classification itself. Bernier was obviously not the first person to suggest that people could assign their fellow humans to specific groups. Every single ethnicity or community that has existed has produced some form of folk taxonomy with themselves as the or category and Westerners and Europeans were no exception. During antiquity, the Greeks and Romans distinguished themselves from the rest of the world's supposed rabble by designating themselves as civilized, whereas other human types were labeled as barbarians, and just who those barbarians were depended on one's perspective. The Greeks assigned the term to all non-Greek speaking peoples, including the Africans, Persians, and initially Romans. And the Romans used the term to refer to Northern tribes, including the Saxons, the Goths, and Vandals. And by Bernier's era, the term, according to the encyclopedia, was being applied to anyone who did not seem to have "laws or politeness," be they Amerindians or Tartars. Bernier's taxonomy, however, did not attempt to divide the world in terms of its civilization or the lack thereof. His innovation was dividing the world based solely on physical traits. In this regard, he was tapping into another tradition that had started when Aristotle broke down the world and its creatures into manageable, rational categories in the history of animals, which was composed around 350 BCE. Now let's go back to Madame de la Sablière's salon. Sometime in the 17 -- 1670s, and imagine Bernier reading his New Division of the Earth in public for the first time. In most cases, the chit chat and tittle tattle that went on at this salon would evaporate into the ether and Bernier's theory of human races could have been no exception. And yet several years later in 1684, the 64-year-old Bernier got the idea to publish a written version of the New Division at the Journal des Sçavans, which, incidentally, is the same journal where the call for papers for our contest was published as well. And by 1684 in the early spring, Bernier's essay now entitled, A New Division of the Earth According to the Different Types of Races of Men by a Famous Traveler was typeset, published in Paris, and distributed through route Europe. Now in the next slide, we're looking at an image of the front -- the first page of that article. And the first sentence of this provocative essay makes abundantly clear that Bernier was proposing a radical reconceptualization of the human species that ashued both the Bible and typical geographical breakdowns. And in the next slide, we'll see that. I will read that here, the quote, "Hitherto, geographers have only divided the earth into its respective countries and regions, but my own observations during my lengthy travels gave me the idea of dividing it in another way. Although one could easily associate men with the different areas of the world in which they live by looking at the external form of their bodies, especially their faces, and while people who have traveled widely can often distinguish one nation from another without a problem, I have nevertheless observed that there are four or five types of races among men that are so obvious that they can justifiably serve as the basis for a new division of the Earth." Now like many groundbreaking articles from which scholars expect a huge reaction, Bernier received none. Most of his 17th century readers were presumably confused by the new division. How curious for this famous traveler, and everyone knew it was him, to categorize humans in the same way that most people classed animals? How funny to use the word race, which had generally referred to royal bloodlines for animals, in order to refer to humans? Now, although 17th century Europeans had absolutely no qualms about scorning Blacks, Amerindians, or Laplanders as their moral and perhaps even physical inferiors, no one had ever sorted humankind by color and physiology. Now, how should we assess this guy? Some people have called him the father of race. The first thing I think we should note is that compared to the mirthless skull-measuring classifiers that would come into -- who would practice their classification schemes 100 years later, Bernier's race-based breakdown of the human species is anecdotal and downright chatty. It's a product of the salon. And one detects also less of the dogmatism of later science. Indeed, as a practitioner of the great skeptical tradition, Bernier freely admits that he is unsure where to class Native Americans. Were they different enough, he wonders, to constitute a separate race? Ultimately, toward the end of his essay, Bernier actually decides to lump all of the inhabitants of the New World with the first -- with this first race. It's really revealing to see who is a member of this big first group. It included pale Europeans, tawny Turks, North Africans, Native Americans, Jews, Arabs, light and very dark-skinned Indians, as well as some of the inhabitants of contemporary Thailand and Malaysia, an enormous category. And he never explained the criteria involved in putting together this group of people. But the primary factor seems to have been the recognizability, if that's a word, on the level of facial features and this trumped all other considerations. Now to a certain extent, much of Bernier's new division actually served strangely enough to humanize a group of -- a number of groups and peoples, Jews, Arabs, Christians who had long been separated by religious hatred and violence. It's bizarre to think that in this one instance, race maybe being used to actually humanize a larger group. And this was particularly true for the second race, Asians. Bernier labeled them a distinct race, certainly, but he did not do so in terms of pigmentation. In fact, he described Asians as being "really white" with dark hair and a different eye shape. This rather soft understanding of human difference did not extend to Bernier's assessment of the two final racial categories, Laplanders and Africans. Bernier's disparaging remarks on the Laplander race, more appropriately, referred to the semi-peoples of Finland, accurately reflect the hatred and disgust that early modern explorers had related about this semi-nomadic ethnicity. And Bernier really describes their bodies and behavior as monstrous. And yet as dehumanizing as Bernier's assessment of the Laps was, it remained on a level of basic anecdotal xenophobia. The real steps toward an ideology of race came, not surprisingly, in his assessment of Black Africans, by far the most distinct and disgust racial group in his four-part breakdown of humankind. Now Bernier had met many Africans in his travels. Some were the unwilling participants of the East African slave trade, others were soldiers serving in the Great Mughal's armies. There were also eunuchs who had been taken from the Horn of Africa as boys, before being emasculated in India in order to work in the harems. Bernier's observations of these transplanted Africans, which was partially based