Some affirm that Africans had fallen from God’s grace others that blackness had resulted from a brutal climate still others emphasized the anatomical specificity of Africans. The essays themselves represent a broad range of opinions. Looming behind these essays is the fact that some four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic by the time the contest was announced. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why. The authors ranged from naturalists to physicians, theologians to amateur savants. Sixteen essays, written in French and Latin, were ultimately dispatched from all over Europe. In 1739 Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of “blackness.” What is the physical cause of blackness and African hair, and what is the cause of Black degeneration, the contest announcement asked. The first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of “black” skin-an indispensable chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism. To read them is to witness European intellectuals, in the age of the Atlantic slave trade, struggling, one after another, to justify atrocity.”-Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
“The eighteenth-century essays published for the first time in Who’s Black and Why? contain a world of ideas-theories, inventions, and fantasies-about what blackness is, and what it means. “A fascinating, if disturbing, window onto the origins of racism.”- Publishers Weekly Visit Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran’s website,, to view an interactive Timeline of the History of Race as well as an up-to-date listing of book-related events
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