What Does 'Caucasian' Mean?

Summary

Podcast Summary: "What Does 'Caucasian' Mean?"

Introduction

In the episode titled "What Does 'Caucasian' Mean?" from the American History Hit podcast, host Don Wildman engages in a profound discussion with Dr. Sarah Lewis, a renowned art and cultural historian from Harvard University. The episode, released on January 27, 2025, explores the historical origins and enduring implications of the term "Caucasian" within the context of American racial hierarchy.

Origins of the Term "Caucasian"

Dr. Sarah Lewis delves into the 18th-century work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German scientist whose taxonomy categorized humanity into five races. Blumenbach designated the Caucasus region—as situated between the Caspian and Black Seas—as the "homeland of whiteness" based on perceived physical beauty, skull symmetry, and biblical lore. Dr. Lewis explains:

"He designated the Caucus region, the Black Sea area, as the so-called homeland of whiteness for three main reasons... beauty, mythology, and symmetry really cohered into this ideal of the Caucasian race being superior to all others." (07:07)

P.T. Barnum and the Circassian Beauties

The conversation shifts to P.T. Barnum, the infamous showman, who played a pivotal role in perpetuating the Caucasian ideal through his exhibitions. Barnum's American Museum featured "Circassian Beauties," portrayed as the epitome of Caucasian elegance. Dr. Lewis highlights how Barnum's exhibitions served as cultural platforms to reinforce racial hierarchies:

"Barnum is able to create an arena to process the unspeakable... to stage the Circassian beauties to address one fundamental issue, which is, is there any basis for the idea of racial domination?" (21:03)

These exhibitions were not merely spectacles but deliberate attempts to engage the public in questioning the legitimacy of racial superiority myths.

Frederick Douglass and the Power of Photography

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to Frederick Douglass's strategic use of photography to challenge racial stereotypes. Dr. Lewis emphasizes Douglass's foresight in utilizing this emerging technology to reshape public perception:

"He becomes the most photographed American man in the 19th century... he understands that in representational democracy, we would need representation itself to change the narrative of who counts and who belongs." (32:02)

Douglass's photographs were a counter-narrative to prevailing stereotypes, showcasing African Americans as dignified and intelligent, thereby undermining the racial pseudoscience of the time.

Impact of Racial Misrepresentation

Dr. Lewis discusses the long-term effects of these historical misrepresentations on contemporary racial tensions. She argues that the constructed notions of race have had a lasting impact on American society's structures and beliefs:

"This unseen history has an outsized influence on our politics today... we've been living with this term Caucasian, knowing that it doesn't relate to how we use it." (38:14)

The episode underscores how foundational myths about race continue to influence modern discussions on race, identity, and social justice.

Conclusion: Legacy and Ongoing Relevance

In wrapping up, Dr. Lewis reflects on the necessity of confronting and deconstructing these historical myths to address present-day racial issues. She emphasizes the importance of truthful representation and the acknowledgment of historical inaccuracies:

"The question then becomes, why was there a willful disregard of these fictions?... how we changed how we taught global history to avoid dealing with this question." (38:14)

Don Wildman echoes this sentiment, highlighting the importance of historical accuracy in resolving ongoing racial conflicts:

"It's the bullying that you're talking about. It's like, yeah, you need that easy thing because you're not capable of going into the fuller detailed issue of what we're talking about." (35:42)

Key Takeaways

1. Historical Construction of Race: The term "Caucasian" originated from 18th-century racial classifications that had no real basis in the diverse populations of the Caucasus region.
2. Cultural Reinforcement: Figures like P.T. Barnum exploited these racial classifications to reinforce societal hierarchies through popular exhibitions.
3. Challenging Stereotypes: Frederick Douglass utilized photography as a powerful tool to counteract and dismantle entrenched racial stereotypes.
4. Enduring Impact: The fabricated myths about race have perpetuated systemic inequalities and continue to influence contemporary racial dynamics.
5. Need for Truthful Representation: Addressing and correcting these historical inaccuracies is crucial for advancing social justice and equality today.

Notable Quotes

• Dr. Sarah Lewis on Blumenbach’s Classification:
  "We use the term Caucasian now for whiteness. And that's based on Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's idea." (08:22)

• Dr. Sarah Lewis on Racial Hierarchy:
  "The tangled roots of racial pseudoscience unravel when exposed to the light of truth." (05:39)

• Dr. Sarah Lewis on Frederick Douglass's Photography:
  "He's using the idea of the photograph and the image and culture to read people back in." (33:07)

• Dr. Sarah Lewis on Present-Day Implications:
  "This unseen history has an outsized influence on our politics today." (38:14)

Final Thoughts

The episode provides a compelling exploration of how historical misconceptions about race were constructed and perpetuated, shaping American societal structures. Dr. Sarah Lewis's insights offer a critical understanding of the origins of racial terminology and its lasting effects, emphasizing the importance of historical accuracy in addressing contemporary racial issues.

