Revisiting Racialized Voice: African American Ethos in Language and Literature

2. From Reading Race to Race as a Way of Reading

25 2 From Reading Race to Race as a Way of Reading B L ACK VO ICE IS A SLIPPERY META PHOR PA RTLY because its two operative terms (race and voice) are elusive and culturally charged. Indeed, all literal and many figurative ways of describing race in America have been flawed because race remained an object to be interpreted or read rather than a way of reading culture. From the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, these flawed views evolved into codified interconnections among race, language, and being that have informed the appropriation of voice as a shibboleth in the history of African American writing. Notwithstanding the voluminous work that has been done on critical race studies, rhetoric composition scholars must continue to interrogate the historical import of race and writing. If an ever-broadening knowledge of the sociopolitical histories of ancient Greece and Rome are requisite for applying classical rhetoric to contemporary writing instruction, even more relevant are ongoing explorations of American race histories in constructing increasingly more mobile paradigms for black voice in composition studies. Ongoing historical excursions might encourage composition scholars to replace literal and figurative readings of race (such as Henry Louis Gates’s metaphors “race as text and trope”) with, among other constructions, the notion of “race as a cultural hermeneutic.”1 Neither the notion of race as a way of reading nor the phrase “race as hermeneutic” is entirely new. Nevertheless, many 26 From Reading Race to Race as a Way of Reading theoretical and pedagogical implications remain unexplored as this notion and phrase inform rhetoric composition studies. Racist Doctrines Any historical survey of black voice, therefore, should start with the more fundamental question of what has constituted “blackness.” From the 1870s to the 1920s, biological and linguistic boundaries of blackness, arbitrary within themselves, had come to demarcate the more arbitrary boundaries of psychological and spiritual blackness. The oldest and most common indicators of biological blackness (those predating the nineteenth century) were the visible differences between Africans and Europeans: primarily complexion but also hair, nose, and lips. Later, complexion came to be construed as the cultural or, in more cases, genetic sign of inferiority —that is, a sign of difference ironically more than skin deep. Scientific and philosophical rationales influenced by religious ideology during all of the eighteenth century had become, by the middle of the nineteenth century, divorced from this ideology. One way to chart the complete transition from the less religious to the more secular construction of blackness, therefore, is to understand the difference between what Thomas Gossett has called the “monogenetic” and “polygenetic” theories of race origins. In the main, eighteenth-century thinkers embraced the former theory, which claimed that all people (regardless of race) were a part of the same species. Hence, “all men” (the sexist exclusiveness of this phrase and the period notwithstanding) were originally created “equal.” This theory alludes to the Old Testament but primarily comes from John Locke’s natural rights philosophy and Thomas Jefferson’s adaptation of the Magna Carta.2 The first forty years of the nineteenth century chronicled a shift from the monogenetic and religious theory of race origins toward the polygenetic and secular theory.3 The polygenists believed that separate races evinced distinct species. A number of scholars and scientific journals clung to this theory until 1859, the year Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species appeared. Samuel George Morton, George Robin Gliddon, and Josiah Clark Nott were the most distinguished advocates of polygeneticism . They predictably enjoyed attacking the fundamentalist Christian stance on creation (Gossett 64; Stanton 162). From Reading Race to Race as a Way of Reading 27 Morton was the “most eminent scientific member” of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (Stanton 1). Amid “the confused speculation about the origin of the races,” his Crania Americana, published in 1839, “was hailed as a solution to the whole problem” (25). A physician and anatomy professor, Morton was best known as a craniologist . He was among the first to measure the skulls of various races, concluding that Caucasians had the largest skulls and, as a result, the largest brains and the greatest capacity for thought (32). Conversely, the Ethiopians had the smallest skulls and, therefore, brains. Since Morton’s research led him to conclude that people could be divided into “twenty-two families,” he discredited Thomas Jefferson’s environmental hypothesis. Curiously, as Stanton notes, Morton avoids using the word species, preferring families (33). Doing so, despite his allegiance to Archbishop James...