The Invention of Race: A Conversation with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew S. Curran

foreign I'm Michael Brown president of school for advanced research and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to this 2023 president's lecture featuring Henry Louis Gates Jr Andrew Curran discussing their search for a scientific understanding of Blackness in 18th century Europe and Beyond the book that came out of this research is entitled who's black and why and copies of it autographed copies of it are available in the lobby and at collected works and I'll thank elected works for their collaboration in a minute before I introduce the speakers uh I've got some sponsors to thank and obviously an event like this takes a lot of support and a lot of people involved so bear with me for about I don't know 30 seconds uh I'd like to thank Susan Foote Rachel O'Keefe the Gale family Foundation the Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi Gerald and Katie Peters and Santa Fe dining collected works bookstore the Flora Crighton lecture fund the Luke and Betty vortman endowment Newman Zone Foundation Thornburg Investment Management adobo catering Dan Marion's UBS Financial Services the pelohima foundation and Herve wine Barber that wasn't too painful was it these these events are made possible thanks to the generosity of our sponsors and our members actually I would remember we had members in the audience would you please raise your hand well let's see that's impressive so if you're not a member grab one of those people and ask them why they're members and then you will be joining us uh and if you want more information look at our website as sirweb.org for information on membership and our activities which are diverse and exciting now to introduce our speakers I feel I mean I I suddenly realize that Henry Louis Gates Jr is somebody who doesn't need to be introduced as uh on the way here he was he was stopped on the street uh you know like a dozen times for selfies and autographs and God knows what else all of which he responded to with great generosity but if you happen to have been living on Venus or something like that for the last 20 years I should explain that he is the Alphonse Fletcher University professor and director at Harvard and director of the Hutchin Center of African African American Research he's published many books including the one I just mentioned produced and hosted an array of documentary films I suspect for this audience he's best known for his work at PBS including the long-running program Finding Your Roots and the recent documentary making Black America his collaborator and partner Andrew Curran is the Williams Armstrong professor of the humanities at Wesleyan University a leading specialist in the enlightenment his books include the anatomy of Blackness and dietero and the art of thinking freely the moderator tonight is Chelsea West oheri Chelsea is an assistant professor of Slavic and Eurasian studies at the University of Texas Austin do we do we have to do Hook em Horns Here In This Crowd no no uh with appointments cross appointments in anthropology and African and African diaspora studies she's interested broadly in structural inequality and processes of racialization her ethnographic research and this is really interesting primarily focused on Albania so if we have some Albanian speakers in the audience I'm sure Chelsea would be happy to talk to so she's going to be running the show she was an SAR Weatherhead scholar two years ago in 20 21 22 and we're really delighted to have her back in Santa Fe so before I hand things over to Chelsea um just I need to remind you to silence those cell phones turn them off or mute them or whatever to give us all an enjoyable event so please join me in welcoming these three great thinkers to this event wow [Applause] thank you thank you all so much for being here thank you thank you thank you I thought we would start the conversation tonight to ask how you all came to this project who's black and why how you even got interested in this work well there's a project I'm very proud of called the image of the black in Western Art and it was founded by Dominique and de menil in Houston Texas in 1960. they're French obviously and they were in the oil business and they moved to Houston because that's where the oil is right and they're very liberal and they wanted to find a way to make an intervention in the civil rights movement in very conservative Houston in 1960. they're also pioneering collectors of modernist art so it occurred to them to commission a French art historian to look for images of noble black people Noble Africans in European art black gods and Kings because you know Balthazar one of the Magi was black after the 13th century there's a saint called Saint Maurice who also becomes black in the 13th century 13th century there was a lot happening in the 13th century now think about it why would why would these Saints uh and why would one of the holy men become black in the 13th because the church the Vatican is discovering worlds of color Europe is in more culture cross-cultural contact and they want to expand their missionary work right right and people want to worship somebody who looks like them well they weren't going to make Jesus black and they want to go make Mary black but they go you can have a saying you can have one you can have one of them one of the magic so the uh so they commissioned this French art historian to start looking for images of black people in Western Art now by the time I was hired at Harvard in 1990 they had found 26 000 images of black people in Western Art this is European art and and of late American all right and the woman who was the executive director was a woman named Karen Dalton and when I went to Harvard I was my mandate was to rebuild a defunct moribund Department of uh African and African-American studies they had one professor and he was from he was a German when I say that people laughing he's a good scholar but you know he can't build the whole department of black studies with the German dude you know even a little bit more diversity and so I told the the president that we needed to acquire an archive and um the archive I wanted to acquire was the image of the black and Western Art because I knew about this um these 26 000 images which were based in Houston and Madame Damon Neal wanted them to go to Harvard because her kids went to Harvard and Karen Dalton the executive director was marrying a boston-based architect bingo so um I went to the president and said we have a chance to acquire this archive and to acquire the executive director Karen Dalton so to make a long story short all of that came to Harvard and Karen came to me one day and she said you know you're never going to believe this but I'm going to give you uh an idea that it's just it's so bold and so out of out of the box that everybody will take notice and I said um well being shy and retiring myself I hate that kind of project I said tell me tell me what and she said in 1739 The Academy of Arts and Sciences at Bordeaux in France obviously I had an essay competition and they wanted to they issued a call for explanations on the causes of the Blackness of the African and I get you know get out of town I mean you really and she said yeah and they received these submissions 16 submissions and they didn't give a prize and all of these essays are just sitting in the archives and they have been there since the 18th century and the essays were written in French and written in Latin um they've never been translated so she said why don't you translate them find a publisher and bring these wild speculations about why Africans are black um