For more in-depth analysis, listeners are encouraged to explore Dr. Lewis’s book, The Unseen When Race Changed Sight in America, and her civic initiative, Vision and Justice.

Transcript

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[Don Wildman]

Here's a show that we recommend.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

This.

[Don Wildman]

Season on the Dream Supplies are being provided by nurses who run out in the middle of the night and purchase diapers, but the hospital is still charging.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

As if they still have these items. We are digging into every topic we've ever wanted to cover on this show. It's a spinning plate analogy. The second that you stop spinning those plates that crashes so you can never stop working. The Dream Season 4 comes at you.

[Don Wildman]

Weekly starting Monday, January 20th.

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[Don Wildman]

Hello all. Just a note for me before we get into this. This episode contains outdated strong language which has been used for historical context and accuracy. New York, 1855 Gas lights flicker as the physician Dr. James McCune Smith leans over his writing desk. Trained at the prestigious University of Glasgow in Scotland, Smith is an accomplished doctor and scholar. The first African American to earn a medical degree, he spends his work days at his New York practice and tending the needs of the children in Manhattan. But at the same time, he is a trailblazer in the American Geographical Society, founder of the New York Statistics Institute, and a co architect of the radical abolitionist party alongside Frederick Douglass. As he writes, crafting an introduction to Douglass second volume autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, Smith praises his friend and ally, using the opportunity to note a shift in current discourse around the subject of race. The once dominant term Caucasian, traditionally employed to source the geographic homeland of the white race, is falling out of favor among ethnologists, Smith observes. The people about Mount Caucasus are and have ever been Mongols, he writes. The great white race now seek paternity in Arabia. Keep on gentlemen, you will find yourselves in Africa by and by. His critique is a Warning and a prediction. The tangled roots of racial pseudoscience unravel when exposed to the light of truth. It's a fact made ever more obvious by the advent of photography in American life. Hello listeners, this is American History Hit, and I'm your host, Don Wildman. So happy to be with you. In American history, racial hierarchy, the social, political notion that one race can stand above others, was in the past. A major theme of our society, arguably still is in the present. Of course, it was the white race, historically characterized as Caucasian, which benefited from this promotion. And today, across this land, we are still coming to terms with the depressing crimes and evil injustices that resulted, enslavement, Jim Crow and others. But what is not so apparent is where this idea was sourced. Where in history were the moments when Europeans and then Americans embraced whiteness as something definably superior and exceptional and then made it the backbone of their societies? A recent book, hailed as a masterpiece of historical detective work, has carefully dissected this notion while uncovering an even more illuminating reality that this whole phenomenon of racial hierarchy was based on a crafted fiction, a pack of lies that most of the American public could see, but then elected to look away from. The book is entitled the Unseen When Race Changed Sight in America and its author is the esteemed art and cultural historian, Dr. Sarah Lewis. She is the John L. Loeb Associate professor of the Humanities and African American Studies at Harvard University, best selling author and editor of numerous publications, and founder of Vision and Justice, a civic initiative we'll discuss later in this interview. Professor Sarah Lewis, welcome to American History Hit. It is a privilege to speak with you.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's a joy and an honor to be on this podcast.

[Don Wildman]

First of all, let me join the resounding chorus of critics, fans and podcast hosts everywhere. Congratulations. This book was a long time in the making. I know.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Thank you. Yes, over 10 years in the making. So yeah, thrilled to have it out now.

[Don Wildman]

It's a riveting book. It's a very big journey. The title of the book, I will repeat, the Unseen When Race Changed Sight in America sounds like a mystery because it really is all concerned with race, its visual representation in Europe and then America, specifically how whiteness was represented and then staged quite literally as you explore through misrepresentations. Am I in the ballpark with this summary?

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Absolutely. Right in the bullseye zone. You've hit it. And it is a piece of detective work, in effect, and that's resulted in over 10 year journey, really to find the moment in which we willfully disregarded the myths that let us believe in the idea that any race is superior to any other.

