The "Bestial Mark" of Race in The Island of Dr. Moreau

Frederick Douglass Engages the Problematics of Race

In 1855, on the eve of the American Civil War, Frederick Douglass published his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. Early in this book Douglass takes issue with those who seek a biblical justification for slavery. Specifically, he addresses the popular argument within the American South that blacks are "the lineal descendents of Ham," that their dark skins are the mark of God's displeasure, and that they are therefore ordained by an act of God to serve as slaves.¹ Rather than attacking this argument textually, his strategy for addressing biblical arguments in favor of slavery elsewhere, Douglass chooses to debunk this line of reasoning by pointing out that "thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who—like myself—owe their existence to white fathers."² Therefore, beginning his argument with the acceptance of the absurd premise that God created Africans so that white folks might have slaves, he satirically remarks that "according to the scriptures, slavery in this country will soon become an unscriptural institution."³

In this passage Douglass exposes, through satire, the obvious political motivation behind such an argument. Douglass understands the game that is being played: the logical incommensurability of the divine act with any empirical reality is being exploited; within the symbolic order of slavery, the empty placeholder of the real is filled in with a certain imaginary content, the will of God, that serves both to justify slavery and to place it beyond criticism. We might speculate that it is because he wishes to expose the nature of this ideological game that Douglass refrains from seriously engaging the argument. Recognizing that in this case "the will of God" occupies the space of an empty placeholder that can be filled with any particular content, Douglass replaces "the will of God" with the perverse desire to exploit others sexually. The irony that Douglass generates in this passage results partially from the suggestion that the biblical logic that holds race to be a divinely ordained truth and therefore outside of the realm of empirical questioning is, in fact, nothing more than a disavowal of a very worldly motive: the desire to sexually exploit a group of women without legal or moral consequences. I would argue, however, that the irony of this passage is more specifically the result of Douglass's exposure of the simplicity and arrogance of the form that the argument takes.

My contention is that Douglass identifies the essential logic of race through this satirical deconstruction of the "sons of Ham" argument. Within the view that Douglass attacks, race is divinely ordained, and the dark skin of blacks is the mark of a primeval sin. In this view, race originated through an ultimately unfathomable act of God. This act was registered as marks on the bodies of certain people, who were thereby racialized. The dark skin of Africans marks them as the abjected others of those in God's good grace (whites, of course), and this originary act of exclusion/creation must be indefinitely reiterated through the institution of slavery. Slavery itself becomes, in this account, a reenactment of an original, incomprehensible act of God, a reiterative performance of God's will. The original act is therefore present in the reenactment as the kernel of nonsense, the incomprehensible moment of decision, which escapes incorporation into the series of events that it inaugurates (the enslavement of blacks). "Race" in this case designates what Derrida identifies as the "ungraspable ... instant," the " exceptional decision which belongs to no historical, temporal continuum."⁴

In this article I attempt to perform a critical operation similar to Douglass's exposure of the kernel of nonsense at the center of the biblical justification for slavery in regard to "sociocultural evolutionism," which largely displaces religious explanations of race in the mid-nineteenth century. The social evolutionary model of cultural and racial difference becomes the predominant influence in both social scientific, and, more generally, intellectual circles, beginning in the 1860s, when the "evolutionary method" and polygenism converge. This model will form an ideological framework within which various theories of...