back to the public why don't you we bring them out in English and open a dialogue about it it was a lost Adventure in the history of Science and a lost Adventure in the history of race and so I said deal Karen um so we were going to do this together Karen unfortunately had a stroke and she recovered but she wasn't ever able to be my partner in in that project um and I was reading a book by a guy Wesleyan and Wesleyan uh has a special place in my heart because my daughter went to Wesley and I was reading the anatomy of Blackness by Andrew Curran and he in his footnotes and in a chapter had talked about this essay competition and I had never read any secondary sources about this essay competition so I actually reached out to him and he should pick up the story from now from here yeah thanks Andy yeah yeah it was an amazing day I have to say when you get a phone call from skip Cates out of the blue and I think the the interesting thing about this project is that both Skip and I realized that there's something really remarkable remarkable about these essays and they've showed up in footnotes for a long time but since no one had actually uh they said they didn't give a prize um people didn't really write about them substantially but skip said you know really these things are the Dead Sea Scrolls of race and I thought they were really like a focus group um you know a core sample of what was going on in 1789 on 1739 and generally what happens is that we think about the history of Race and History in general as a horizontal type thing and and here we had this fascinating sample of what was going on in 1739 1740. so we worked on it for three years and here we are here we are here we are yes oh thank you and the book is dedicated to care adults Humberto and maybe about the essay itself the people who were writing these essays I'm sorry the competition people writing these essays well Andy happens to have some slides I think it's important to think about academies in a kind of a different way than the way we think about them generally today um academies are not the same thing as universities in the 18th century universities were really there to replicate knowledge they were not big research universities like Harvard at all they were there to produce almost vocational schools for theologians for lawyers and doctors and the academy was really a kind of a gentleman's club of 40 men living in Bordeaux 20 of them were the super super Elite of the of the of the city including Montesquieu whom you may know and then there's another 20 people who had actual kind of kind of real expertise and they were kind of lower class people they might have been you know chemists or botanists but the top 20 were magistrates judges members of parliament and they would get together and they one of the things they did was to in order to make their the academy better known was to create these contests and they were fascinated by things like volcanoes the importance of Mother's Milk all these kind of Natural History type questions and then as a century went on they became increasingly interested by more quote anthropological questions and this is interesting because this is the first time that science is really starting to claim uh the idea of race as belonging to science as opposed to belonging to theologians um so yeah so the issued a call for papers it's an essay competition with a cash prize and a gold medal it just so happens we have an image of the Bordeaux Academy which was taken the 19th century before it got um renovated yes yeah absolutely and then I think you have another image too oh that's right so here's the competition itself with the title and the prize a gold medal where the common workers annual salary yes very often when people um send in submissions they were not they were this is a contest for amateurs it was fascinating because anyone could write there was a democratic feeling to this whole contest so um even though famous people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau won a contest these were people who were not super well known this is also very interesting to see what people were thinking about uh what became race and taverns theologians were thinking about it we don't know exactly who all the people were right yeah and you can see how hard it is to uh make a transcription because very often the manuscripts were sent in by people who didn't have a lot of money and they wrote on both sides and so you hold it up the paper and you'd see the cross hatching all the way through very difficult but the translators did a fabulous job on that mm-hmm yep and so why Bordeaux what's what's the connection um to this competition to this essay competition and to um the question of who's black and why well um Bordeaux was a a port and known for its trade um and as it turns out of course we know because of why right but as it turns out um bordeaux's responsible for 150 000 Africans being shipped uh to the new world in the slave trade so its economy was very much implicated in in the larger issue of human bondage right right right it's interesting to think about how it became increasingly important uh Bordeaux was making so much money earlier on the century that they weren't as involved as say Liverpool or not in France but by the eight by the end of the 18th century they were really they'd actually displaced knelt as the number one uh slave port in France and the relationship between um Bordeaux and the French islands was a skip was sayings very very uh um very developed by the 1740s by the time the contest takes place there were 30 ships who were dedicated full time to going back and forth to Guadalupe Martinique and eventually to sandomang which is what we know now is Haiti and by the end of the 18th century what's really fascinating is that Bordeaux which is a small City from our perspective 75 000 people so 75 to 100 000 people responsible for 150 000 people being sent to the new world they own owned half of the plant more than half the plantations in sandomang or Haiti sendomeg had five hundred thousand enslaved Africans there toward the end of the century Bordeaux Planters probably owned 250 000 so you can see there was a big big link between the islands and it's not just the business side of things but intellectually it was part of the the culture of the culture and there was also four thousand people four thousand Africans or people of African descent going through Bordeaux during the 18th century there was probably 400 people walking around Bordeaux enslaved Africans or Caribbean Africans walking around Bordeaux at any given time during the 18th century let's play a little parligate I'm admittedly this is a very big parlor but let's play it anyway now here are the facts and then we're going to ask you to guess we're going to ask this side to guess the sign to guests and assigned against the answer and if you know don't be Googling and don't be cheating are you gonna get a lot of trouble so we actually know we um there is a um a database called the transatlantic slave trade database and Scholars have counted the numbers of Africans shipped from um West Africa and West Central Africa to the new world called the transatlantic slave trade between the 16th century there are only 1500s in 1866. so that number was 12.5 million Africans Embark get or put on the ships 15 percent die in the Middle Passage and you know the Middle Passage is you know coming across the ocean that means let's say 10.7 million Africans disembark in the new world okay you got it 10.7 million now these are all facts how many came to the United States over here just shout out how many 2 million 2 million how many over here I hear three three million over here six