The Ethiopian Prophecy in Black American Letters

3. Uplifting Ethiopia in America: Conversion, Self-Consciousness, and the Figure of Ethiopia

3 Uplifting Ethiopia in America Conversion, Self-Consciousness, and the Figure of Ethiopia The notion of the Negro as a defective being was a given to many literate eighteenth-century Europeans and Americans. As a non-Christian, nonEuropean , non-white living in the modern world, the disfigured Negro was described in many European and American religious and scientific writings as a being outside the flow of human history toward its telos. The Negro’s phenotype and articulations of consciousness (religion, culture, creativity, and reflectivity) were signs of defect. For Johann Blumenbach, the “father” of modernity’s racial categories and hierarchy, blackness was a degeneration of whiteness. Organizing the races aesthetically in the late eighteenth century, Blumenbach judged the Caucasian type to be the most beautiful of the five human races and the Negro type as the least attractive (Gould 401–12). We saw in the previous chapter that the absence of Christianity among blacks constituted a deformity, a disfigurement of great spiritual proportions. Dovetailing these assessments of the Negro, major European and American scientific studies made more inflammatory claims that the Negro was mentally disfigured. In what reads as an intertextual game of “the dozens,” western thinkers from Hume to Hegel engaged in a type of one-upmanship for who could describe the Negro as the most defective. In a footnote of his essay, “Of NationalCharacters”(1748),HumewritesthefollowingabouttheNegro: “I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men . . . to be naturally inferior to the whites. . . . there are Negroe [sic] slavesdispersedalloverEurope,ofwhichnoneeverdiscoveredanysymptoms of ingenuity . . .” (252). Not to be outdone, Jefferson, in his Notes on Uplifting Ethiopia in America / 53 the State of Virginia (1787), surpassed Hume’s appraisal of the Negro: “In general, their [the blacks’] existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. . . . Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, . . . and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous” (265–66). Hegel trumped both Hume and Jefferson in his Philosophy of History (1830) by labeling the Negro as an infantwhoisoutsidethemovementanddevelopmentofconsciousnessin the historical world: “From these various traits [the absence of universal ideas and principles, fetishism, sensualism as articulated by cannibalism and physical enthusiasm, slavery, and tyranny] it is manifest that want of self-control distinguishes the character of the Negroes. This condition is capable of no development or culture, and as we see them at this day, such have they always been” (98). Bringingthe Negro withinthe trajectoryof Christianhistoryandmodern consciousness to ameliorate his disfigurement would become a major discourse in modernity. To overcome the Negro’s spiritual disfigurement , Fox and Mather, working within a Crusoean worldview, promote conversion—the transformation of the figure of Ethiopia from pagan to Christian. Their understanding of Psalm 68:31 guided their figuration of Ethiopia as Christian. Closely linked to the spiritual uplift of the Negro to Christianity was its intellectual counterpart fought for by black exegetes of Psalm 68:31: the acquisition of modern Anglophone culture. Conversion narratives, the transformation of the figure of Ethiopia from paganism to Christianity and from orality to an Anglophone culture of literacy, were the first, dominant, and eventually institutional figures of Ethiopia to emerge out of the interpretations of Psalm 68:31. The discourse of “racial uplift” prominent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a “racial pygmalionism”: the conversion of the other into a semblance of the modern white individual. Even though black and Native American populations could become “almost” modern human beings by converting to Christianity and acquiring literacy and Anglophone culture, their perceivedracialdifferencesmade itsocially,politically,andlegallyimpossible for them to be substitutable for Western Europeans or Euro-Americans. Hence, these populations might resemble modern individuals, but they lacked the similitude of substitutability and therefore were not equal to their Western European and Euro-American counterparts. Despite this 54 / The Ethiopian Prophecy in Black American Letters problem, many black exegetes would interpret Psalm 68:31 in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a verse prefiguring the conversion and salvation of Ethiopia from a spiritual and intellectual morass. Bringing the Gospel to Native Americans The earliest appearance of the figure of Ethiopian uplift is derived from a reading of Psalm 68:31 in black letters and occurs in the autobiographical narrative of John Marrant. The figure of Ethiopia in Marrant’s reading is not the slave in America, the...