[Don Wildman]

That's the key to understanding this title for sure. But also the book that there is a pivot point in our society that has to do with a choice that has been made or at least a moment that an act that results in an unseeing, as you say in the title, which is what we'll try to drill down to in this conversation. Let's start with a fundamental truth that still surprises many. Racial hierarchy is the term evolved over centuries, of course, but the basic notion of race in itself was a creation, the product of a German scientist in the 1700s named Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in his famous treatise on natural varieties of mankind. I have to say I went back to school on this just for this conversation. I was not sure what this was about. Can you take us through his work and what it's really mean? It comes down to five categorizations of mankind.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Mm. And we all live with his thinking without knowing it. So he, for his doctoral dissertation comes up with the idea of the five races of mankind. But he bases the idea of the superiority of so called whiteness on what would have seemed like data then, but seems like specious evidence now. So we use the term Caucasian now for whiteness. And that's based on Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's idea. He designated the Caucus region, the Black Sea area, as the so called homeland of whiteness for three main reasons. First was the so called beauty of the women. This famed jeweler had stated that they were in his travel narrative, the most beautiful. That was so called Dada. Then the symmetry of the skull of a woman from the proximate region who was actually sold into sexual slavery. A Georgian skull. And then the biblical lore of the region. In Genesis, you have Noah's Ark coming to rest in the approximate region. Jason. And the Golden Fleece, Prometheus is another myth. So beauty, mythology and symmetry really cohered into this ideal of the Caucasian race being superior to all others. And that's how we arrive at the term. Right.

[Don Wildman]

Wow. I mean the other four categories, just to be clear to everyone. Mongolian, that's the Asian world, generally speaking, Ethiopian, sub Saharan Africa, Malayan, which is all the island world of the Asians. American, which is both north and south indigenous cultures. But then there is Caucasian. It's drawn from a very specific geographic area, as you say, between the Caspian and the Black Sea, above Turkey, below Russia called the Caucasus, which is where those mountain that Mountain range is. And it is so interesting how this evolves into this homeland of whiteness, which of course nowadays we know doesn't even exist, since we all come from Africa. Assuming you believe in Louis Leakey's work, why was this necessary to do? Was it an academic project for this guy, for Blumenbach, or was there a greater mission that he had?

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Well, the mission at the time, I mean, as an achievement for him, he was able to create a taxonomy and a hierarchy that legitimated his social order at the time. And we've lived with it today. I mean, the reason to right about it though is we've long lived with this term Caucasian, knowing that it doesn't relate to how we use it. You know, no one really is from the Caucasus region who uses the term Caucasian to describe themselves. But we've thought, well, it doesn't really matter. It is this 18th century thing, as we've just discussed. But what I've learned and what made me write the book is my own kind of academic enterprise was that it did matter. It mattered for even presidents such as Woodrow Wilson. It mattered for major cultural figures. It mattered when there was this moment. We'll get to it. When people saw that that region, the caucus region, had nothing to do with whiteness at all. And seeing that fiction actually became a major issue for American society that had built up an entire racial regiment predicated on this idea.

[Don Wildman]

I have to tell you, it's a brilliant in on this whole issue because those of us who grew up, I was born in the early 60s, just have been checking that box all our lives. Yeah, I'm a Caucasian, I'm a white guy, I'm a Caucasian. Not even thinking about it. You know, just because it was taken for granted that this was a label that we had been given without knowing why it even came to it. I mean, the 1700s, they're dealing with the aftermath of the age of discovery at this point and. And the pressures of understanding colonization and the results of that, which is enslavement of populations. There's lot of issues that are happening in Europe that have to be figured out and. And we're not putting that on Blumenbach. He was supposedly not a racist man. It's more from a scientific thing that everybody was labeling everything in those days. It was all about the species and so forth. So he comes along and creates this view of mankind that then becomes a very useful tool for all sorts of people to use. I just want to go back to what you said about the Bible, because that is central Especially in America, which is such a religious society in those days. What is it about the Caucuses? Where do we root the storytelling that becomes so useful that we need to claim it for white people?

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

So Noah's Ark reportedly comes to rest right in Mount Ararat, which is close to the Caucus region or in the Caucus region. But the idea of a race being effectively designated by God as superior gives it an unimpeachable lore, right. Culturally throughout the world. I'll tell you, for the writing of this book, I knew I had to go to the Caucasus region. Thankfully, right before the pandemic, I was able to go with the historian Nell Painter. And it was stunning to many who we spoke with this history. Many people that live there that are part of the Caucasian diaspora do not know about how we use this term in America. But I mention it because when one individual he met with, he had done a study abroad program in the United States. He told me that in college, his roommate learned that he was an actual Caucasian from the Caucus region and treated him like a God. That was the way he described it, you know. So this lore still persists. The biblical mythology is a key there, and it's rarely discussed.