million 388 thousand only 388 000 Africans came directly from Africa to North America all the rest went to places south of Key West and you know why five letter word called sugar you know for us slavery is about cotton yeah but for everybody else it was about sugar sugar was the world's first commodity uh crop and you know remember when uh you've seen the little kid take the first lick of ice cream and their eyes cross that that sense of bliss imagine Europe taking its first lick of ice cream before the New World opened up only rich people you know the the birthday uh verse Kings and Queens of Bishop Sue only rich people could taste sugar the opening of the new world democratized access to Sugar but unfortunately the only way you could cultivate sugar is cultivation is intense is with free labor and where did that Free Labor come from it came from Africa so here are the facts of that 10.7 million 388 000 came the United States 772 000 went to Haiti 772 000. a million went to Jamaica 980 000 went to Cuba 5 million went to Brazil Brazil is the second largest black nation in the world after Nigeria not amazing all because of the cultivation um of sugar so Haiti which was only became Haiti after it freed itself from France was the island of San domangue and it was the richest colony in the history of the world to that time and it was called the pearl of the Antilles and that's why they fought like crazy to keep it they lost because of Tucson luvatore and the Africans rose up against their French Masters when Napoleon came back to the throne he sent his brother-in-law Paul LeClaire and 40 000 troops back to to San dimang to re-institute slavery and the Haitians beat the largest army in the world got to give it up to Freedom ladies again that's right absolutely and a lot of people don't know that a lot of people don't know that history and you know what you want to know why Haiti's in such a poor place since the day it announced its independence formerly on January 1st 1804 the whole world has tried to undermine it starting with our own Thomas Jefferson why they did not want a free a republic uh um composed of free independent black men and they said that and they did everything to kill the country of hadio anyway end of History lesson and somebody cheated over there I heard I just ignored you I heard you say 380 000. either Googling or fresh out of a class right that history of Texas is important because why is why is contrast about Blackness about the origins of Blackness I mean why because all these black people were swirling around you know swirling around as Andy said in Europe there have always been black people in Europe you know we think that um all of us you know that we well remember in school we were taught Henry the Navigator right but sailed down to the west coast of Africa and discovered Africa it's like a load of crap the Ethiopia the um okay the oldest Christian Kingdoms in the world Armenia Rome and Ethiopia Ethiopia became Christian in 324 A.D and they sent emissaries to Jerusalem like but like other pilgrims so they're of oh and that's just one example the Nubia in the in the early years of uh in in what we used to call the dark ages of the Early Middle Ages a big Christian kingdom was in what is now Sudan and they had Bishops and they they had um exchanges with the Christendom uh in Europe as well and then there were uh for years that black people were enslaved Crossing uh the Nile River the Sahara Desert Spain was run by the Moors for 800 years in 1492 three things happened in Spain Columbus sailed the ocean blue [Laughter] and Ferdinand Isabella expelled the Jews and the Moors from um I from Iberia you know from what's what's in now Spain so one of the things we learned from the image of the black and Western Art was that there is an almost continuous history of representations of black people in European art from from the Greeks from the ancient Greeks to yesterday there have been black people painted or represented in in European art so there was always cultural contact people traveled people migrated we're talking about this in the cocktail party uh before with a very nice person that and we made a joke we made a joke that it's sort of part of your DNA to move the African people were just as curious about what was down the Nile is a people you know in Europe were curious about what was south of the the equator and there were trade routes um so you know gold so much of Europe's gold came from three or four locales in Africa a site in Zimbabwe um the kingdom of kush which is Nubia Egypt's gold came from the black Kingdom of of kush or and Ghana the Kingdom of Ghana supplied uh gold as well so there were Sahara Desert trade routes and also for spices and and other things like that in other words cultural contact has been continuous between African the continent of Africa and what we now think of as Europe but because of the slave trade exactly there we go the slave trade changed things exactly you can't just pick up 12.5 million people and not bother your conscience you know what I mean so there were all these wild explanations um of well where did God really create this people to be slaves are they People Like Us did they descend from Adam and Eve like we did ah maybe they're more than one Adam and Eve maybe there were five atoms in these atoms and Eaves maybe there was a Chinese enemy maybe there's an Indian Anatomy maybe there was a Native American adamant by India I mean the subcontinent maybe there was a Black Adam and Eve and maybe there was a real Adam Leaf who would have been white right the real ones yeah so there was all this speculation and even even when I was a kid um but I've heard black people say our Blackness was because of the curse um it's called The Curse of ham but you know the story of the Bible that Noah's son looked upon his drunken nakedness and God punished his son Canaan that he would be a servant unto servants and that though it's Blackness is not in the Hebrew Bible or your old testament King James Bible it became associated with servitude because of the the presence of slavery so and that as Andy will tell you is one of the theories in the essays explaining the causes of Blackness right so and that theory as well as some of the other theories around climate or around yeah I I think it's important to think about this this whole contest is representative of a huge shift taking place and so these explanations that theological biblical explanations been you know circulating for a long time the portal Science Academy was not interested in those they got some but they weren't interested in those they wanted naturalistic or natural explanations so they're pretty much five different kinds of uh essays they get so there's the theological ones or the religious ones what you might call actually providentialist that they would say that God created uh black skin because black skin operates better in uh the torrid zone or Africa and then there was also anthropological explanations to the idea that maybe there was something different happening on an organic level or perhaps Africans had black blood black bile and that got into even a black sperm so there's anatomous we're getting involved with that I want to pause here hold that thought no hold it hold it can you imagine yeah so your blood is black your bile is black your semen is black it's ridiculous and then there were the climatological ones the climatological ones the idea that that uh the climate had actually just changed people it sounds like the same religious ones but these were um put forward without any kind of recourse to the Bible and then their genealogical ones too that I did that something happened to an original white prototype