on his physiological knowledge, is the closest that he gets to a modern notion of race. To prove that Africans constitute a distinct type, Bernier began by citing facial features, which he claimed were distinct from aquiline noses and medium-sized lips. Most salient, however, was his assessment of African pigmentation. Of course, this is the line that grows into the contest. In stark contrast to what he said about Indians, whose pigment he attributed to the climate, Bernier argues that "blackness is Africans' essential defining trait." This color, he continues, is no way -- in no way caused by the heat of the sun. Given the fundamental stability of the African category, Bernier then infers that the explanations for their other essential traits, including oily skin and curly-textured hair must be sought out on a deeper physiological level, in Africans' semen and in their blood. In Bernier's eyes, this physiological explanation for blackness quickly becomes the model around which a larger causal explanation of human difference emerges for all phenotypes. In fact, he goes on to say that not all differences among humans can be attributed to the environment, to the water, food, land, and air. They must also stem from the nature of the seed, which must vary with specific races and types. And here, in one simple phrase, were the basic ingredients for race theory that would slowly emerge in the coming decades, heredity, permanence, and classification. And this brings me back, very briefly to the 1740s, 1750s, 1760s, by which time the first halting steps toward a comprehensive racialization of the human species was well underway. And now I will turn the podium over to my colleague and friend, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who will talk to us about this era and what he calls the dark side of the Enlightenment and how new methods allowed Europeans and their colonial descendants and the United States to engineer such an effective dehumanization of an entire people. Thank you so much. [ Applause ] >> Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Give it up for Andrew Curran, please. Isn't that fabulous. [ Applause ] Such a great honor to be here and a great honor to be able to lecture without a mask. Robert Silvers is a hero of mine. I had the pleasure of being part of his nomination for an honorary degree at Harvard and hosting him and Ray when they came up and he just was the consummate scholar and intellectual and editor and I revered him. I admired him so much. And to be able to give a lecture in his honor is truly a great honor for me. Literacy, that is the absence and presence of reason, is measured through the capacity to write, would become the single most important argument used to justify the enslavement of African people in Europe and the New World in the latter half of the 18th century, which also happens to mark the very beginning of the Anglo-African and African American literary traditions. Where did this idea come from, that Black people lacked reason by nature? And why did Black people and Black and white abolitionists have to prove that Black people in fact did possess reason and therefore we're human and should not be enslaved? All the way back to antiquity and even through the 17th century, there's copious evidence that Africans and Europeans been in contact with each other in relationships of political, religious, and scholarly exchange, as well as through trade, relationships that could accurately be described as respectful, courtly, and even equal. But even at the same time that, for instance, el negro, Juan Latino became the first Black person to publish a book of poetry in any Western language, he published three books of poetry in Latin between 1573 and 1585, other forces were amassing to diminish and dehumanize Africa and its Black Africans. This is not one Latino. Juan Latino became professor of the classics at the University of Grenada and was very, very famous. I mean, he -- Cervantes mentions them in the beginning of Don Quixote. And we know that his portrait was painted but it's been lost. It's one of my fantasies, the way -- you know, to find this long, lost portrait, along with the second volume of Phillis Wheatley's poetry, right? Which has disappeared. So that's on my bucket list. But this is a portrait called Portrait of a Moor and it was done between 1525 and 1530 by Jan Mostaert. So we know that there were Black people in Europe and they were posing for portraits. When we go back to the 17th century, an array of great European thinkers expounded upon the primacy of reason, the arts, and writing in defining what it is to be human. Francis Bacon in the New Organon in 1620 wrote that, that which makes man a God to man is knowledge of the arts and sciences. Descartes, most famously in the Discourse on Method in 1637, which yielded what may be the single most famous line of early Enlightenment philosophy, of course, which we all know, I think, therefore I am. And Bernard Fontenelle in a discourse concerning the ancients and moderns, speculated about the potential of Africans and Laplanders to create literature. The proof of thinking is reason and the proof, the manifestation of reason is its writing. As an Anglican priest argued in the year 1684, he knew, contrary to aspersions cast on Africans, he knew that Black people were indeed human beings, he writes, because they know how to read and write and how to laugh, he added for good measure. David Hume. We all know Hume. David Hume built up upon on a century of these ideas in an essay he published in 1748 called, Of National Characters. If the characters of men depend on the air and climate, the degrees of hold -- of heat and cold should naturally be expected to have a mighty influence, since nothing has a greater effect on all animals and plants. And indeed there is some reason to think that all the nations which live beyond the polar circles or between the tropics are inferior, Hume wrote, to the rest of the species and are incapable of all the higher attainments of the human mind. Now Hume surveyed the world's peoples in the first version of this essay, everybody but Africans. So maybe he was prodded. Because when he published the second edition, five years later in 1753, he added how he felt about the Black world in a footnote. And this is his footnote, I am apt to suspect the Negroes and in general, all the other species of men for there are four or five different kinds, to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation, no ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbers of the whites, such as the ancient Germans, I'm sorry for anyone of German descent in the audience, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them in their valor, form of government or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference, Hume concludes could not happen in so many countries and ages if nature had not made an original distinction tweaks these breeds of men. Yet