Who’s Black and Why?

2023 PROSE Award in European History

"An invaluable historical example of the creation of a scientific conception of race that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon."
- Washington Post

"Reveals how prestigious natural scientists once sought physical explanations, in vain, for a social identity that continues to carry enormous significance to this day."
- Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People

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

"To read [these essays] 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

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, written in French and Latin, were ultimately dispatched from all over Europe. These essays document European ideas about who is Black and why, against the backdrop of the kidnapping and transportation of some four million Africans across the Atlantic by that time.

The essays represent a broad range of opinions but revolve around a common theme: the search for a scientific understanding of the new concept of race. More importantly, they provide an indispensable record of the Enlightenment-era thinking that normalized the sale and enslavement of Black human beings.

These previously unpublished documents survived the centuries tucked away in Bordeaux's municipal library. Translated into English and accompanied by a detailed introduction and headnotes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran, each essay included in Who’s Black and Why? lays bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colourism in the West.