Race, Enlightenment, and Negritude: From Gobineau to DuBois

Introduction: Race and the Enlightenment Legacy

Is race a construct of the Enlightenment? Obviously the European encounter with a racially constructed "other" begins long before the Enlightenment, with Montaigne's cannibals and Shakespeare's Caliban. But the Enlightenment facilitated a kind of scientism in thought that not only gave rise to new disciplines — such as anthropology — but also permitted pseudo-science, like the so-called "scientific racism" of the Comte de Gobineau. This essay examines how the question of race was first framed by Enlightenment thinkers, and how it was later transformed in the twentieth century by thinkers like W.E.B. DuBois. If indeed DuBois was correct that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," it also bears examining how those in the Negritude movement sought to overturn the assumptions of racism while essentially upholding the abstract values of the Enlightenment.

Diderot and Rousseau: Universalism and Its Limits

Diderot's Encyclopédie and Rousseau's Discours are both central documents in the history of the Enlightenment, and therefore share to some extent the Enlightenment tendency toward universalism and scientism in thought. The Encyclopédie lacks an entry for "race" as a concept, interestingly, but does include an entry for "Negro" (Formey). The assumptions about race embedded in that entry are largely scientific in their general approach. Yet the scientific discoveries that might explain the physical differences between an African and a European were many years away from Diderot's time, so the science is necessarily speculative:

"Did all these peoples that we have just run through, so many diverse men, come from a single mother? We are not permitted to doubt it. What remains for us to examine is how so many different species can have been born from a single individual… It is not impossible that one day, when the series of white eggs that peoples our regions runs out, all the European nations will change color or that Ethiopia will only have white inhabitants. It is thus that in a deep quarry, once the vein of white marble is exhausted, one finds only rocks of one color after another. It is in this way that new races of men may appear on the earth and that old ones may be extinguished." (Encyclopédie, s.v. "Negro")

What is interesting here is that race is considered — however fancifully — as a mutable category. The authors of the Encyclopédie are not speculating on why Europeans are white and Ethiopians are black, except to suggest that it might just as easily be reversed in the future. In other words, engaging with the question seems to invite a general attitude of relativism. This tactic — reversing the valences on racial questions — appears elsewhere in Enlightenment writing. We might consider Rousseau in his Discours, where he essentially inverts his distinction between the free "noble savage" and the slave by suggesting that all men, even masters, are enslaved to each other under the structure of early capitalism:

"…Free and independent as men were before, they were now, in consequence of a multiplicity of new wants, brought into subjection, as it were, to all nature, and particularly to one another; and each became in some degree a slave even in becoming the master of other men: if rich, they stood in need of the services of others; if poor, of their assistance; and even a middle condition did not enable them to do without one another… All these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality." (Rousseau)

This is, of course, rhetorical on Rousseau's part — just as when he says that men are "everywhere in chains" he does not mean that all men are literally slaves. Instead, he is making a rhetorical point by noting that in a capitalist system even slaveowners are themselves "enslaved" metaphorically to the idea of ownership. This may be a valid point, but we are also tempted to ask whether Rousseau should be permitted such rhetorical flourishes when an actual slave trade existed in his own lifetime — a trade organized along racial lines.

Indeed, the biggest problem is that, despite the broad and expansive claims made in the Enlightenment for a new intellectual basis of society, the actual institution of slavery in the eighteenth century received a free pass from most thinkers. This was presumably because of the heavy influence of Greece and Rome on European intellectuals of the period, which simply took slavery for granted even when making assertions about political liberty or tyranny.

Gobineau, Firmin, and Scientific Racism

This is where the Comte de Gobineau and his great antagonist Anténor Firmin enter the history. Both are nineteenth-century figures who purport to extend the scientific inquiries of the Enlightenment. Yet Gobineau essentially attempts to justify slavery as the natural consequence of racial distinctions, rather than as a system of tyranny imposed by violence and the threat of violence. What is fascinating, however, is that Gobineau performs the same rhetorical maneuver visible in Rousseau and Diderot — and arguably traceable back to Montaigne: defending against the charge of racism by making clear that identification with one's own race is not assured. Montaigne's cannibals are ethically superior to the Frenchmen who fight civil wars over religion; Rousseau's slaveowner is himself a slave to a monstrous system of thought; the Encyclopédie imagines a future in which Ethiopians are white and Europeans are black. All of these are different ways of accommodating relativism in the face of cultural encounter. Gobineau performs this same cognitive maneuver:

"As to the question of intellectual merit, I absolutely refuse to make use of the argument 'every negro is a fool.' My main reason for avoiding it is that I should have to recognize for the sake of balance that every European is intelligent: and heaven keep me from such a paradox! I will not wait for the friends of equality to show me such and such passages in books by sea-captains, who declare that some Yolof is a carpenter, some Hottentot a good servant, that some Kaffir dances and plays the violin, and some Bambara knows arithmetic. I am ready to admit without proof all the marvels of this kind that anyone can tell me, even about the most degraded savages." (Gobineau 180)

This is, of course, racism dressed up to seem like anti-racism — or at least principled misanthropy. As Firmin notes regarding Gobineau's faintly snide faith that "some Bambara knows arithmetic": "besides, the honor of having invented the science of numbers and surface measurement does not belong to the White race. The origin of mathematics goes back to Black Egypt, the land of the Pharaohs" (Firmin 168). The quarrel between Firmin and Gobineau is, in essence, predicted by what Rousseau seems to intuit — the issue of property, and particularly of turning human beings into chattel property, establishes itself and then warps the discourse around it. Essentially what Gobineau and Firmin are arguing, from different perspectives, is about whether slavery is justifiable. The fact that Firmin comes from Haiti — where Toussaint L'Ouverture was serious enough about the universalist ideals of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen that he led Haiti to its own democratic revolution — surely gave him the impetus to fight back against Gobineau, whose point of view essentially debases Enlightenment thinking in an attempt to make slavery justifiable on pseudo-scientific grounds, just as public morality had begun to deem it unjustifiable.

Conclusion

Thus it is important to recognize that, if the Enlightenment set up its own categories of thinking about race, the Enlightenment was also essentially called into fundamental question by everyone in the aftermath of the excesses of World War Two. The problem of the twentieth century became, as DuBois said, the problem of the color line — but only because the larger problem was the collapse of the old Enlightenment paradigms themselves.

Works Cited

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Print.

DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Project Gutenberg. Web. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/408/408-h/408-h.htm

Firmin, Anténor. The Equality of the Human Races. Trans. Asselin Charles. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Print.

Formey, J.H.S. "Negro." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Pamela Cheek. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2003. Web. Trans. of "Nègre," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 1. Paris, 1751.

Gobineau, Arthur de. The Inequality of the Human Races. Trans. Adrian Collins. New York: Putnam, 1915.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on Inequality. 1754. Trans. G.D.H. Cole. Web. Constitution Society.

Senghor, Léopold. "Prayer to Masks." In Selected Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Print.