An important collection of documents on scientific racism.
Enlightenment science and systemic racism meet in this probing account of a scientific competition nearly three centuries past.
Harvard African studies scholar Gates and Wesleyan humanities professor Curran join forces to examine the proceedings of the Bordeaux Academy of Sciences in 1739, when the organization decided that its members should address a compelling question: “What is the cause of the Negro’s dark skin and hair texture?” The question had corollaries: What does being Black mean? Why are some people Black and others not? The French scholars may have professed scientific detachment, but as Gates and Curran note, the Bordeaux of the time was deeply implicated as a slave port, bringing Africans in bondage to the French Caribbean—and responsible, write the editors, for “approximately 13 percent of the 1.2 million enslaved Africans who arrived alive in the French colonies.” As Gates and Curran show, the members of the academy were not innocent: Many of them had financial interests in the slave trade and overseas colonies, and one of their pressing concerns was to figure out physiognomic reasons why shipboard captives died of disease in such large numbers. Some of the essays that arrived in response to the competition addressed these issues of mortality, while other theses were pseudoscientific by modern lights—e.g., “Based on Newtonian optics, blackness results from the absorption of light”; “Blackness arises from vapors emanating from the skin.” Particularly interesting is the “belief in human consanguinity.” The scholars recognized that Black Africans were human, at least, if by their account degenerate or inferior. Some of the essays here even approach modern science in connecting skin pigmentation to environmental conditions. Still, most of the French authors of yore were content with the notion that the original and best color of humankind was a “pleasant whiteness,” with their science put to the job of supporting supremacism and servitude.
An important collection of documents on scientific racism.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-674-24426-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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