and this is close to what happens here so those original white prototype if you laugh that's kept very close to the idea of Caucasian because the caucuses is where Noah's Ark landed and then then they moved around and degenerated inside outside of the the temperate zone of Europe and everybody believed that and everyone everybody believed it and there's still people who refuse to believe that 50 000 years ago all of our human ancestors lived on the African continent they won't believe it to this day so the climatological one the the idea of degeneration which we may get back to the idea that that original group degenerated in different places is the exact opposite of the Out of Africa Theory which has people moving out of Africa and turning white because of a mutation because of vitamin D here this is the exact opposite and it's and it's not as optimistic either because the idea is that when you degenerate bad things happen both internally externally perhaps to your intelligence as well and the final and the most important thing that we see in the essays is the idea of taxonomy so taxonomy is racial classification and for the longest time humans were not classified because humans had a soul they were distinct from animals you wouldn't subject them to a kind of Zoological perspective but we start seeing these essays and this comes out after Linnaeus publishes his 1735 system of nature when that starts happening you have this grid system of where humans fit in they fit in with mammals and then they split them into four categories and when you start splitting humans into categories that allows all the the stuff that's been circulating for a long time to be organized in an entirely different way classification schemes racial hierarchy is the infrastructure for race and we already see it happening in the 1740s here and that's why we talk about the invention of race is happening before our eyes in these essays there was a construct called the Great chain of being not even Aristotle talks about the great chain and being but it really um comes roaring back in the 18th century so imagine an infinite uh staircase that connected a god at the top um with the lowest forms of life amoeba let's say or bacteria and every uh form of living thing had its own place on this infinite set of stairs on this infinite staircase so God was at the top looking like Carlton Heston in all of this right right under uh God of course was the Angels then under the Angels the human Community but the human Community had as Andy said four or five subcategories always at the top of a human Community were Europeans under uh Europeans would be Asians generally under Asian Chinese people on Japanese people under Mongolians under them people from the subcontinent um Indians from India under them Native Americans under Native Americans black Africans Who and the great chain of being was under black Africans Apes and often Africans were represented in these charts of the great chain of being with the same head shape the same noses the same hair textures as apes and for some people the human Community only had four branches in the fifth Branch the Africans were the top of the animal kingdom and not the bottom of uh Humanity why I mean it seems so absurd to us today why because of all that guilt about the slave trade you needed to define the other that you were about to dehumanize and treat like an animal you needed to Define her or him as an animal and blame God created these people to be they're different than us so not really human they they benefit from slavery you know we are we are doing them a favor we are saving them from their savagery by bringing them to the new world and in you know a thousand years they'll be equal to us yeah that's it I mean and you know you hear gas when you from the audience and hear laughs because today the sounds really absurd but as you've already pointed out many people believe this and subscribe to this right as I was reading the essays it's very hard to I think these are so bizarre these are outrageous claims are there any in particular of the group that stand out oh my favorite my favorite cause why why are black children born because when a white woman is making love she fantasizes about a black man or Blackness and the baby comes out in that cold that is so that is amazing now you talk about sexual anxiety Andy do you do that one I think that's my favorite too it really is you know I think that to me stood out as well as the one too about the power of the black maternal imagination so that the black women also play a special role in producing black children and so I really want to think about that because history has a lot of records of people theorizing or claiming that there's a certain kind of magic power that is either causes Blackness or that black people themselves have it and so black people are you know dehumanized on the one hand but then given these very super human powers these abilities and I was wondering if you could speak to how the essays might show some of these ideas coming into existence how they coalesce around like the the power of black bodies all right um I think that one of the things that's fascinating about the Estes is that there is an undercurrent where um the different essays are identifying particular kind of corporeal body you know attributes uh with Africans and part of this comes out of the slave trade I think and the Superhuman side is the fact that Africans and this is a horrible Africans can suffer pain much more easily than uh other people and this is one of the implicit justifications for the slave trade that white people can't or Native Americans can actually do the same kind of work because Africans are more resistant to disease but then also they have an ability to work incredibly hard and be tortured as well there are a lot of Dominican priests actually who wrote about this as well there's a kind of a suffering aesthetic going along that we see these people were very very far away from the colonies but it's interesting to think about this is a giant circulation right who are in the colonies in these islands that I that we showed here are writing back these travel logs are being processed by naturalists and philosophers and then all this lore gets transformed into Natural History and Science and we do see this in the uh in a lot of the essays and I noticed that too that a lot of people would say I know this to be true because this person said it was true and they got it from this person who saw it you know in the new world right absolutely absolutely yes so I think one of the most um heinous aspects of of this um literature well this larger discourse is the belief the assertion that black people couldn't feel pain to the same degree as other human beings and that led to horrendous experiments so-called scientific experiments with um are they the uh who's the name oh I'm blocking this thing because he's so disgusting the man who did the experiments on on black women's genitalia yeah it makes sense yeah yeah and would refuse to give a anesthesia because they couldn't feel pain yeah um yeah in the in the same way that say a white woman yeah and all of that is tied to this long I mean centuries um old set of speculations on who these people are who are these black people are they like us no they're not like us are they human like us no they're not human like us are they smart like us no they're not smart like that do they have souls well the first thing that the Christians had to do was decide whether they had souls or not and that was they pretty much decided in in the United States in the 1600s yes they had Souls but it took them a little while so Jamestown 1619. um Morgan Godwin I