Hume definitely knew about learned literate Africans as well, especially Francis Williams, educated at the Inns of Court in London, a Jamaican and a writer of poetry in Latin, whose work Hume trashed in that same footnote. And this is what he says, Hume, "In Jamaica, indeed they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning, but 'tis likely he's admired for various slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly." He also most certainly knew about William Ansah Sessarakoo and Job Ben Solomon, two formerly enslaved men who became celebrities in London and whose images graced the pages of Gentleman's Magazine in 1750. He may have known too about Angelo Soliman, who was a prominent figure in European courts in the middle of the 1700s. He not only knew of them, he knew that they could read and write, that they were intelligent, that they were articulate, they were sophisticated, and aristocratic. But Hume ignored the evidence that pointed exactly to what he would call reason in favor of what he presented as a lack of African civilization and even African cognition. Hume created a discourse that we might call race and reason, which became one of the most powerful tools in the justification of the slave trade. At the very height of the Enlightenment in Europe in the 18th century, all the major thinkers in the Enlightenment who wrote about this question, took their starting point from David Hume. Ten years later, the most influential Enlightenment thinker of all, Immanuel Kant, writing in Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime in 1764 had this to say, "The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling." Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of Blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality. Or any other praiseworthy quality. Even though among the white some continually rise the law from the lowest rabble and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. "So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man," Kant says, "and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color." Even anti-slavery philosophe, such as Montesquieu and Voltaire, harbor racist attitudes toward Black people. Montesquieu famously opposed slavery in his Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748. Nevertheless, he asserted that those who lived near the equator are, as my co-editor and dear friend, Andy Curran, writes, consequently lazy, pleasure-driven, unthinking machines with no curiosity, no noble enterprise, no generous sentiment. As for Voltaire, who also opposed slavery, Africans, he wrote in 1769 in his essay on The Spirit of Nations, were the other of Europeans. And I quote, "Their round eyes, their flat noses, their invariably fat lips, the wool of their head, even the extent of their intelligence reflects prodigious divergences between them and other men." Now Voltaire showed the capacity for change in 1774, a year after the publication of Phillis Wheatley's book of poetry. He wrote to the Baron Constant de Rebecque reversing himself, saying that, "Genius, which is rare everywhere, is nonetheless found in all climates. Fontenelle was wrong to say that there would never be poets among the Negroes. There is now a Negress who writes very good English." First, you likely are aware of the famous story of Phillis Wheatley whose first edition is housed in this lovely library, the young African American purchased by Susanna Wheatley, the wife of a Boston merchant. When she arrived in Boston in 1761 from the windward coast of West Africa, she was seven or eight years old, one of 7,161 enslaved Africans who arrived in North America that year. By 1765, she had mastered English and was writing poetry. Her first poem was published in 1767, her next in 1770, and by 1772, she had written enough poems to comprise a book. Her poetry was elegant and filled with classical allusions, very much in the mold of 18th century poetry. Yet still, she was subjected to what her judges called a critical examination by the best judges, either individually or in small groups, who according to their Boston censor advertisement on February 29th, 1772, "Think the poem is well worthy of the public view and find the declared author was capable of writing them." Despite this testimony, this evidence, no one would publish Phillis's book in Boston because no one believed a person of African descent had the requisite intellectual capacity to have written those poems. So her master put her on the ship and sent her to England, seeking the support of the Countess of Huntingdon and her Methodius circle of abolitionists who understood they could most potently fight against slavery by showing, demonstrating the possession of reason by an enslaved person and this could be no more forcefully demonstrated than through that enslaved person's literacy. Thus, Phillis Wheatley's book, Poems on Various subjects, Religious and Moral was published in London in September 1773. We celebrate her today as one of the progenitors of the African American literary tradition. And she was the Toni Morrison of her age. But she would die in 1784 at around the age of 30, penniless and essentially, anonymous. Her second book of poetry was advertised in 1779 but it disappeared. George Washington appraised her, Voltaire views were transformed by her, but not everyone was convinced. How about Thomas Jefferson. Writing in Notes on the State of Virginia in -- written in 1785, this is what Jefferson said, "Among the Blacks is misery enough God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced the Phillis Wheatley, but it cannot produce a poet. The compositions," Jefferson wrote, "published under her name are below the dignity of criticism." Jefferson of course said much more than this in his Notes on the State of Virginia about the suitability of Blacks to be "retained and incorporated into the state, raising objections that were political, as well as others that are physical and moral," and I'm quoting Jefferson. He wrote that the difference between Blacks and whites is "fixed in nature and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us." He wrote that, "Blacks are in possession of desire whereas whites have sentiment, sensation, and reason." Most grotesquely, Jefferson wrote, "Is not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the races, are not the fine mixture of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of color in the one preferable to that eternal monotony which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race. Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form. Their own judgment in favor of the whites declared by their preference of them as uniformly as is the preference of the orangutan for Black women over those of his own species." In what has to be one of the most heinous assertions ever made about people of African descent, Thomas Jefferson just argued that the imagined sexual practices of African women signified their true status on The Great Chain of Being. The African, he's arguing implicitly, rests between the human and the animal in a state intermittent between those conditions and that's why it's important and necessary that he trashed the quality of Phillis Wheatley's poetry, a creature capable of mating with an ape. In effect, Phillis Wheatley's mother from whose arms, Wheatley tells us in a very sad poem, from whose arms she was snatched. In Jefferson's telling Kate cannot be capable of reason, cannot be capable of writing. A person of African descent cannot be capable of creating elegant poetry. Thus for Jefferson, the representation of Enlightenment thought in the United States, along with Benjamin Franklin, Blacks were worthy of enslavement, not freedom. "I advance it therefore as a suspicion only that the Blacks, whether originally a distinct race or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in endowments, both of body and mind. This unfortunate difference of color and perhaps of faculty is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people." I referred earlier to Angelo Soliman and I want to return to him now so that we can put the finest point on what Black people were up against, in case Jefferson's heinous fantasies weren't enough. Soliman, friend of Mozart and Haydn tutor to princes an advisor to Emperor Joseph II, the "Father of Pure Masonic Thought," surely his presence and his accomplishment stood as prima facie evidence of the inherent quality of equality of Black people, wouldn't you think? When Soliman died in 1796, the director of the Imperial National History Collection in Vienna had him skinned and stuffed as a mummy, placed on display in the museum in a cabinet of curiosities. The mummy was on display in 1806, finally burned during the October revolution of 1848. Even Angelo Soliman, who I jokingly called the Vernon Jordan of the 18th century, the most assimilated Black man in all of the Enlightenment who was in a Masonic lodge with Mozart, was turned into an object upon his death, no different than the most humble enslaved African woman or African man. We spent plenty of time on the outrageous arguments about the nature "of Black people," arguments used to justify their enslavement, their objectification, and dehumanization. It's important to understand the philosophical and economic context in which these arguments were made. Today, we understand that what we properly call race is a social construction that all human beings, no matter how different we might seem from each other based on our physical traits, such as hair texture, facial structure, and of course skin color, are over 99.99% identical genetically. However, the Enlightenment arguments about the inferior nature of Black people were made in the context of the belief that emerged in the 18th century, the cultural characteristics are "natural," are biological, are scientific and essential and unalterable, a belief that was used by Europeans to justify the slave trade. Immanuel Kant's work was the most critical to the emergence of this discourse about race. In his 1775 essay of the different human races, he was, "the first person to formally define races," according to evolutionary anthropologist, Nina Jablonski down at Penn State. Nina writes, "For Kant and many of his followers, the rank ordering of races by skin color and character created a self-evident order of nature that implied that light colored races were superior and destined to be served by the innately inferior, darker colored ones." Jablonski adds that with its roots and pre-medieval associations of white with good and black with evil, "the light-dark polarity was extended to the human sphere with the establishment of the slave trade and hereditary slavery in the Americas. The bottom line," she continues, "negative associations of dark skin and human worth were now profitable, enormously profitable. As the trans-Atlantic slave trade became more lucrative, the moral polarity of skin colors was accentuated, creating one of the most sinister," she concludes, "and long-lived patterns of unfairness that the world has ever known." In America, it's easy to see that for African Americans, the most damaging of the works of these Enlightenment philosophers were the arguments made by our very own Thomas Jefferson about the nature of Black enslaved people in this country, counteracting his wise words that all men were created equal. All men, not all men. But Black people would fight back against Jefferson, taking up Jefferson's own weapons against him. They responded in writing to his claims that they were lesser, unworthy, and slaves by nature. This powerful resistance is what we will talk about from here on now. But first, we need to understand why writing was crucial to a so-called racist place on The Great Chain of Being and Hegel tells us why. Writing in The Philosophy of History, his lecture notes published after his death in 1837, Hegel wrote that, "Africa is no historical part of the world. It has no movement or development to exhibit. What we properly understand by Africa," he writes, "is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of world's history." Why? Because Africa had no writing, he claimed, ignoring the Black written tradition in Arabic at the University of Timbuktu, no tradition of written literature either in European language or in indigenous African language. Without writing, according to Hegel, there is no memory that is reliable or iterable and without iterable memory, there could be no meaningful history of a people. Beings are "human" because they can recount their histories, Hegel argues, and they can recount their history because they have memory. They can repeat and share their memories collectively through writing and only through writing. So for Hegel, who is a human being? A people who have writing, a people who have a written history. Without writing and without history, Hegel claim the Negroes in Africa existed wholly outside what he called the range of culture, were void of a sense of a higher power, of respect for themselves, for others, and for the universal principles of justice and morality, he puts it, that in Europe and America were associated with humanity, prone to tyranny, cannibalism, polygamy, and other non-human activities. Their predilection for slavery as both sellers of slaves and purchase slaves was, according to Hegel, the natural condition of the Negro. Now this was a damning indictment of an entire continent of people. Judged by these criteria, Africans weren't human. Or at least they weren't human like Europeans were human, no writing, no reliably repeatable memory, no memory, no humanity. So how did Black people fight back? Well, in three ways. Perhaps you can anticipate the first, they wrote books. Africans had in fact been writing books for centuries, ladies and gentlemen. Though, we've seen how this wasn't enough to refute racist allegations about the nature of the African. And examples, and