[Don Wildman]

But you referred to the previous legends. I mean, the truth is that the Bible is built on legends that come mythology that comes before and as far back as Gilgamesh, you know, thousands of years before the Bible was created, sort of roots civilization in that area, of course, Mesopotamia. And all of that is happening not too far away from there. But it becomes an actual claim on the area. That's the point of all of this. And it involves specifically a country that actually occupied this geographical zone in the world at the time in the 19th century, called Circassia, or Circassia, if you're in the UK. This was the focus of a great deal of conflict from the 1700s, right through the middle of the 1800s, around the time of the Civil War. This war has everything to do with this story, doesn't it?

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Everything to do with it. So this is a group of people who were facing incursions from both north and south, Russia and Empire wanting to gain access to the Black Sea. Ottoman Empire below, wanting the same. So that battle was globally understood as important. The reporting on it came into the United States with the same frequency as, say, our own American Civil War. You know, Don, this is really. It's an untold story. The importance of this battle on the Black Sea with the Circassians. It is the reason I wrote the. It is. It was shocking to me. That there's no secondary literature about the importance of this battle in American history. Not one book. And the reason it's so important is that it resulted in a level of indisputable exposure of this region as having nothing to do factually with racial hierarchy, that there was no basis to use the term whiteness as an associated racial term for this region. When the reports came out about what was happening to the Circassians in the region, they would describe the men and women there, they would describe the leader of the resistance who was an imam, you know, not Christian. Right. An imam Shamil, and realized that they were phenotypically not white, culturally, you know, not Christian. And it was this totally Janus experience. It was a reversal of the lore. And that level of reporting and exposure is the key moment that's been missing in our understanding of racial mythology and racial narratives.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah, well, it probably flew under the radar, I suppose, before America becomes a much bigger story in the world. By the middle 19th century, you've got media certainly present in Europe. The storytelling of this identity becomes a much more global affair thanks to America.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

It does. Well, you know, it does, but there's also a moment where it could have. I mean, the history of what's called white slavery, you know, sexual slavery, had made the region popular in cultural lore. So, you know, if you're into the arts and you've looked at paintings by Jean Leon Jerome, or you've read Edward Said, Frank Duverneck, or, you know, that the history of Orientalism made this site an actively engaged one for painters and writers of all kinds. But whenever they would put forward images or write about the region, they were still propagating the myth of white racial superiority. And so it took actual journalistic reports about the region that came in the mid 19th century and the 1860s to reveal what actually was going on in that part of the world.

[Don Wildman]

Right. In a way, this parallels the growth of the abolition movement, in a sense. I'm not saying it's equal to this, but this is an unchallenged truth in quotation marks for so many white Americans and Europeans, for that matter. It will happen, as we'll discuss in this conversation, that it does become challenged later on by the likes of Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes, as a matter of fact. But until that challenge comes, it's a very comfortable fact for white Americans that we come from this place. If you buy into the Bible, this is where we come from, and that's why we look the way we do. Evolution, Darwinism, all of that stuff. Will come to pass and science will challenge this as well. But it's the lack of challenge that happens until the mid 19th century that allows this to sort of be taken for granted. Am I correct?

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

That's right. No, exactly. And it really takes that moment, and it takes the visibility of the reporting and all the different ways in which the confusion about the region is staged by impresario P.T. barnum and photographers Matthew Brady and others, for people to take seriously that this was a problem for all of American society.

[Don Wildman]

You have taken us to the next place in this conversation. I'll be right back after this short break. Meantime, if you'd like us to cover anything specifically, if you have any ideas of subject matter we should be looking at, send us an [e-mail] we'd love to hear from you.

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[Don Wildman]

After the Civil War or even before it ends really 1864, the likes of P.T. barnum take a great interest. Subject matter P.T. barnum for anyone who doesn't remember this, he goes on to become Barnum and Bailey, an infamous showman in the world in those days, a humongous influence in American society. And he creates some years before the American Museum in Lower Manhattan, which is basically a combination of zoo, theater, museum, lecture hall. All sorts of things happen in this. It's an emporium of culture is what it really is. And at some point he decides to feature the Circassian beauties. That's the title of the exhibition, supposedly bringing infamously beautiful women from this area of the world. Circassian. And they are going to be exhibited, which is just such an ugly idea. But they're going to be put on display in his museum, just like Tom Thumb was or any number of other characters were put on display at this museum. This is a big Hit in New York, a very successful exhibition.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

That's right. Exactly. And, you know, he is infamous, but he is far more influential as a cultural figure than I think we remember. You know, in Benjamin Rees book on Barnum, he describes him as a man who invented the notion of fame. Right.