actually teach this book every year on published The Book of 1684 um called the 1680 called the The Indian in in the Negro and Indians Advocate and he goes yes they have souls they have souls he was an Oxford educated Anglican priest the Episcopal priest in Virginia and he said I know they're human they have souls and we should uh convert them but I um the real reason I know they're they're human is three things they can read they can write and they can laugh isn't that interesting that they can laugh they have risibility which means the capacity uh the capacity to laugh so that means they're human but so we should convert them but that but that doesn't mean we should free them because we need to make sure they go to heaven to the colored section of Heaven you know really you know it's yeah it's so it will make you cry you have to laugh at it to keep from crying right right um but all of this was about the Benjamins make no mistake about it it was about a way to justify the enslavement of 12.5 million human beings between 1500 and 1866. if I could add one thing about the 18th century and how this works uh I think Skip is really picking up on something that's so so important the idea that there was a metaphysical justification for slavery for a long time so you give up your physical freedom and get Eternal salvation and that justified slavery particularly among the Catholic countries English were always hesitating about this but as the century moves on and philosophers and uh particularly Enlightenment thinkers are attacking the church attacking metaphysics attacking religion what happens that justification for slavery no longer exists and by the 1760s what happens is that the pro-slery lobby which relied on religion doesn't have that option anymore what do they do they go back and grab all these kind of ideas been circulating and that's another time when race really starts crystallizing yeah David Hume wrightson in essay in 1748 called of national characters it's a Proto and this is a distinguished Anthropologist who's interrogating us here so it's a proto-anthropological essay um and he talks about different species of men as he calls them right and in the original essay he doesn't talk about people from the African continent at all so obviously people gave him Flack about that and he published the second edition of this essay called obnational characters in 1754 and adds a footnote about black people and you know the footnote says it says in he said I am apt to suspect that there are four or five different species of men that's the first thing I am apt to suspect that black Africans are naturally inferior to whites and he says on the entire continent of Africa no one has found and I'm quoting even a symptom of Ingenuity even a symptom of Ingenuity and then he ends this is David Hume the father of the Scottish Enlightenment he ends by saying in Africa no Arts no Sciences yeah cold can't okay I don't want to be accused discriminating against my Scottish brothers and sisters so let's go let's let's go uh to Germany what did the German say go to Germany Khan Ten Years Later exactly in 1764 puppies is book called observations on the beautiful in the sublime in section four he does a riff on Hume and he says not only is Hume right but he said he gives this example of an example of a mission a French missionary quoting something that a black man had said right and then Kant at the end says um it is clear that no he says this man was black from head to toe and I'm quoting he said because the man was black from head to toe everything he had to say was stupid and there you have a conflation ladies and gentlemen between characteristics physical characteristics blackness and character intelligence so that you know if you see a black person come in the room the do you think that they're well we're all professors right do you think they're majoring in physics or math or that they got in by being part of the basketball team we still have these attitudes with us today absolutely we still have these associations absolutely you know these people are they run faster you know they could jump higher right but they're not going to invent the internet right right yeah absolutely so it was take associating Blackness with the absence of intellect that's what they did and that's what in the nastiest things that has been done to people of color in the history of cultural content without doubt I think Kant is really such a pivotal figure both given the fact it has this institutional relationship he really is part of a research institution and having these these very important anthropological lectures that are read by lots of people and this is very important he also defines kind of what race is for the longest time the term didn't really mean what we kind of think of it right now people talked about human varieties right which is a Botanical metaphor and it's actually kind of interesting to think about lots of different kinds of people a big Continuum of of kind of hybridization going on and that gets gets shifted as I said earlier into something that's much more Zoological with race which means Bloodlines and lineage for the longest time race just meant like a race of dogs race of horses or a race of kings and it was just that huge shift when all of a sudden that term gets applied to humans and and uh it subjects humans to these kind of animalistic methodologies right and and your your characters fixed it's determined by your essence and your essence is signified by your color by your hair texture by the shape of your nose by the thickness of your lips and there's nothing you can do about it right nothing because you're Irish that means you have these characteristics or your English or your French you have those characters and if you're black you know you have this always bad set of characteristics well I'm glad you all said that because uh you know we know for many people today I mean people in the audience might have heard that race is socially constructed it's no it's not biological and these essays are really showing you know this scientific racism racist biology race is fixed um but we you know now uh largely uh larger audiences understand that race is socially constructed uh but yet it still poses as biological could you all speak to that to the ways that race is socially constructed but again poses as biological um or as you were just saying Professor Gates the ways that Blackness is understood not just in terms of phenotype or Anatomy but I think in terms of intelligence intellect um the ways that Blackness signifies well we now know because of DNA that um the average African-American is 24 white neither ancestry.com which is the lead spot full disclosure leads lead sponsor of finding roots and um uh 23andMe I'm a consultant for both of them um I am the most DNA tested black man in the history book that happens to be true but the big uh when this paper came out in 2015 it had the admixture average administer of African Americans so the average African-American is 24 Point 24 percent European that's amazing and at that time neither of those companies had tested an African-American who was 100 black or 100 sub-Saharan African that's astonishing um and the uh I'm trying to see how many black people are in this room but the uh if I could see if I had the lights up I'd say uh how many black people in here no that you were descended from a Native American that your great great grandmother raise your hand thank you for there's one right there there's one there's one okay none of y'all got Native American ancestors the average African-American is 0.8 percent Native American isn't that amazing but every black American and you know this every black