keep in mind that each of these individuals had been enslaved, our friend el negro, Juan Latino, Professor of Grammar at the University of Granada, now in Spain, who became the first Black person to publish a book of poetry in any language and was even mentioned, as I said, by Cervantes in Don Quixote in 1605. Anton Wilhelm Amo, the first African, we believe, to attend a European university, then earning his PhD at Wittenberg in 1734 and becoming a professor at the University of Halle. Jacobus Capitein, a contemporary Amo's who earned his PhD at the University of Leiden with, unfortunately, a Defense of Slavery, and who then returned to the Gold Coast, present day Ghana, as the Black minister at Elmina Castle. Francis Williams, whom we met before, born in Jamaica, who studied law at the Inns of Court, who wrote poetry in Latin, and became a celebrity throughout literate London. Job Ben Solomon, who essentially wrote his way out of slavery in Maryland in a letter, an Arabic letter, that he wrote to his father. You know, you couldn't exactly, in 1730, go to the post office to have a letter mailed back to Senegal. But this brother was in prison, he was fluent in Arabic, and he insisted on paper and he sat down and wrote -- he wrote a letter. Thomas Bluett, a lawyer was passing through Annapolis and heard about this African who was in prison and was writing this strange script on the walls of his prison cell. He took the letter, sent it to James Oglethorpe. Oglethorpe had it sent up to Oxford and translated by the reaches -- professor of Arabic and the letter said, dear daddy, help, get me out of here. I'm a slave. They have made a terrible mistake. And they -- and the English, oh my God, he's royal. He's a prince. They raised the money and freed him. This brother literally wrote himself out of slavery. And his portrait is in the British -- in the National Portrait Gallery. Now it's magnificent portrait. When he was free, Bluett wrote a book about him in 1734. He was hired by the Dutch West Indies Company and returned to Senegal as their agent. And the first thing he did when he got there was to purchase two slaves. William Ansah Sessarakoo, the son of a wealthy Fante trader in gold and slaves, also from the Gold Coast, who was erroneously enslaved by a duplicitous sea captain and sold into slavery to Barbados, but then freed when his father refused to sell the British Royal African Company any more slaves unless his son was released. Phillis Wheatley, whom we've already spent time with. Ignatius Sancho whose colorful correspondence with the British literary was published posthumously in London in 1782. And Olaudah Equiano, the author of a slave narrative published in 1789, whose fame was unmatched until Frederick Douglass published his bestselling slave narrative in 1745. The 18th century discourse of race and reason, articulated by Hume, Kant, and Jefferson in particular, persisted well into the 19th century and Black people continued to respond to it with remarkable commitment. Take this example, an errand boy in the anti-slavery office in New York City in 1833 or 1834 overheard a conversation in which it was stated that the infamous Senator from South Carolina, John C. Calhoun, a good Yale man, I graduated from Calhoun College, and a stone-committed racist, had declared, "if he could find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax, he would then believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man." That errand boy was a man named Alexander Crummell, who had become a pioneering Black abolitionist, a Pan-Africanist, an Episcopal priest, and a missionary educator in Liberia. And what did this young errand boy do? Determined to show Senator Calhoun that such a Negro existed, this young Black man went all the way to Queens College at the University of Cambridge, studied for four years in the classical curriculum, passed his exams, and in 1853, became the first African American to earn an AB -- a BA from that August institution, emerging fully fluent in Greek, all to refute Calhoun's racist notion that Black people were innately inferior unless at least one of them wrote and spoke Greek. Ladies and gentlemen, it's hard work being Black sometimes. Whether they wanted to be or not, these Black authors were engaged in, trapped into, forced into a complex act of representing, as we say. A solitary and quite vulnerable individual was made to stand for or represent an entire group, in this case, an entire continent of human beings in a relationship of synecdoche, a part for whole. Frederick Douglass even called himself the representative colored man in the United States. Still, they took on the work of refutation, of writing back against racist imaginings, racist projections, racist fantasies of Black people and they did so intentionally and energetically. If the first way Black people fought back was by writing in general, the second of three ways in which they fought back against this discourse of race and reason, was to create their very own genre of literature, which today we call the slave narratives. Slaves would run away, gain their freedom, become literate, then often, after 1830 in this country, go on the lecture circuit and then publish book-length autobiographical accounts of their bondage and their freedom, which happens to be the title of Frederick Douglass's second slave narrative published in 1855. And within this genre that the former slaves created, they also invented their own peculiar metaphor or trope, which today we call the trope of the talking book. That metaphor is the image of the voice speaking in the text, which is itself a metaphor for a Black person making the text of Western letters speak in her or his own voice. Writing within the circle of a small Black literary world, each of the authors of five -- of the first five slave narratives published between 1772 and 1811, all employed this image in their text, James Gronniosaw in 1772, John Marrant in 1785, Cugoano in 1787. Equiano in 1789, and finally John Jea in 1811. Here's how James Gronniosaw first used the trope of the talking book, "My master used to read prayers in public to the ships' crew every Sabbath day. And when I first saw him read, I was never so surprised of my whole life as when I saw the book talk to my master, for so I thought it did as I observed him to look upon it and move his lips. I wished it would do so for me. As soon as my master had done reading, I followed him to the place where he put the book, being mightily delighted with it. And when no one saw me, I opened it and put my ear down, close upon it in great hope that it would say something to me, but was very sorry and greatly disappointed when I found it would not speak. This thought immediately presented itself to me, that everybody and everything despised me because I was Black." In an allegory, if you think about it, it is such a compelling allegory of the anti-Black racist discourse that we saw in Hume and Kant