[Don Wildman]

Wow.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

He creates the blueprint that we're still living with today, whether it's in thinking about the presidential election and the way in which spectacle has dominated our politics, or as we think about the development of the entertainment complex. The root is really Barnum, actually.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah. Right.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

So to begin the conversation with Barnum as a way to talk about the staging of this idea, I just want, you know, our listeners to know we're dealing with a major figure.

[Don Wildman]

I often on this podcast attribute the change in American culture to the growth of media in the 19th century, which is true, I get a big nod from most guests. But you're right to point out Barnum, which I never do, and he was a major figure that made people take notice of new and different things in the world. For better or worse, how were the Circassian beauties treated by him? And what were people really coming to see?

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

So the way to get at that, just think about Brian just for a minute longer, is one of the main tensions in American society is that we live with the unspeakable.

[Don Wildman]

Right?

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

This tension between equality as a virtue and ideal and slavery, inherent bondage and dehumanization. The unspeakable is such a key root that prevents us from being able to tell the true story of who we are, that it's always required the work of culture to do it for us. Right. And that's how you have Barnum enter the scene.

[Don Wildman]

Why?

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Because he's able to create an arena to process the unspeakable. He's able to give people a locus and a prompt through which they can begin to address what couldn't be discussed any other way. So he's able to stage the Circassian beauties to address one fundamental issue, which is, is there any basis for the idea of racial domination? Is there any legitimacy to this? Right.

[Don Wildman]

Was he consciously aware of this question?

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

He was. You know, the confusion about the caucus region is something he understood. He was not alone. And as we'll go on to discuss, many, many thinkers and leaders understood that this reversal was taking place, Frederick Douglass among them. You know, at the time. The opening of My Bondage and My Freedom begins with this foreword from James McCune Smith, where he is lampooning the idea of the Caucasian ideal. You know, and this is published, you know, a decade before 1860s. So Barnum mounts a performer that lets the public think through this problem. And she's staged as a Circassian beauty. She is seemingly alabaster white in terms of complexion. You know, she's got a sort of dress with a sash on it that seems as if she's an ambassador of a region. Her hair, though, is the giveaway that something is amiss. She has an Afro.

[Don Wildman]

A real Afro, or a wig of some sort.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Well, there are many photographs of these performers that would, you know, prompt the question, is it real? Later on, it emerges that it's a wig or that she's teased up her hair with beer. It's not, in fact, how she, you know, naturally would wake up each day. But when Barnum mounts this Circassian beauty, he was really saved from bankruptcy. She is that popular. People come to understand the fictions underneath the foundation of the Caucasian ideal through engaging with her. The way these stagings work is a performer is mounted at the museum and someone reads a script about her origin story. And that's fabricated, we know, but it allowed for time to process this history we've just run through.

[Don Wildman]

And these were thoughtful lectures that audiences were hearing, in fact.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Yes. And through the fabrication of these facts, they became, you know, ways to thoughtfully engage with. With this history. So she was purportedly from the Caucasus region, escaped where she lived during the Caucasian War that we'll. That we've been discussing. And to lampoon the idea of slavery in the United States in the lecture that's read about her is, you know, claims to feel so grateful for the freedom that she experiences in the United States and the freedom as a value in the United States, which is. Which is also dealing with a tension we haven't discussed, such as the parallel between white slavery and the sympathy for white slavery globally, and the apathy, Right, for bondage in the United States, for African Americans.

[Don Wildman]

All of this is happening against that backdrop. I mean, we've been fighting a war over it during these last few years, and suddenly on comes this exhibition, this very famous exhibition that really puts it right in people's faces. Like, you're sympathizing, you feel badly for this woman who has escaped the bondage. And yet at this time, there's also been this whole other reality, which is going to become even more confusing later on, just a decade later, choices are going to be made. I want to explain to the audience what these pictures really look like. You can find them online, and you should, but you're Right. The most startling thing is the ha, which is so distinctly styled, I suppose, to grab your attention. But we haven't yet talked about the fact that what's really making the difference here is photography and the fact that this image is now capable of being grabbed. You know, this is the middle of the 19th century. This is not a common thing, but suddenly it's becoming much more prevalent and people are seeing these pictures and they're being printed and distributed through new means, and that's really spreading the news even more so.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