American I was raised great great grandmother had high cheekbones and straight black hair there it is and she was Cherokee they're always Cherokee my family would not even put it that formally no no it's true you know we got some in us that's what they were yeah and uh the average African-American never saw a Native American so it's hard to mate with somebody you'd ever see you know what I'm talking about the reason that your grandmother uh had high cheek bones a great great grandmother was because of all that white ancestry that they had and my own family when they revealed my my advents here my cousins they had a family meeting and you you all of a sudden you know my nickname skip my mother gave me that name when I was in her tummy and Skipper you know and uh they had a family reunion and they said Skippy telling them lies about our family on that television show they pulled out pictures look at that hair I'm filming um West duty tomorrow uh here in Santa Fe I'm doing his family trip so I'm really excited about that he's my first no Louise airdrick was the first Native American I did and I'm doing um um West tomorrow so that the point is that we're all mixed the point is that no matter what the law was in the day at night everybody was sleeping with everybody really now unfortunately there was cajoled sexuality and rape of course all throughout history um I look at the the extent of Mongolian as it were genes all through Europe from uh Genghis Khan but um there was a tremendous amount there is no race Purity is the point that I'm and no offense you might have Native American dances I saw that lady over there she gonna kick my butt I said she said them and I am Native American no no now I got to go ask my family because that is that that's a story got to take the DNA test because you know the brothers say Brothers on the streets like DNA don't laugh oh yeah and 50 000 if we had the family tree of everybody in this room back 50 000 years ago you all descend from somebody black human Community 50 000 years ago lived in East Africa and the last time I checked they didn't look like they were like Thor hahaha but that is curious that's what Andy said the presumption was that the whole world was white right and everybody degenerated from whiteness when ironically the whole world was black yes and all other quote-unquote races um you know degenerated from the Blackness right because because of melanin yeah the book is entitled who's black and white but I think after reading it you really have to ask who white and white right here I've been wondering that 72 years but we know you know melanin protected you from dying of skin cancer right everybody in Africa would have been dead without melon this is a simplistic version of biology and um our you know some family got pissed off 50 people got demanded some other people in Africa and they said I'm out of here and they left and slowly they spread All Around the World in all these different colored people uh evolved in it took a long time that in the nutshells how the human species evolved it's fascinating isn't it yeah so we're more varieties than races yeah so we're varieties it's interesting though to think about your question um mid with the social construct that the problem is is that the categories even if they don't exist in biology have been kind of reified they've been made into real categories for lots of different purposes and so paradoxical paradoxical you need to recognize those categories in order to fix the problems that were generated by the invention of race right so that's the big the big thing right and we're still trapped in this language you know just read the New York Times They will use the word race or racial um standing for ethnicity Andy and I wrote an essay in the New York Times about it saying race is socially constructive but ancestry is real so maybe and that's what find your roots is about every week it's about your ancestry you know who's on your excuse me who's on your family tree back 500 years the DNA tests that we use are good for 500 years um beyond that you know that they're not accurate but one of my colleagues David Reich r-e-i-c-h you should look him up he's an expert on Ancient DNA so they could go back and they extract DNA from the inner ear of um you know skeletons that they find and they can analyze that in the same way that um 23andMe and ancestry can analyze your DNA if you spit in a test everybody I believe you know you're talking to the wrong guy if you don't believe in DNA but I believe everybody should um have their DNA tested because Stephen Hawking is one of my heroes you know the great physicist that my alma mater of the universe of Cambridge again um um when I sit down with guests I always give this quote he said that um our identity the secret to identity is in the past you know he was a scientist of black holes and that's by for him the past was what happened eight billion years ago with with the big bang and he said without knowledge of the past we have no idea who we are and I think that's true of everybody in this room I think that we uh all we're you're not confined by what your ancestors did but who you are was informed by what your ancestors uh did and it's a look at how people cry in Finding Your Roots you know when I thought of finding Roots I only did black people I I was called um African-American lives and I started with Oprah and Quincy and and and Chris Tucker and basically I just wanted to beat Alex Haley you know I wanted I knew Alex Haley Quincy Jones Quincy Jones scored the music for roots and Quincy's friend of mine and he introduced me to Alex Haley so you could say since 1977 I have a case of roots Envy you know I wanted to know where I was from in Africa like Alex Haley and so I got the idea um to do the series Once DNA science evolved so we could do roots in the test tube for black people on their mother's mother's line to see what we used to call tribe you know it's very funny Native Americans say tribe but but Africans don't want to say tribe they think it's insulting so you always have to check your language you know use um so I wanted to do what Alex did in a test tube in a in a laboratory but the biggest surprise to me was when I was filming Oprah for the first time I mean she was the first guest whom I filmed and uh Oprah famously said she wanted to be Zulu and um you know the problem with that is no Africans came from South Africa to the United States so she couldn't be she couldn't possibly be Zulu well I'll tell you the whole story so we test we we give Oprah a DNA test and the next day she flies to South Africa and I always keep a TV in my study so I've been a News Junkie right so I was watching seeing them and there's Oprah with Nelson Mandela in this huge stadium in Johannesburg 70 000 people and she's announcing that girls school that she has since created right it's created this amazing Private School uh for for poor girls in South Africa and she got carried away and in the middle of this speech she said and I just took a DNA test and the results are in and I'm a Zulu and everybody in this place ladies and gentlemen jumped up and cheered him because you know it's the main tribe Anthony group in South Africa and CNN flashes Oprah Winfrey Zulu and I go holy mackerel so I knew that wasn't true because first off we hadn't analyzed their DNA yet secondly no Zulu people came to the United States in the slave trade and that's the only way an African-American can be related to somebody in Africa so the scientists who was uh who taught me about how this DNA analysis works for black people his name's Dr Rick Kittles and at the time he was working at Howard University so I was watching this I said oh this