and Jefferson, the text would not speak to the slave. So what does the slave do in the face of this? He writes a book to make the text speak. He writes a book that contains the Black voice. He makes it reflect his face, the face and the voice of Blackness. It is a bold and brilliant move, both to write and publish a book in the first place to prove that these racists that Black people were reason-possessing and then to throw the whole process in their faces by creating a trope of instruction which names the act being performed. Where did the trope of the talking book come from? Cugoano tells us in an aside, he says that it came from the great Inca Emperor, Atahualpa, who when he was confronted by the conquistador Pizarro and hit the representation of the Vatican who was with him, Father Valverde, and they said, we seize your land, your gold in the name of the Roman Catholic Church. And he was holding a psalter and a cross and Atahualpa took the psalter, the Book of Psalms, held it up to his ear and said, this book is useless, it doesn't speak. And threw it onto the ground in which -- at which point Father Valverde said, the word of God has been traduced, insulted and they attacked him and captured Atahualpa. They tortured him for a year or so and then finally, they killed him. Blacks also fought back in a third way, by entering the discursive arena and writing back critically against Thomas Jefferson, specifically, as we could see in famous texts by David Walter and -- David Walker and Frederick Douglass. Though his presidency ended in 1809, Jefferson's ideas about the supremacy of whites over Blacks would hold enormous sway over the politics and economy of the United States. In 1829, three years after Jefferson's death, the radical Black abolitionist, David Walker, published his appeal to the colored citizens of the world, offering a powerful rebuttal to Jefferson's ideas. The appeal was structured as a riff on the Declaration of Independence. Walker was a tailor in Boston, and he would sew copies of his book in suits so that free Black sailors could distribute them among slaves in the South. The State of Georgia put a bounty of $10,000 on his head if he were turned over alive and 1,000 if dead. He died mysteriously in 1830 in Boston. Walker's appeal has four principal points or articles plus the preamble. First, Walker quotes Jefferson's Declaration of Independence to refute the claims that Jefferson himself had made about Blacks in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Walker says, "Unless we try to refute Mr. Jefferson's arguments respecting us, we will only establish them." Second, he maintains that Blacks themselves must establish a literature, a discourse that refutes pro-slavery arguments. "For let no one of us suppose that the refutations which have been written by our white friends are enough. They are whites, we are Blacks. We in the world wish to see the charges of Mr. Jefferson refuted by Blacks themselves according to their chance. Our oppression ought not to hinder us from acquiring all of the learning and knowledge we can," He says, "For one day, we will be free and then we will want all the learning and talents among ourselves and perhaps more to govern ourselves." Every dog must have its day and the Americans Walker boldly predicts is coming to an end. Third, Walker argues that the most insidious aspect of Jefferson's justification of slavery is that Africans are defined as brutes, as animals as non-human beings. "This is the crux of the entire argument for slavery," Walker says. "Can the whites deny this charge?" He asks. Have they not after having reduced us to the deplorable condition of slaves under their feet, held us up as descending originally from the tribe of monkeys or orangutans? Is this not insupportable?" Well, the brother couldn't wrap his mind around evolution because so many people compared us to apes already. As you can clearly see, and we'll see Frederick Douglass thought evolution was a bad thing for that reason as well. Finally, Walker says, we do not want to be white. We want to be Black and to be free. In Walker's radical critique of slavery in its prime justification, he's determined to refute allegations of innate or biological differences between whites and Blacks, arguing against those who claim that nature herself would have it this way. He is calling out the dark side of the Enlightenment and doing so through a scathing indictment, which some of his contemporaries thought got him killed. Finally, let's turn to the great Frederick Douglass. Douglass, without a doubt, was the most famous Black man in the world. The most famous Black person in the world after 1845 when he published his first book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. He would go on to edit his own newspaper, be the leading Black figure in the abolitionist movement, become a friend of Abraham Lincoln, a minister ambassador to Haiti, and a very rich, prosperous, and celebrated man in his long lifetime. He was the most photographed American of the entire 19th century. He would die in 1895, the same year that W.E.B Dubois would become the first Black person to earn a PhD from Harvard University. In 1854. Douglass was the first person to give a commencement oration before a white audience at what is now Case Western Reserve in Cleveland. Think of that, the very first Black person to address a commencement. Douglass begins his speech with a long quote from an editorial that had recently been published in a Southern newspaper, the Richmond Examiner, which had laid out the issues at the heart of the justification of slavery. This is seven years, ladies and gentlemen, before the outbreak of The Civil War. I want you to listen to its language, because though by now we are in the year 1854, a full century after Hume publishes the infamous footnote about no arts and no sciences in Africa, nothing has changed. Listen to this, "The white peasant is free and if he is a man of will and intellect, can rise in the scale of society, or at least his offspring may." The Examiner editorial begins, echoing the same argument that Jefferson had made about the white slaves in classical Greece and Rome and their capacity to become free and rise. The editorial continues, "He is not deprived by law of those inalienable rights, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by the use of it," the editorial continues, "but here is the essence of slavery, that we do declare the Negro destitute of these powers. We bind him by law to the condition of the laboring peasant forever without his consent and we bind his posterity after him. Now, true question is, have we a right to do this? If we have not, all discussions about his comfortable situation and the actual condition of free laborers elsewhere are quite beside the point. If the Negro," the editorial continues, "has the same right to his liberty and the pursuit of his own happiness that the white man has, then we commit the