How Race Is Made

Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses

Mark M. Smith

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780807877272
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Discriminazione e rapporti razziali

For at least two centuries, argues Mark Smith, white southerners used all of their senses--not just their eyes--to construct racial difference and define race. His provocative analysis, extending from the colonial period to the mid-twentieth century, shows how whites of all classes used the artificial binary of "black" and "white" to justify slavery and erect the political, legal, and social structure of segregation. Based on painstaking research, How Race Is Made is a highly original, always frank, and often disturbing book. After enslaved Africans were initially brought to America, the offspring of black and white sexual relationships (consensual and forced) complicated the purely visual sense of racial typing. As mixed-race people became more and more common and as antebellum race-based slavery and then postbellum racial segregation became central to southern society, white southerners asserted that they could rely on their other senses--touch, smell, sound, and taste--to identify who was "white" and who was not. Sensory racial stereotypes were invented and irrational, but at every turn, Smith shows, these constructions of race, immune to logic, signified difference and perpetuated inequality. Smith argues that the history of southern race relations and the construction of racial difference on which that history is built cannot be understood fully on the basis of sight alone. In order to come to terms with the South's past and present, Smith says, we must explore the sensory dynamics underpinning the deeply emotional construction of race. How Race Is Made takes a bold step toward that understanding. How Race Is Made is a highly original, always frank, and often disturbing book. Sensory racial stereotypes were invented and irrational, but at every turn, Smith shows, these constructions of race, immune to logic, signified difference and perpetuated inequality. In order to come to terms with the South's past and present, Smith says, we must explore the sensory dynamics underpinning the deeply emotional construction of race. How Race Is Made takes a bold step toward that understanding.
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1 Learning to Make Sense

Englishmen first encountered Africans through their eyes in a context that stressed the reliability of vision to ascertain truth.¹ English travelers saw West Africans before they sensed them in any other way. Robert Baker described first encounters in 1562 and 1563:

And entering in [a river], we see

a number of black soules,

Whose likelinesse seem’d men to be,

but all as blacke as coles.

This point—though not its historical importance—has been made before by historians. “Negroes looked different” to English eyes; the “most arresting characteristic of the newly discovered African was his color,” followed closely by dress and other visual markings. That Englishmen saw Africans with their eyes focused on blackness—their vision generating and reflecting cultural associations of blackness with filth, dirt, evil, and degeneracy—was quite natural given the context and the suddenness of contact.²

It is impossible to say how quickly other ways of sensing became important. Early sensory stereotypes concerning the smell, sound, and skin of Africans were a product of curiosity and newness and proved remarkably enduring, helping to lay the basis for the making of race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The construction of sensory inferiority enabled elite whites to depict black slaves as both human and animalistic. The sources for this projection were at once religious, pseudoscientific, and classical, and they were important not just to whites’ understandings of racial superiority but also to their surveillance of a restless slave population. Drawing implicitly on Aristotle, who argued that “lower forms” mediated their existence through the rudimentary senses of smell, sound, and touch, colonial and antebellum racists stressed the inferiority of black slaves, who, they maintained, not only emitted distinctive odors and possessed unusual skins but also were hostage to primitive, passionate outbursts. These “inferiors” had a propensity to make noise and react strongly to nonvisual stimuli. According to elite whites, then, not only was blackness sensorily distinctive, but blacks themselves sensed differently, relying more on the putatively lower senses of smell, sound, and touch, and less on the rational, refined, Enlightened perspective of the eye.³ Indeed, the very forms of slave resistance, which often depended on heightened sensitivity to their surroundings, confirmed in white minds that blacks sensed differently.

COLONIAL STORIES

We have no reliable way of knowing when, exactly, whites first constructed sensory stereotypes that created “black” people. White and black had been mixing in Africa and Europe long before Columbus lucked his way across the Atlantic, and sensory awareness of race probably predated the Columbian encounter with the New World. What we can say with some assuredness, though, is that sensory stereotypes were applied by whites to Africans with growing frequency during the eighteenth century and that the meaning of these stereotypes lingered into the antebellum period, when they were used to anchor slaveholding southern paternalism.⁴