is very embarrassing you know I wonder what to do so I picked up the phone and I called them and he answered the phone I said Rick where are you he said I'm in my laboratory why I said zenby in there with you he said no I said make Oprah a Zulu [Laughter] so I had to tell Oprah Winfrey that she was not Azuka and she was not amused but what Oprah taught me um when the way we set up the script is that we do genealogy first as you all know and then we do the the DNA we do the paper trail first and then we do the DNA last and remember I was trying to out Alex Haley right to get to reveal what ethnic group African-Americans were from on their mama's mother's mother so um to get her to Africa as it were I'm there tracing her family tree backwards you start with a person's birth then your parents then your grandparents Etc and I said and Oprah uh here's a record of your third great grandfather's name was Constantine Winfrey and he was owned by and he was married to a woman a violet Winfrey went and here they are in the 1870 federal census the first census went in which all formerly enslaved black people were listed by name because the census you know part of the dehumanization of black people was not uh recognizing their names so they were just listed under the property of a white person by gender by age and by color whether they were mulattos or or black and not by name so this 1870 census is the magical census for black genealogy and I go this is your third great grandfather and he's living against the white man named absolutely so we looked at his property records in 1860 and he owned a black man 10 years younger than this Constantine Winfrey and I said see those hash marks that is your enslaved great-great-great-grandfather she looked at that book and looked at me and just cried like a baby and I knew that I had misunderstood The Narrative Arc of the genealogical reveal whereas all my guests are interested the black guests where they come from Africa that's an intellectual thing the emotional bond was with your enslaved ancestors whose names you didn't know whose names were robbed from them or kept from them and but the big surprise to me was that nobody knew more about their ancestry than their grandparents or their great grandparents I got a letter from when we when African-American lives aired it was a big hit because nobody had done that so then PBS asked me to do a sequel and I did African-American lives too I did Maya Angelou you know the great my Angela I did Morgan Freeman anybody who plays God and the president you got to do this so it was a big hit so I get a letter from a Russian Jewish lady and she said dear Dr Gates I've always admired your work but after watching African-American lives I've decided you're a big fat racist because you only do black people she said how come you don't do Jewish people like me and I swear to God it had never occurred to me that I thought everybody knew their ancestry um but us and the funniest I'll tell you a funny story Coca-Cola was our one of our corporate sponsors at the time and our corporate executive was a woman black woman named Ingrid Saunders Jones so I read this This Woman's letter and I thought about it I said well could we as marketers say could we expand the brand you know I started doing white people right yeah and well you got to have the corporate sponsors have to keep writing the checks right so I decided I would call her and say what did she think about this so I said I called her on herself and she answered and I said Ingrid I'm holding a letter from a Jewish lady who says I'm a big fat racist because we don't do white people she goes what and I go yeah well and she says we should do Jewish people we should do everybody in the world what do you think and she said hold on for a minute and I thought the call had dropped because I didn't hear anything but it turns out she had been in a board meeting with all these white people and she didn't want them to hear this conversation so she got up and walked all the way down the corridor in Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta Georgia and I was I kept saying Ingrid are you there you know Ingrid I need to know what am I supposed to tell this woman and when I was about to hang up she said skip don't hang up I was with all these white people I go okay and I said well Ingrid what's the answer and she said well I only have one thing to say to you and I said what's that she said there's a lot more white people drinking Coke than black people so that ladies and gentlemen is a true story of how Finding Your Roots and nobody nobody knows about their ancestors white people don't know any more than black people the everybody because of the pain of the past Collective Amnesia Collective Amnesia people just say if we don't talk about it it never happened but guess what it all it's there it's there in your the customs of your family the way you cook food the way men treat women the way people carry themselves all of that trauma and stress and angst has been passed down and the only way to get rid of it is to expose it to name it to learn about the sacrifices and and the traumas that your ancestors went through and that I think is a healthy process that makes us better foreign this conversation reveal is that there is a real desire among many people of all kinds of backgrounds to want to know to connect to belonged and at the same time for many there's a desire to move away from race or Beyond race or there's a resistance because race is sometimes thought of as in terms of malice or animosity or if it's not you know something that we don't want to adjust we don't want to get into um that to even think about race is racist right and so we see that real tension come into being but yet we know that it's important to be able to expose like you say to interrogate and so I would love to hear you speak about the recent momentum behind bands that want to limit the teaching of race that want to why are we seeing such an increase against learning and teaching about race I think censorship censorship is to knowledge it's lynching is to Justice and we have to stand up against cancer culture no matter what nomadic guys look my ideal of the university is a safe space where you can say Andy could say um he's for Donald Trump and I would say that's okay you know one of my favorite things is to be marry out my wife's here my wife I don't know where she's sitting my my wife is great historian to from a Cuban historian a Cuban citizen I met her 2009 when we were filming the series it became black and Latin America and she and a brilliant genealogist in Miami coordinate uh all of our research on our Cuban guests um whether it's Andy Garcia or Marco Rubio who was uh who's again so give it up for my wife ladies and gentlemen um now and oh yeah I just said well I did Marco Rubio that's a sign I love when we're walking through airports people stop us about finding a roots and um not so long ago a guy with a big Mega hat came up and he he said to me he stuck out his hand and said I don't like your politics but I love your show can I have a photo I said yes sir you know but that's the way the world should be you know it should be you have a right to vote for whoever you want this is the United States for goodness sake and I don't have a right to demonize you um because of that we have to agree to disagree because we're all Americans this is what the uh the reason our country was founded on the great uh principles for which it stands and as particularly in the academy you should have a right to stand up in class and give whatever opinion you want without fear of censorship or recrimination and unfortunately that's not the cases I think it is