greatest wrong and robbery to hold him a slave and act at which the sentiment of justice must revolve in every heart and Negro slavery is an institution which that sentiment must sooner or later blurred from the face of the earth." So ladies and gentlemen, what is the answer to this rhetorical question posed by the editorial writer of the Richmond Examiner? Douglass, who's quoting the editorial tells us that the Examiner boldly assert that the Negro has no such right. And in all capital letters, Douglas writes, because he is not a man, meaning he is not and she is not a human being. Douglass starts to deconstruct this argument by attacking the ranking of the human races in the way that Kant did on The Great Chain of Being and more specifically, those who think that Africans are more related to apes genetically than to other human beings. "The whole argument in defense of slavery," Douglas continues warming up, "becomes utterly worthless the moment the African has proven to be equally a man with the Anglo-Saxon. Pride and selfishness combined with mental power never want for a theory to justify them. And when men oppress their fellow men, the oppressor ever finds in the character of the oppressed a full justification for his oppression. The evils fostered by slavery and oppression are precisely those which slaveholders and oppressors would transfer from their system to the inherent character of their victims. Thus, the very crimes of slavery become slavery's best defense. By making the enslaved a character fit only for slavery," Douglas concludes, "they exclude themselves -- they excuse themselves for refusing to make the slave a free man." Douglas knows that the only way to win this argument in which he and all of the other Black writers to whom you've been introduced this evening, are engaged with, Hume and Kant, Jefferson and Hegel, and what we might think of as the popular American cultural imagination is to prove that there was in fact a great civilization that once had thrived on the African continent, a civilization created by Black women and Black men. "Where can one find that?" He ask. "Well," he says, "let's start it with the pyramids. Ancient Egypt," he almost shouts, "is not only in Africa, it was a decidedly neither white nor European society. But Egypt," he argues, "is in Africa. Pity that it had not been in Europe, or in Asia, or better still in America. Another unhappy circumstance is that the ancient Egyptians were not white people," Douglas says, "but were undoubtedly just about as dark in complexion as many in this country who are considered genuine Negroes. And that is not all. Their hair was far from being of that graceful likeness," echoed Jefferson, "which adorns the fair Anglo-Saxon head," a direct reference to Jefferson's claims about the inherent superior beauty of the European complexion and texture of hair over those of Africans. And since Egypt was in Africa and its accomplished people were not white, Douglas concludes, "Egypt alone disproves the aspersions cast upon the nature of the Negro people and therefore it is slavery that is responsible," he concludes, "for the degraded position of the New World people of African descent. Let us end this ridiculous argument for once and for all," Douglas practically shouts from the page, "admit that you guys have invented these crazy ideas about our people to justify exploiting our labor to create the most prosperous economy on earth. And to those of you who actually doubt the fundamental equality of the human community, end slavery and racial prejudice," he says with great finality, "and you will see the Black man and the Black woman rise to the former glory of his ancestors." When challenged to prove their common humanity with Europeans by the greatest thinkers in the Enlightenment in Europe, when he had to disprove the scandalous assertion that Black people were animals, sleeping with orangutans and not fully human beings, Black women and men, all former slaves or the daughters and sons of slaves, met that challenge head on. They sat at their desks and read and wrote books and by doing so, they wrote themselves and their fellow persons of African descent into the human community. These early ex-slave writers are true heroes of the 18th century and the 19th century, both to Black people and to all people who love freedom and justice, just as surely as our Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, W.E.B Dubois, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King Jr. These earliest writers in the African American literary tradition devised their own ingenious ways to tell their stories using their own tropes and their own scenes of instruction. And in these early writings, we can see that for the last quarter of a millennium, the last 250 years, Black people have stood up and declared relentlessly that Black lives do matter and so does Black writing. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] Thank you. Andy, come on up here. Oh, were you supposed to go off while you do that? They gave us so many instructions that don't make sense. >> Andrew S. Curran: Thank you so much. >> Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Thank you. >> Andrew S. Curran: Well, that really was an astonishing talk, I think. And I have -- we have a time for a few questions and I have to say, this is an astonishingly smart audience because the questions are very intense and brilliant. We have time just for a few. So let me read a few and see how you react. Our book is over here and the question is, do you feel it is more -- >> Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Which you can buy? [ Laughter ] >> Andrew S. Curran: Do you feel it's more important for Black people or white people to buy this book? >> Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: I am not prejudiced. I don't know. How do you feel? >> Andrew S. Curran: Well, I think it's maybe important for everybody, but I think it's particularly incumbent upon people who have been benefiting from skin color and everything else to kind of look back to the history of race, because I don't think we study it nearly enough. And I think that, you know, getting -- understanding that genealogy, which is so intense and what you showed tonight, would be really a great part of our curricula. >> Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: You know, the thing that struck Europeans about people of color, as we would say, Black people, was their color. And it's signified in the names that they gave to the countries in which Black people lived. Ethiopia is Greek for burnt face, Zanzibar is Arabic, land of the Blacks, Sudan, Arabic land of the Blacks. What else am I? Oh, Niger, that's Black, you know, in Latin. Nigeria, Blackness. Abyssinia means mixed race people. Ethiopia was Abyssinia and then went back to Ethiopia. And maybe one more than I'm not remembering. But that's what struck them first and then they had to explain it and they had to