Racial Essence Research Articles

American Racial Discourse, 1900-1930: Schuyler's "Black No More"

When George Schuyler's Black No More appeared early in 1931, it entered a culture primed for its reception by more than three decades of apprehensive and contradictory public fulmination, posing as and often passing for reasoned debate, on the subject of racial essences and their relation to national character. In his spoof of Harlem's Talented Tenth; of the stock themes, incidents, and characters peopling their work;1 of W.E.B. Du Bois (Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard, later Dr. Karl von Beerde, editor of The Dilemma) and the NAACP (The National Social Equality League, later the Down-With-White-Prejudice-League); of the Virginia aristocracy (the Anglo-Saxon Association) and the Ku Klux Klan (The Knights of Nordica with their Grand Exalted Giraw); of Marcus Garvey (Santop Licorice) and Mme. C.J. Walker, hair goddess (the bankrupt Mme. Sisseretta Blandish reincarnated as Mrs. Sari Blandine, purveyor of Egyptienne Stain); of Protestant clergymen preaching the efficacy of lynching (Rev. McPhule) and ignorant statesmen from the rough and gentle classes (Senator Kretin and candidate Arthur Snobbcraft); of earnest anthropologists and scientists for the race-all those self-designated protectors of the national bloodlines and birthrates (Dr. Samuel Buggery); in short, in his spoof of all the gruesome, absurd, and tedious manifestations of American racism and racialist thinking to date, Schuyler, the black Mencken, suggested that there was, perhaps, enough of both to go around (Lewis 252). His plot is fairly simple, even obvious in the context of 1931, if ominous in the context of what would shortly follow in Europe. The story follows the ups and downs of picaro-cum-trickster Max Disher in profiting from the work of Dr. Junius Crookman, lately of Germany. Crookman's efforts have resulted in a treatment which lightens dark skin permanently-no bleaches or creams here; this process is glandular and electrical (Schuyler, Black 27)2--effectively

The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science

Marek Kohn Cape, £17.99, pp 322 ISBN 0 224 03958 X At the turn of the century some of the most innovative ideas concerning the prevalence of chronic degenerative diseases and mental disabilities were formulated in eugenic and racial terms. As human genetics research and screening have advanced, questions of ethnicity, race, and disease continue to haunt modern medicine. Attention has shifted from external physical appearance to chromosomes and genes, and most recently to the molecular level, but ideas of some type of racial essence or identity have persisted, and the Human Genome Project has wisely included a built-in ethical component. Other scientists adhere to long discredited notions: some schools of anthropology in eastern Europe seem like remote tribes cut …

Durkheim and the idea of soul

I have looked forward to the opportunity presented by a conference such as the Theory and Society one to debrief in a sense, to test out some observations I made while retranslating Emile Drukheim's 1912 masterpiece, Les Formes elementaires de la vie religieuse. But since it is in February, which is African American History Month, and since this is for a conference session on race, ethnicity, gender, and class, it is well to start with a forewarning or a reassurance (as the case may be) about the word soul in my title "Durkheim and the idea of soul." I do not intend to affiliate Durkheim, or Fields, with those collective representations, popular two decades ago, that joined things like jazz with a way of talking, and collard greens with a way of walking, in an alleged African racial essence baptized then as the idea of soul. What I have in mind is Durkheim's own title for Chapter Eight of Book Two of Formes: La Notion d'ime, he wrote, "the idea of soul." He did not write La Notion de l'ame, "the idea of the soul," as Joseph Ward Swain's 1915 translation mistakenly tells us, and the difference is consequential. When Durkheim meant the soul, something thought of as an inward and individual possession, he said so. When he said "soul," without the "the," he meant a generic substance or essence thought of as partly independent of individuals.