important that uh this history we're talking about whether it's the invention of race or the history delivery belongs to everybody and we all have to access it not just certain groups or you know with something that really belongs and we belongs to everybody we absolutely need to think about it together but you can't stand up and say black people are black because they got black blood or black skin you know Patrick Daniel Moynihan had a saying that I loved which is Everyone's entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts facts matter absolutely absolutely uh we actually did somewhat of a contest of our own so to speak when we ask some of the attendees to give some questions that they wanted to be able to ask about race and so I think this is time actually to highlight one of them in which someone asked and I'm kind of paraphrasing here if you all think that we will be able to get to a place where not necessarily using the word post-racial but where we could really undo racism that we could um address it and and really interrogate the invention of race but then be able to go beyond where we are in this present State and I I'm imagining mostly in the U.S Focus do you want them yeah I think that it's going to be tough uh the way I look at race and studying it as it kind of you know goes through time it seems like a virus that is so politically useful to people in power that it's it seems hard for me to think that it can go away um it will change shape as it gets demystified deconstructed by people like skip but it'll just kind of keep doing something at the same time we created it and theoretically we should be able to take it apart too so I think I think this book and the work that we've been doing is is very important because I think a lot of people don't understand that race was invented as a matter of fact skip was stopped in the street by a guy today goes was race really invented right for the Marquee yeah you did yeah I said are you are you a plant so I don't think it's one of the great untold stories it really is what are the great untold stories so we're going to keep telling it but I I want us I don't want our difference to disappear I want the value judgments about our differences to disappear yes we're here you know we just came out of Passover um I I admired the way the uh Jewish people have protected and nurtured uh Jewish culture for thousands of years if if Jewish people had to depend on the state for that it wouldn't be a Jewish culture right you have a right to be Jewish but but people don't have a right to hate you because you're Jewish you don't have the the white supremacists at Charlottesville Barry Allen and I were watching TV and like what are these idiots chanting you know I could I literally couldn't understand anything Jews will not replace what the hell what mushroom did these people crawl out from us you know what I tell my students at Harvard they two streams running under the floorboards of Western culture one is anti-Semitism and one is anti-black races and white supremacy hates Jews as much as as it does black people and in times of economic scarcity in times of economic anxiety some demagogue just lifts up those floorboards with a Dipper and you can just spread the hatred of Jews and the hatred of black people around because it's our fault it's the fault of Jews if only you could kill all the Jews everything would be fine but only you could you know send those black people back uh back to Africa and you know let's be honest eight years of that beautiful brilliant black family in the White House unfortunately drove some of our countrymen out of their minds that's true and the Beast of white supremacy which we thought was dead you know it turns out it was just asleep and it came up out of those floorboards so I want us to be you know if you want to paint your hair green on St Patrick's Day go for it you know and you want to be proud of of being a you know she is a scholar of out tell them what your subject there is I study race in Albania and she speaks Albanian a black woman speaking of Bandits we have come a long way [Laughter] they're not that many of us black people the beauty parties you saw being sick go ahead tell us what it was say one of them words oh yeah but it's when you say Jews are responsible for the collapse of the economy black people are responsible for you know taking up good jobs or spaces because of affirmative action at the you know where she's at a University of Texas and he's at Wesleyan I'm at Harvard that these people are not qualified and are getting into the university in an unfair in an unfair way I went to my mentor I went to Yale um uh bless you I went to yield I hit 69 and 96 black kids hit campus at the same time we were the largest class up to that time of blackheads we have the affirmative action first big class right uh Sheila Jackson Lee was in my class Kurt schmoke first black mayor of Baltimore a little nerdy primary pre-bent guy I always forget his name he didn't really hang out much of the parties what's the name of Ben Carson and Candy Crush we were all we were all there together so I went to my mentor John Morton Morton Blum the Great American historian who was Jewish and who told me once that he had to convert to the Episcopal Church in order to get tenure at Yale because it was so anti-semitic he told me he never wanted me to forget that isn't that a heavy thing well you know and I said to him Mr Blum at Yale there was no doctor Yale had a policy of everybody calling being called mister obviously they had no women teaching so that they wouldn't discriminate between people who had master's degrees and people had phds isn't that interesting um so I said I have something difficult I have to ask you and he said what I said what do I say when kids say I only got in here because of affirmative action because I was black and he said to me you're from West Virginia aren't you I said yes sir he said that's why you got in here when I was at Yale there were five kids in West Virginia I mean they were a whole lot more black people and I we both laughed and it was so but he did that as an act of kindness and told me the story about anti-Semitism uh anti-Semitism in Yale but we still at that same the footnote I described from David Hume the const anecdote about the black man being black from head to toe and therefore everything he said was stupid all of that is embedded in saying these black people get into uh Harvard because of they're not really up to Snuff it is that same discourse that we're trapped into these associations between physical characteristics and our larger larger as it were manifest metaphysical characteristics that's what we have to kill ladies and gentlemen that's what we have to stand up against not our physical differences not the manifestation of The Marvelous Variety in the history of humanity but the Prejudice of value judgments placed on women on black people on Native Americans on Hispanic people on immigrants on recent immigrants the the people we're trying to manipulate us to hate the other are the enemies of all that this country stands for and we have to fight them to the death foreign we have actually reached the end of our conversation time but I could not think of a better word to end it on Professor Gates and Professor current so thank you both so much to skip Gates and Andy Curran for this conversation for this time together um it has been such a delight thank you thank you [Applause] good job wow [Applause]

Channel: SAR School for Advanced Research

Views: 21,561

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Id: lb8V-q6QQlY

Length: 73min 55sec (4435 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 21 2023