That's right. Part of what prompted this book is seeing how many of these images are strewn, you know, archives around the United States. And I would just run into them and not understand what I was looking at. Why are these images? And so I encourage everyone to Google and take a look. The performers, we describe them. But one thing that we often forget about Barnum and that whole complex is that, well, he's known for the con. First of all, we should say he's known for, you know, putting forward the seeming farce and getting people to engage with whether it's true or not. But he's also, in this case, dealing with facts. He is miming her look to engage with the contours and the template of a famed leader at the time, the Imam Shamil, who was. He's leading the resistance valiantly, you know, against his Russian incursions. Shamil is a figure that's so popular, he comes up parallel to, say, a John Brown in the context of abolition, Woodrow Wilson's text on the history of American life. He engages with Shamil. So that Afro, you know, Barnum has really connivingly rhymed with both black racial identity, but also the reporting that's coming out about the region. He's rhymed the Afro with that kind of turban, like, conical shape. So if you look at those images together, you start to see why the American public would not just dismiss it. Right, as something that was completely satirical.

[Don Wildman]

But this is one of those pivot moments, isn't it, that the unseeing happens and it is a choice to. I mean, who wouldn't see that picture and think, well, these people have nothing. You know, this is a distant world here. We're not talking about my ancestors. I mean, it's sort of that obvious. And yet these audiences, persuaded by whatever information is being delivered to them, but primarily through their own sympathies, I suppose, and their own desires, choose to see this depiction of whiteness as true to their own. And thus that pivot has been made you're using this as an example of what the whole culture was doing at the time, which then leads to justifications of all sorts later on.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

That's right. So one of the central questions we still are faced with is, when are we going to give up the lie? The lie that there is any basis for this idea of racial superiority. That's what was being put to the public. Are we going to give up the lie? That's what's being staged. And the question then becomes, well, why did the public continue to want to believe the lie? Right. Why was there a willful disregard of these fictions? You know, the Circassian beauty show, it's mounted in the 1860s, but it really continues for decades, all the way up to World War I. Because Woodrow Wilson, he. At the end of World War I, you would think he would have other things to do. He asks for a report from his chief of staff of the army stationed near the Caucasus region on the legendary beauty of the women there. He wants to understand whether this lore is actually true. And he, in fact, makes a request that's taken seriously. There is a Circassian beauty party of 70 women that are paraded, you know, before officials in order to give Wilson this report.

[Don Wildman]

That's pretty creepy. Yeah, that's a little creepy. He has a picture, you open the book with this, of a portrait actually over his mantle in the White House, of a Circassian beauty. I mean, that's how famous it was. Of course, he was a man of a certain age, so he'd been living with this idea all his life to that point. So now he's president. He wants to know.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Yeah, yeah. And the woman in there, that painting is from our media. But it's an example, because he's. One thing we haven't mentioned, Don, it's really important, I think, to bring in here is that there are legal implications for everything we've discussed.

[Don Wildman]

Right.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

So as Barnum is mounting the show, you know, it's only a decade later that the Supreme Court would start to realize, and it's very explicit and jarring when you read this, that they have no basis for the idea of whiteness as it relates to citizenship. Right. Because they know, everyone in the American public knows that's why it's such a crime that's been left out of, really, history this moment. They know that racial scientists got it wrong, that Blumenbach got it wrong, and they state as much. And so what happens in the 1870s, specifically, and Ian Hanny Lopez is a fantastic legal scholar on this and engaged with the work in the unseen. Truth is that they rely on what they call, quote, common knowledge instead to define whiteness. They say it is so confused what happened with racial science at the caucus region. We're just going to forget that ever happened. But you know what? We know what we mean when we say Caucasian. We know what we mean. Okay, so we're going to run with that now.

[Don Wildman]

Well, the majority can do that.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Don Wildman]

It brings to mind how precise the Constitution was at some point, you know, in defining blackness and how absolutely detailed we had to be and how all that. And that didn't just start with America. It was a Spanish thing. And also it was. It goes all the way back. How do you parse these lines? How do you parse these peoples to fit your needs, you know, to fit your definition of them.

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[Don Wildman]

I want to get to Frederick Douglass before we go too long here because the man's a hero. Let's just say it, you know, an insanely brilliant man. In this situation, I want to skip right to his use of photography. He's long since free and moving about. He makes a deliberate use of this. It would have been in the context of this show, I suppose, being so famous in New York. But he begins using photography to his own end to change people's perceptions of reality, right?

