How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses

Abstract

As Mark M. Smith argues, “modern discussions of ‘race’ and racial identity are hostage to the eye”—so much so that, for many, the ideal is “a color-blind society” (p. 2). Yet for more than two centuries white Americans, especially but not exclusively in the South, relied on noses, ears, mouths, and fingers, in addition to eyes, to explain African Americans' supposed racial otherness. The stereotypes they constructed were damning: black people smelled bad, they were loud and unruly, and they lacked sensitive taste buds and so merited only the coarsest food. Their skin was thick and tough, made for picking cotton from prickly bolls, clutching the rough handles of heavy hoes, and otherwise laboring under the hot southern sun. Although it is impossible to say precisely when such notions arose, Smith's impressive research makes it clear that “sensory stereotypes were applied by whites to Africans with growing frequency during the eighteenth century,” and their meanings “lingered into the antebellum period, when they were used to anchor slaveholding paternalism” (p. 12). Indeed, whites' conviction that they could not only see, but also smell, hear, and feel blackness helped them weather the storms of change over time. Increasing numbers of slaves and free blacks light enough to pass for white posed no real problem for proslavery ideologues of the 1850s who claimed that certain odors, sounds, and textures were unmistakable racial traits. Similarly, white sensibilities withstood the political and social upheaval of emancipation and undergirded the system of segregation that gradually emerged after the Civil War.

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