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• W285039434 abstract "In an especially bizarre passage in his otherwise very sober Histoire naturelle, Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, explains that the darker human complexions one finds in some parts of the world have resulted from the actions of the wind. Buffon had observed that the inhabitants of Peru who were least exposed to the wind had the lightest skin; the more people undergo the wind's action, he theorized, the darker their complexions become. Summarizing the findings of Alexis Littre, a fellow member of the Academie des Sciences, he offers up physical proof' that the wind causes darker skin: Monsieur Littre, who in 1702 performed a dissection on a Negro, observed that the tip of the glans of the penis which was not covered by the prepuce was black like the rest of his skin, and that the rest, which was covered, was perfectly white. This observation proves that the action of the air is necessary to produce the blackness of Negroes' skin. Their children are born white, or rather red, like the children of other men, but two or three days after their birth, their color changes. (1) The association of whiteness with ideality (perfectly white), particularly as it concerns human morphology, correlates not only a burgeoning discourse on the hierarchy of the human races, but also a nascent affiliation between the abstractions of philosophical discourse and the materiality of differently raced bodies. In this essay I would like to propose a model for trying to understand how the human identifier began to precipitate a nexus of social meanings, and how by referring to attributes extending beyond the field of the visible, whiteness indexed specific culturally valorized characteristics while simultaneously producing itself as an empty category, one with no attributes but nevertheless capable of evaluating people and social practices. Whiteness produced itself, that is, as invisible or as effacing its own characteristic value, in the same way, say, that a unit of currency seems only able to gauge the value of other things without expressing anything about itself. Its self-effacement con tributed to its capacity to measure the abstractions surreptitiously associated with it, in particular its relationship to law and to the discourses of reason and logic generally associated with Enlightenment values. Two principal components of racial concern me here, and both relate to the manner in which ways of about bodies exceed the field of the visual and extend into abstractions that nevertheless remain steadfastly tied to what people could ostensibly empirically observe. On the one hand was a discourse of law, perhaps most fully elaborated by Montesquieu, for understanding how people interacted with and depended on their social, geographical, and political environments. On the other hand, and closely related, was a discourse of causality by which European observers attempted to explain the differences in human morphology that they observed. The two forms of I am identifying as white racial thinking have traditionally appeared to gauge the validity of other forms of thought, most generally under the guise of logic, reason, or some other variety of Enlightenment discourse, and they have also seemed oriented more toward form than content. That is, Enlightenment discourses generally concern first and foremost thought processes themselves-- that is, the manners or modes through which other questions can find resolution--and only secondarily the content of that thought. Here I would like to sketch out a means of looking at the positive content of Enlightenment logic--of analyzing, in other words, the content of the form--by examining how discourses of law and of causality were fundamentally tied to the body and to European ideological dominance. Montesquieu begins his Spirit of Laws by observing that there is an originary reason [raison primitive]; and laws are the relationships between that reason and different beings, and the relationships among these diverse beings. …" @default.
• W285039434 created "2016-06-24" @default.
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• W285039434 date "1999-06-22" @default.
• W285039434 modified "2023-09-24" @default.
• W285039434 title "Missing Links: Whiteness and the Color of Reason in the Eighteenth Century" @default.
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• W285039434 hasPublicationYear "1999" @default.
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