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Mm. He does. He becomes the most photographed American man in the 19th century. Not African American man, but American man. And he, you're exactly right. He speaks during the Civil War about the last thing many in crowds of thousands that would gather to hear him would expect. Namely pictures, right. And the power they had on the critical imagination for American progress. He drafts this speech multiple times over the course of his life, pictures in progress, and thinks through an idea that really no one had focused on which is that in representational democracy, we would need representation itself to change the narrative of who counts and who belongs. So he begins that work by putting himself in front of the camera that many times. He's pushing back on a Niagara flow of stereotypes. Sure, right. That just really litter newspapers and journals to kind of legitimate racial oppression. So Douglass understands this, and the medium of photography begins this discussion about the power of culture, visual culture. Right. For politics.

[Don Wildman]

Sure. It's a very deliberate, very smart and savvy idea to come along at this time when this is a brand new technology. I mean, nobody was doing this. There were salons here and there. My Quaker ancestors, you know, took pictures of themselves. Everybody, you know, stood for their portraits. But to do it a lot and to do it as much as he did it was a really deliberate choice to get this image out there. And it's a fascinating idea and a bold and courageous one on his part to do it because he's basically shoving it in people's faces. This is how we really look people, you know, we dress well, we are very smart, we're good looking. My goodness, the man was good looking. And he knew the power of that image and what it would have. And it's truly here we are talking about it 150 years later. It was unstoppable.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Absolutely. And the final reason that makes this work so urgent is rarely discussed. But we should bring it up here. He understood that photographs were being weaponized deliberately to create a kind of data to undergird this whole racial regime. I teach at Harvard University. Harvard has a set of photographs that would have been likely known to Frederick Douglass. They are taken by Joseph T. Zealy in an attempt to prove polygenesis. You know, pre Darwin, the idea that separate races are separate species and that they exist in a hierarchy. These photographs which show American and African born enslaved men and women, father and daughter pairs, in an attempt to show this sort of state of so called denigration. And he understood, and he wrote in the speech in 1847, claims that the Negro ethnologically considered that the racial scientists, the naturalists, working in this vein, were trying to use the arts, use photographs to read people out of the human family. And in pictures in progress, he's decidedly using the idea of the photograph and the image and culture to read people back in. Right. So this is something that's left out of the history of photography, that it's used to honor human life, but even at its very inception, to deliberately denigrate it as well.

[Don Wildman]

And he gets that it's so much. I mean, your experience on back, the onus is always on black Americans to deconstruct this construction, to take this thing that white America has allowed to happen, or created in this case for sure, and then deconstruct it in order to show its flaws. That's so much the theme of 19th, 20th, and even 21st century America.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

That's right. That's right. And so much of this book, and we'll get to it, is to salute the unsung heroes of the early civil rights movement. Douglas. Yes, but then those who come decades later, two who were working in Woodrow Wilson's White House, who understand this and are doing their part to deconstruct it. I also wrote to salute my own grandfather who was doing this work. He was expelled from a public high school in New York City in 1926 for asking these same questions. You know, he wanted to know why the textbooks just presented excellence one way, and we know what way that was. He wanted to know where the whole world was. And it was a history class, 11th grade, and his teacher told him that African Americans did nothing to merit inclusion. And he didn't accept it as an answer. And he was expelled for his impertinence. And he went on to become an artist. And I never knew why. He never received his GED or high school diploma until he died. And I was at Harvard as an undergrad and thought, okay, I can continue this work.

[Don Wildman]

Oh, the irony you mentioned that this sticks around this Circassian idea. And even langston Hughes in 1930s goes over there. And in your book, you account for this in and sees that which everyone knew. But he reports, as he can, that there are people who don't look anything like you think they look.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

That's right. He describes the men and women you see in the broader caucus region, Transcaucasia, basically as dark as russet pears and as brown as chocolate. It says many would be described as so called colored in the United States. And that was one of those moments where I thought, oh, I have to go to the region and I have to write about the.

[Don Wildman]

Did you find the same?

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

True, I did, I did in the sense that I found an entire region that was, as, you know, racially varied and heterodox.

