Who's Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race

"A fascinating, if disturbing, window onto the origins of racism."--Publishers Weekly  "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. 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 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.   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. Sixteen essays, writte