Celebrate the release of the groundbreaking new release from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew S. Curran, Who’s Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race, during a special live conversation with the authors at the Museum of Science, Boston!

In 1739, Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced a prize contest for the best essay on the sources of “black skin and hair.” Months later, a varied group of naturalists, physicians, and theologians dispatched essays from all over Europe to the academy. The most religious of these contestants claimed that Africans had fallen from God’s grace; more “scientific” thinkers affirmed that Black humans had degenerated from a white prototype race in the “brutal” African climate; still others affirmed that dark skin resulted from “the black bile and blood” that supposedly coursed through Africans’ veins. Looming behind the genesis of this 1739 contest (and its essays) is the Enlightenment desire to put forward the first scientific understanding of what we now know as race. As important is the fact that, by this era, some four million Africans had already been kidnapped and sentenced to a life of enslavement on American plantations.

The never-before published essays produced for this contest have survived the centuries tucked away in Bordeaux’s municipal library. Accompanied by a detailed introduction and headnotes written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew Curran, each essay included in Who’s Black and Why? lays bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism in the West.

For one night only, Gates and Curran come to the Museum of Science, Boston for an important and insightful conversation commemorating the release of this extraordinary new collection.

This program is supported thanks to the generosity of the Barbara and Malcolm L. Sherman Fund for Adult Programs.