For the most part, eighteenth-century whites liked the way they looked. “Of all the colours by which mankind is diversified, it is easy to perceive, that ours is … the most beautiful to the eye,” judged Irish novelist, playwright, and poet Oliver Goldsmith in his popular 1774 study, History of the Earth. The reasons were both aesthetic and religious: “The fair complexion … has a transparent covering to the soul” through which one can see “all the variations of the passions.” Not so with darker skin through which soul and passions are not “so visible.” Although whiteness was the original color of man, Goldsmith did not argue for innate black characteristics. The “varieties of climate, of nourishment, and custom, are sufficient to produce every change,” he ventured, stressing that “we have all sprung from one common parent.” But making whiteness the standard necessarily made blackness deformed and degenerative, and it remained unclear if the “condition” was reversible. It would, Goldsmith maintained, take “centuries” to effect the change.⁵

But if blacks looked less appealing than whites, they looked better, too. According to Charles White, English surgeon, member of the Royal Society, author of the 1799 An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man (read in “important quarters” in America), while they lacked the visual aesthetic of dress and decency—hence their gaudiness and nakedness—some “Negroes” were blessed with an “acuteness of sight.” White marveled at reports of “the extraordinary distance” at which they see “very minute objects.” The “optic nerves” were “uncommonly large in the African.” A similar duality applied to black sound and aurality. White cited various authorities on “the indolent Hottentots” comparing the “sound of their voices” to indolent “sighing,” their language to the “clucking of a turkey.” But sounding less than agreeable did not mean poor hearing. Africans could hear horses, “the noise of an enemy,” and “a flock of sheep” at great distances. Olfactory stereotypes also had two meanings: that Africans smelled rank did not necessarily mean that their sense of smell was inferior. To White it was “observable that Negroes have wider nostrils than Europeans…. They find the subtilty of the sense of smell very useful in their military expeditions; for by it they perceive, at a distance, the smoke of a fire, or the smell of a camp.” But Africans were not as sensitive as, say, “dogs,” which “possess this sense in the greatest perfection.”⁶

If “Negroes” had noses almost as sensitive as those possessed by animals, how they smelled to white nostrils helped anchor black inferiority. Stereotypes concerning black scent percolated so deeply into colonial society that they crop up in even the driest documents. Official speculations on the possible success of silk cultivation in Georgia sent to London in the 1750s, for example, included warming reassurances that “gathering of the Mulberry Leaves, and supplying the Worms with them whilst they are feeding … can be done even by a Negro Girl, if she is carefull; For upon Trial, it appears, there is not the least Ground for the Apprehension some People have had, that the Smell from the Negro would be offensive to the Worms.” While worms seemed oblivious, whites were not. To J. F. D. Smyth’s British nose and ears, the slave South in the 1780s was a place whose flowers “regale[d] the smell with odoriferous perfumes” but where “Negroes” gave off a “rank offensive smell … extremely disagreeable and disgustful to Europeans.” The stereotype had wide purchase throughout the colonies and was by no means limited to the South. As one Philadelphia resident with a retinue of black domestic servants wrote in 1769, “The negroes … stink damnably.”⁷

Not all blacks smelled the same. Charles White considered “The RANK SMELL … much stronger in some tribes or nations than others.” Sweating, though, was not the cause: “The negroes sweat much less than Europeans,” probably “owing to the thickness of their skins.” Other observers, such as the Jamaica historian Bryan Edwards, also believed that there were differences within African groups, differences not just in skin tone but also in skin scent. The “Mandingoes,” he said, “are in a great degree, exempt from that strong and fetid odor, which exhales from the skin of most” Africans, and Oliver Goldsmith reckoned “those of Mosambique [to] … have no ill smell whatsoever.” But these were mere variations on a common scale, for to whatever degree African groups were separated from one another, many whites came to believe that Africans per se were a kind unto themselves. For example, the Scottish philosopher Lord Kames argued that Africans generally could be both seen and smelled. “The black colour of Negroes, thick lips, flat nose, crisped woolly hair, and rank smell, distinguish them from every other race of men,” he wrote in the 1770s. These traits had little to do with climate or environment because the “Abyssinians[,] … their complexion a brown olive, features well proportioned,” enjoyed the same climate as those in “Negroland.” No, pondered Kames, from the beginning of time, men had been created as different races.⁸