explain it in negative ways. So to answer your question, I think it's important for everybody, but for different reasons. For white people to understand the subtle ways that intellectual apparatuses were drawn upon, were confected and then drawn upon to justify the enslavement of 12.5 million Africans who were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean between 1501 and 1866. That you would think the Academy of Bordeaux, that 40 academicians, they have an essay contest, 1739, the prize is a gold medal and a year's salary for a French worker, what's that have to do with slavery? It had everything to do with slavery. What did David Hume writing that footnote have to do with slavery? Everything. What did Kant in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime? Everything. Because through phases of mediation, this philosophical discourse was drawn upon to justify the slave trade. It was all about the Benjamin's. But no matter what their intention was in writing they were good people, I'm sure. They thought that they were calling it the way that it was, but that discourse was drawn upon to justify slavery. And it's a pernicious nasty episode in the history of letters, in the history of philosophical thought, in the history of the Enlightenment, and we all need to be aware of it. You know why? Because generations further down the road will look back at us. And we want this to be a cautionary tale for us to look around at what questions we're asking in our very own academies, what questions are we not asking? What are future generations going to look back and criticize us for? For being blind to? For missing the treatment of chickens, for example, the treatment of animals, the -- I don't know, you know, what it will be. But we hope that this will lead to more self-scrutiny among us, among us as citizens and us as intellectuals. >> Andrew S. Curran: All right. Great. And it's a perfect transition because someone wants to find out about the essay contest itself. How was the essay contest and its submissions discovered? And how did you kind of come about writing this book? How did we figure out to do this book? >> Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Karen Dalton, who -- I'm the Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American research at Harvard and has 10 units in it. And one of the units is the image of the Black and Western art. Now we published 11 volumes. I am the co-editor with the art historian, David Bindman and Karen is the Associate Director of this research project. And over 10 years ago, she came to me and told me about this essay competition and said that would I partner with her and translate these? The essays have sat there for almost 300 years and never been translated. And could we find money to translate them? They were written in French and Latin, they were 16. And I was just so -- I mean, it's like the Dead Sea Scrolls for race, right? You know me, like on that, it took a nanosecond for me to agree. And then Karen has stroke. And she recovered from the stroke, but the stroke had consequences and so she couldn't do that work again. And I am -- I wrote my PhD dissertation on ideas of -- the relationship between race and reason in the 18th century and I've never published it, just bits and pieces. So before I die, I want to publish this thing. So I've been working on it and there's a whole -- I got my PhD in 1978 or I finished it in 1978. So there's a zillion secondary sources. So I bought all these secondary sources and I printed them out and, you know, every once in a while, I say I'm going to do this and I'm trying to keep up and trying to revise it. And I was reading a special issue of a journal responding to his book. There were four or five essays responding to somebody named Andrew Curran's a book about them cause of Blackness. And so I ordered his book and in it, he refers to the essay competition at the Academy of Bordeaux and I'd never seen a reference to it. And so I wrote to him and said, can I talk to you on the phone? And I said, let's make a deal. Why don't we work together? And he took the bait. I mean, it was just -- and here we are today. >> Andrew S. Curran: That's great. >> Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: And the book is dedicated to Karen Dalton. >> Andrew S. Curran: Yeah, that's great. Well, I think we've got time for one very fast question, Skip. Is racism central to the Enlightenment or unfortunate appendage? >> Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: What do you think? >> Andrew S. Curran: Well, I think it certainly is part and parcel of the whole movement, but the Enlightenment is in the same way the 20th century, the 21st century can't be reduced to one thing. There's a -- it's a complex question. And the Enlightenment actually provides the basis for deconstructing its own worst ideas. And I think you showed that beautifully by talking about Jefferson in that he was -- actually had this emancipatory side too, part of him, and then this horrific racist side. So if we had to kind of call the 18th century the Enlightenment, I think both of those things are there. >> Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Some of the greatest advances they do about history, of course, came in the Enlightenment. You have the scientific method starting what many people think, with Francis Bacon and then, you know, emerging through all the wonderful things about the Enlightenment. You can't say bad things about the Enlightenment, except when it comes to what the Enlightenment said about Black people and women, but that's not our subject today. And for someone -- I mean, Dubois made a list of the, you know, the books all educated people should have read, the four or five books, and the critique of pure reason is right there. And of course, what a sublime mind and what racist things he felt about people of color. He actually in a quote -- I cut the quote off, but he talks about the fact that what a man had to say was stupid because his color was black. Kant became the first person specifically explicitly to equate character with inner character, mental character, with physical characteristics in that same essay in 1764. People had said all kind of bad things about Africans, but no one said the blackness of his face was a sign that what he had to say was stupid. And that is almost a direct quote from Kant. It's hard to walk around that, you know. I mean, what do you do with that but call it racist and that's what it was. So even the great sublime moment in the history of human civilization had a dark sign and that dark sign was its writings about persons of African descent. >> Andrew S. Curran: Great. Well, I think that wraps it up for tonight, and I would just want to thank everybody. I bet you want to as well. It's been really wonderful to be here, and I want to thank Professor Gates. >> Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Thank you. Andrew Curran. Thank you. [ Applause ]