Callaloo

On the next day, which was the 8th of the month of August, very early in the morning, by reason of the heat, the seamen began to make ready their boats, and to take out those captives, and carry them on the shore as they were commanded. And these, placed all together in that field, were a marvellous sight, for amongst them were some white enough, fair to look upon and well proportioned; others were less white like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops, and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere. (Donnan 28)

De Azurara—mid-15th century Royal Librarian, Keeper of the Archives in Portugal, Chronicler of the discovery and conquest of Guinea.

Why increase the sons of Africa, by Planting them in America where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? (Jordan 143)

Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751)

The first difference which strikes me is that of color. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the color of the bile, or from some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, and their own judgment in favour of whites, declared by their preference for them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oran-ootan for the black woman over those of his own species. The circumstance [End Page 519] of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man?

Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia

[The slave women were] clumsy, awkward, gross, elephantine in all their movements; pouting, grinning, and leering at us; sly, sensual, and shameless, in all their expressions and demeanor; I never before had witnessed, I thought, anything more revolting than the whole scene.

Frederick Law Olmstead The Cotton Kingdom

Note the remarkable development of the labia minoria . . . which is so general a characteristic of the Hottentot and Bushman race . . . [that they are] sufficiently well marked to distinguish these parts at once from those of any of the ordinary varieties of the human species.

William H. Flower described his dissection of an African woman in an 1867 article of the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology

This litany of quotations is by now familiar to the student and scholar of black history and cultures. The movement from visual difference (the color black) to ugliness, from ugliness to inferiority strikes us immediately. Yet these observers did not stop at skin color; they initiate a discourse of black inferiority that stands on “evidence” derived from cranial measurements and genital mutilation. Through these discourses the black body came to bear specific cultural meanings: These discourses constitute all black people as unsightly, deformed, diseased. An entire body of literature served as ideological justification for the enslavement, torture, dismemberment and domination that came to characterize new world slavery. The black body is an ugly body and therefore a nonhuman one. This inhuman object is a beast of burden—but it is also an object of desire.

These discourses help to justify the litany of torture and dismemberment, also familiar by now: lynched bodies, broken necks, mutilated genitals, severed hands and feet. In addition to these historical...