The notion that black smell was innate and not indicative of a lack of hygiene found further credence when black scent was compared to red smell (or, rather, the way whites chose to represent the odors). Naturalist Mark Catesby’s 1754 examination of “the Indians of Carolina and Florida” confirmed the racial dimensions of aroma. “They are naturally a very sweet People, their Bodies emitting nothing of that Rankness that is so remarkable in Negres [sic], and as in traveling I have sometimes necessitated to sleep with them, I never perceived any ill Smell” even though “their Cabbins [sic] are never paved nor swept, and kept with the utmost Neglect and Slovenliness.” Indeed, Indians’ innate sweetness of odor was sufficient to overcome the stench usually produced by unkempt living, so much so that Indians were superior to poor whites in this regard.⁹

In his 1774 History of Jamaica, Edward Long made no bones about the nature of black scent. For him the way blacks smelled was an olfactory confirmation of innate difference and affirmation of the hierarchy in the human species, in which “Negroes” were “a different species of the same GENUS.” Climate effected no change in color, maintained Long, a man whose works were read and commented on in both Britain and the United States. Black looks and skin remained unchanged whatever the environment. So did their scent—“their bestial or fetid smell, which they all have in a greater or less degree.” The precise cause of the variation or “degree” Long declined to explain, but he was certain that Angolans had the greatest stench while “those of Senegal … have the least of this noxious odour.” To his credit, whereas most observers felt comfortable merely stating that Africans stank, Long offered extended commentary on the nature and origins of the smell. Long believed that dancing, and physical activity in general, exacerbated black scent; it was “a complication of stinks, [rather] than any one in particular, and so rank and powerful, as totally to overcome those who have any delicacy in the frame of their nostrils.” That blacks themselves seemed unaffected by their own scent spoke volumes about their lack of “delicacy,” although, of course, such an absence did not mean they could not smell other scents, often at some distance, as Charles White argued. Long also noted that “the Blacks of Afric assign a ridiculous cause for the smell peculiar to the goat,” an explanation that involved a story of an angry goddess who presented the goats “with a box of a very fetid mixture, with which they immediately fell to bedaubing themselves. The stench of it was communicated to their posterity; and, to this day, they remain ignorant of the trick put upon them, but value themselves on possessing the genuine perfume; and so are anxious to preserve it undiminished, that they very carefully avoid rain, and every thing that might possibly impair the delicious odour.” For Long, blacks were the goats, but he could not take the analogy too far since the African explanation for smell was not innate but contextual, with smell smeared on, not teased out of, the body. Therefore, Long ventured, “this rancid exhalation, for which so many of the Negroes are remarkable, does not seem to proceed from uncleanliness, nor the quality of their diet.” It was a necessary argument because, theoretically, clean blacks with different diets could smell sweet. To Long, the reek was innate. Out of “science,” Long retreated to anecdote. “I remember a lady, whose waiting-maid, a young Negro girl, had it [the odor] to a very disagreeable excess.” Because she was a favorite servant “her mistress took great pains, and the girl herself spared none, to get rid of it. With this view, she constantly bathed her body twice a day, and abstained wholly from salt-fish, and all sorts of rank food. But the attempt was similar to washing the Black-a-moor white; and, after a long course of endeavours to no purpose, her mistress found there was no remedy but to change her for another attendant,” someone “somewhat less odoriferous.”¹⁰

And so colonial slaveholders, and Atlantic elites generally, were told what they already thought they knew. Without their commenting on how whites smelled, it was clear that to them blacks smelled different and inferior. Whether or not slavery was blacks’ natural condition, whether or not their color and attendant physical characteristics were ordained by God and by genes, or whether blacks could, many years hence, escape their blackness, were, of course, questions of incalculable import to eighteenth-century thinkers. But, for the moment, it was enough to know that blacks were different. They sensed different and sensed differently—in both instances, like animals. Thus even though Thomas Jefferson believed that blacks’ moral sense was equal to that possessed by whites, their physical and intellectual differences were, for the most part, natural, innate, and ineluctable. Jefferson’s “proof ” resided as much in his day-to-day experience with slaves as it did in his considered reason. “They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour,” he offered in Notes on the State of Virginia.¹¹

Given the importance whites attached to skin in signifying color and shaping smell, it is hardly surprising that black skin itself was subject to sensory scrutiny, less to affirm visual stereotypes of color than to deepen associations between blackness, inferiority, and slavery. Stereotypes about touch (the haptic) were very important indeed for helping justify black slavery.

