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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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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