Race and Rhetoric in 19th Century America

I feel like our discussion Wednesday about race started off well then spiraled downward rapidly when we began the explore the Appiah article and tried to connect it to Douglass and Quinney. Looking back, I blame myself for this breakdown. I probably should have composed some course notes for you to look at before class. I did not do so, however, because I wanted to give you the chance to think about these race questions on your own before you began trying to understand my or Appiah’s perspective on them.

In this case, I believe the old bromide "better late than never" applies. We will have to revisit the issues for the rest of the course, so I would like to invest some time clarifying the Appiah piece now.
Reviewing some key quotes probably offers the best approach to understanding the article. We should start with the idea of "racialism." Appiah defines it as the view "that all the members of these races shared certain fundamental, biologically heritable, moral and intellectual characteristics with each other that they did not share with members of any other race." Critics have since defined this perspective as "essentialism," or the idea that racial groups have an inherited "essence" that applies across the group. Appiah describes the characteristics that applied to this racialist notion of "essence" in this way: "they were characteristics that were necessary and sufficient, taken together, for someone to be a member of the race" (276).

Against this racialist notion that evolved in the 19th century, Appiah points to the consensus in the scientific community "that the word "race," at least as it is used in most unscientific discussions, refers to nothing that science should recognize as real" (277). Appiah also notes that racialist thought not only contradicts scientific knowledge but also violates the basic notions of humanity espoused by both Christian theology and Enlightenment rationality. Through the story of Adam and Eve, the bible traces all humans back to a common ancestry, a notion that directly contradicts racialism. Similarly, the Englightenment’s emphasis on the power of human reason and the dignity of the individual poses another cultural and philosophical counterpoint to race theory.

Despite the religious and philosophical traditions that seemed to preclude racialist attitudes, race theory emerged as a justification for a wide range of cultrual, social, and political movements and claims in the nineteenth century. Appiah puts it this way:

"While the Christian tradition insisted on the common ancestry of all human beings, and the Englightenment, even when it was critical of official Christianity, emphasized the universality of reason, by the middle of the nineteenth century the notion that all races were equal in their capacities was a distinctly minority view" (280).

This contradiction between the philosophical systems people claimed to embrace and their belief in and practice of race theory raises the obvious question of why, why did people choose race theory to define themselves and others.

In his essay, Appiah reviews a series of historical and cultural deployments of race theory. Basically, these various uses of race fall into three categories:

1. to unify a people along national or cultural lines (example: the recasting of Anglo Saxon culture as the foundation of the English nation state).
2. to justify (usually through the establishment of racial hierarchies) the oppression or exploitation of one group over another (examples: colonial European powers over Africans and white Europeans over Native Americans).
3. to assert the dignity of peoples oppressed under the justification of racial categories by rallying people to the positive traditions (many generated through resistance) of that racial group (example: the emergence of a canon and tradition of African American literature within American culture).

With this discussion of the emergence of racialism and race theory as a background, the rhetorical brilliance of Quinney, Douglass, and Jacobs emerges as we study the ways that these cultural critiques employ the ideals of Englightenment and Christianity to simultaneously attack the moral credibility of racism and assert the dignity of African and Native Americans. While such arguments have undeniable power, all of the authors most powerfully mobilize anti-slavery passions when they implicate the national identity in the injustice and inhumanity of slavery. This rhetorical turn makes Appiah’s arguments about the link between race, nation, and literature central to our understanding of these texts.