[Don Wildman]

As you can imagine, we have not spent much time on the diaspora of these people. And that's an important part of this. Many of those from the caucuses ended up in the United States and elsewhere around the world. It's interesting how James Baldwin would come to live in Turkey as well. I mean, these iconic black Americans who are generationally undoing these untruths, seeing what America's had unseen. There is so much about this book we unfortunately don't have time to explore. It is a vast work. But I want to wrap up with this question. How much do you see the present racial tensions in this country still related to these ideas? How much are we still dealing with the legacy of what was unseen in the 19th century into the 20th and the foundations of this racial hierarchy?

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

I think it's a. It's a vital question you're asking. This unseen history has an outsized influence on our politics today. Outsize influence on our politics today. It's why I felt compelled to write it, even though, frankly, I didn't really want to have to write the book. You know, it's difficult material to live with for as long as I did. It impacts current society in two ways, I think. The first is anyone, even as a kid knows that when someone is bullying you, it's because there's an insecurity there. They're believing a lie. Right? What happens when an entire society is forced to defend a lie? You get the kind of brutality that we have seen in our racial regime. Right. We haven't addressed the fact that we are defending a lie. And that's really the main point of showcasing this history. To expose not just the lie, but the tactics that were employed to purpose permit this willful disregard of the lie. The way in which we changed how we taught global history to avoid dealing with this question of what really is in the caucus region. When you look at textbooks, how they change from year to year after the Caucasian War, you see a complete gloss over this history. When you look at map making and how that changed, you see a complete decision to not be specific about what's really happening in that region. These are empirical ways to understand how this willful disregard was made possible. The second aspect of this is to think about how important silencing became to shore up this racial regime. That is to say, we tend to understand spectacle as a way to register change in society. But what this history required was a secreting right of these lies, was a withholding of information. And through it, you can begin to see the roots of the censorship debates we're having now about the curricular change issues we're having now. All of this begins when this lie was exposed. So there are many ways that I think it impacts our current politics, and those are two.

[Don Wildman]

I'd say it is the value of history to look for primary source material, to cite that material to make your arguments from that place. And that's what you've done in this book, in rooting out the cause of this misrepresentation and the choice to unsee it, to look the other way from it. These days we're dealing with issues of reversing a lot of these things culturally anyway. And so it's such an obnoxious thing, in my opinion, that it gets dismissed so blithely. The word woke has now become the way to just get rid of that in one phrase. And it's almost like it is the bullying that you're talking about. It's like, yeah, you need that easy thing because you're not capable of going into the fuller detailed issue of what we're talking about. And that's how you end up with this kind of round and round we go on these issues instead of resolving them with truth. All of this is central to your work, which I mentioned at the top of the show. It's called a civic initiative. Vision and justice is what you founded. You are still bearing witness to all this. Just last night my wife put in my hand the new aperture book of yours called Raced Stories, which you edited all about the essays of Maurice Berger. It's the continued power of representing this, of the truth of photography and the commentary on that photography that continues the mission of Douglass and Hughes.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Thank you. The work continues and I'm just so encouraged to continue this work. I'm thinking through how culture allows us to fully see each other as we are, you know.

[Don Wildman]

Well, it's, it's, and it's so correctly titled Vision and Justice because that's essentially what we've been talking about this entire half an hour. If we can see and talk about things in the truth that they truly are, then progress can be made. You are continuing to help us see Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis. She is the John L. Loeb Associate professor of the Humanities and African American Studies at Harvard University. Best selling author and editor. Sarah, tell the audience where they can find more about Vision and Justice.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Ah, the website itself, Vision and Justice will direct you to the set of publications, convenings and initiatives that are taking place there. Of course, social media can give you a handle on all that too.

[Don Wildman]

And I bet you've got new books coming. Can't wait to see them. Thank you so much for joining us.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Such a pleasure, such a thrill to speak to you. Thank you for having me.

[Don Wildman]

Hello folks. Thanks for listening to American History hit. Each week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of great content like mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share with a friend American history Hit with me Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Bye for now.

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[Don Wildman]

Here's a show that we recommend. Hey folks, it's Marc Maron from wtf. I've been talking to all kinds of famous people in my garage since 2009, including a sitting president. You know, I don't imagine you were flying in here on the chopper thinking like, you know, I am nervous about Mark. No, I wasn't. Okay, well that's good. That would be a problem. It would be a problem if the president was feeling stressed about coming to my garage.

[Dr. Sarah Lewis]

Coming to your garage.

[Don Wildman]

And now there's even more WTF when you subscribe to the Full Marin to get weekly bonus content and all WTF episodes ad free with. Listen to WTF wherever you get podcasts and subscribe to the full [e-mail] WTF.

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[Don Wildman]

Acast.com.