The Moment of Racial Sight: A History by Irene Tucker, and: Race?: Debunking a scientific Myth by Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle (review)

In The Moment of Racial Sight, Irene Tucker contends that, from the Enlightenment on, the logic of race has been understood to be arbitrary, much as language is arbitrary. While the signs of racial difference do not signify any biological reality, however, they continue to be significant. Why is this so? Tucker proceeds to note that the concept of “an arbitrary, constructed racial sign” itself has a history and that this concept “is consolidated relatively recently in the modern history of race theorized by Charles Darwin” (6). Her beginning point is not Darwin, however, but Immanuel Kant. She draws on several of his writings to analyze what she calls “Kant’s dermatology.” She relates Kant’s thinking to the emergence of anatomical medicine and the “standardized body,” involving observable surface features and unobservable internal features, making skin the switching point between seen and unseen (32). Racialized skin for Kant links divisions between outer and inner, contingent and lawful, and theoretical and teleological aspects of experience.

The chief puzzle Tucker seeks to solve is why, just as the arbitrariness of race began to be recognized, it nevertheless was accompanied by “a theory of the fundamental and unchanging inequality of human beings” (12). The meaning of skin color for Kant, Tucker seeks to show, emerges from contradictions in his critical theory. She does not exactly claim that her argument invalidates the more familiar assertions by George Frederickson, Nancy Leys Stepan, myself, and others that Enlightenment thinkers were either inconsistent or hypocritical in regard to race. After all, Kant’s highly sophisticated contradictoriness is a version of inconsistency, theoretically inescapable though it may have seemed to him. And Thomas Jefferson could assert in The Declaration of Independence (1776) that “all men are created equal” and yet be a slave owner. At any rate, between the chapters on Kant and Darwin, Tucker examines Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and several of John Stuart Mill’s writings; so, including the one on Darwin, three of her five chapters have a Victorian focus. She concludes her study by examining the HBO series The Wire (2002–08), a crime drama set mainly around housing projects in Baltimore.

Tucker subtitles her book “a history,” but it is not easy to tell what kind of history she is practicing. It is a version of intellectual history, though she does not argue that from Kant through Darwin each of her major figures influenced the later ones (though of course Thomas Malthus influenced Darwin). Except for Darwin, she does not deal with any of the natural historians and race scientists who were the main figures in developing ideas about the varieties of humans. I would be inclined to call her study a genealogy, although Tucker does not invoke Michel Foucault until her final chapter. She is attempting to provide an alternative to standard histories of race, and in doing so often calls upon unexpected writers and texts, frequently ones not focused explicitly on race. So, for example, the novels by Collins that deal more overtly with race than The Woman in White—The Moonstone (1868) and Indians, Armadale (1866) and slavery in the Caribbean—she does not mention. (Poor Miss Finch [1872], with its treatment of blindness and a husband who turns blue, might also have been interesting in regard to “racial sight.”) The chapter on Mill takes a stimulating, if unexpected turn to photography and William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (1844). Tucker pursues a more familiar line of argument in writing about Malthus and Darwin. And the chronological leap from Darwin to The Wire, interesting though that program and her analysis of it may be, makes The Moment of Racial Sight quite unconventional as “a...