But first things first: why was black skin, well, black? Dr. John Mitchell of Urbana, Virginia, offered an account in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1744, a widely read source in eighteenth-century Anglo-America. Mitchell’s explanation drew on Newtonian optics, and he made the relatively unusual claim that because white was a product of all colors and black none, he “aligned all peoples on a single spectrum,” emphasizing “the fundamental sameness of men of the most diverse appearances.” Mitchell’s thinking went like this: on examination, skin in the case of blacks “will appear much thicker and tougher … than in white People.” Cut it, and it feels “more tough and thick.” Why? Because “a black Body retains more Heat than a white one, or any other Colour, it will be very plain, that their skins must be thicker or denser” or “more cartilaginous or callous, to award [sic] off this Violence of the Sun’s Beams.” Sticking firmly to his environmentalist argument, Mitchell explained that in summer sweat gave black skin a greasy feel, whereas in the dry winter months, it became “more coarse, hard, and rigid.” All in all, it was this “Thickness and Density of the Skins of Negroes” that was “the grand Cause of their Colour.” Neither was white skin the “natural” color. Thanks to climate, it had deviated from natural “tawny.” Habits of living also accounted for the thickness and, ergo, the color of skin, “as wee see in Smiths, &c. constantly used to handle hot and hard Things, who have the Skin of their Hands become so thick and hard or cartilaginous by it, as to be able in time to handle even hot Iron.” So it was with Africans and the effect of environment. Not only was black skin suited to hard labor, its “rank Smell” was closely linked to disease: “The perspirable Matter of black or tawny People is more subtil and volatile in its Nature; and more acrid, penetrating, and offensive, in its Effects; … more apt to degenerate to a contagious Miasma, than the milder Effluvia of Whites.” If Mitchell was right—that environment conditioned skin color, thickness, and smell—could the coloration and its associated aspects be reversed, perhaps “by removing them [Negroes] from their intemperate scorching Regions”? Well, hedged Mitchell, “it must be observed, that there is a great Difference in the different Ways of changing Colours to one another: Thus Dyers can very easily dye white Cloth black, but cannot so easily discharge that Black, and bring it to its first Colour.” The very process of emblackment made chances of reversal unlikely: “And thus, altho’ the Skins of white, or even swarthy People, are easily affected by the greater Power of the Sun’s Beams than what they have been used to, and thereby become black; yet they are thereby rendered so thick and hard, or tough and callous, as not to be so easily affected, or readily wrought upon, to render them again of their original swarthy or pale Colour, by any of those Causes, as the Absence of the Sun, Coldness of the Climate, or Ways of Life in it.” Once black, there was little chance of going back, even in this environmentalist explanation.¹²

Some progressive late-eighteenth-century thinkers endorsed such reasoning. After reading Dr. Benjamin Rush’s thoughts on the origins of the races, one wonders whether this staunch antislaveryite did more harm than good when it came to initiating serious discussion about abolishing slavery. In his 1792 address to the American Philosophical Society—published seven years later—Rush argued that the “Negro” was black because his environment, taken to include diet, customs, and diseases, had led to a high incidence of leprosy. Blackness of the skin was due to leprosy, and, in turn, the disease caused the “skin” to become “black, thick and greasy.” The skin itself—not innately, mind you, but just because of the leprosy—“exhale[s] perpetually a peculiar and disagreeable smell, which I can compare to nothing but the smell of a mortified limb.” “This smell,” Rush maintained, “continues with a small modification in the native African to this day.” So, thick black skin and its accompanying scent, argued Rush, was a product of leprosy. But there was more, and it was to prove important for those who defended slavery on the basis that the African was ideally suited to manual labor and fit to endure ferocious punishment. “The leprosy,” argued Rush, quite innocent of the implications of his argument, “induces a morbid sensibility in the nerves. In countries where the disease prevails, it is common to say that a person devoid of sensibility, has no more feeling than a leper. This insensibility belongs in a peculiar manner to the Negroes.” Witness the findings of other “experts,” counseled Rush: “They bear surgical operations much better than white people, and what would be a cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.” None of his arguments, of course, had any basis in scientific fact, and we should not doubt that Rush believed he was making a case for ending slavery. Yes, locating leprosy a...