A Grammar of Black Masculinity: A Body of Science

Abstract

Eighteenth-century European science set out to codify common assumptions about dark male bodies; indeed, science began to recodify these assumptions since the efforts made during the 1700s were not new. Scientists undertook this recodification by providing a precise vocabulary to talk about racial difference and about the process of racial differentiation and by circumscribing black corporeality within a particular modality. Although scientific racism and racialism have led to a particularized reading, what one might label a “misreading,” of all bodies of color and certain marginalized white male bodies, I focus on the black male body because of its axial role in the history of science and thus in the narrative of white-supremacist patriarchy. Eighteenth-century science set out to illustrate natural law by establishing biological differences between different (i.e., black and white) bodies and by proving that these “natural” differences explain the differences between the races and between the civilized and the primitive. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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