I asked myself the same after I finished my lesson in our Enlightenment class yesterday. The paper my students are writing this time around, as I mentioned a couple days ago, has my students attempting some Enlightenment-era questions in whatever philosophical idiom they find fitting. (If class conversations and their first couple papers mean anything, this group tends towards Enlightenment-style thought, specifically a mix of John Locke and Adam Smith, anyway.) Specifically I’m having them write an ethics of common life, a means of living with difference. So Tuesday we (were supposed to) read Wollstonecraft’s “Rights of Woman,” and for yesterday they actually did read a small range of Enlightenment texts on colonization and slavery.
My aim in the lesson was to highlight the difference between racism as a scientific ideology (that predates Charles Darwin, I was sure to remind them) and bigotry as an ethical disposition against an entire group of people.? I did say that a person could be bigoted without being racist or bigoted and racist, or racist without being bigoted or neither, and we talked about some examples of all four categories.? But when we got to the actual Enlightenment-era texts, I fear that I didn’t return to those categories often enough or strongly enough.? One of our main texts was an excerpt from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia in which, I thought, I could teach him as a complex thinker who was of his age but nonetheless had a strong sense of what was ultimately right.? Unfortunately, I let students’ observations about the blatantly racist parts get the better of the conversation, and the side of the conversation where I noted his genuine moral sense got buried.? I meant to hold him up as someone who recognized that former slaves had legitimate historical grievance against a government that allowed them, having been kidnapped, to be bought and sold for generations.? That much is true.? But the class wanted to talk about the fact that he seems to consider Blacks a separate biological species, the parts where he’s concerned that they’ll intermarry and thus cross-breed with the European species, and the parts in which he denied that they have any capability for sentiment or romance when they “pursued” women.? All those parts are in there, the good and the bad, but yesterday I was unable to hold them in balance.? I did say that, had Jefferson (or Darwin, another racist) lived in the era of the Human Genome Project, he likely would not have been a racist, but I fear that I still threw Jefferson at least partly under the bus.
Our conversation about Diderot’s anti-colonializing polemic went better, largely because Diderot’s views resonated with their own post-racist worlds.? The anthology’s selection, an excerpt from “Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage,” creates a fascinating literary character in the person of a Tahitian elder talking to Bougainville’s crew.? We talked about the historical problems the piece presents, not the least of which are the elder’s challenging the European sailors to an Odyssey-style bow-bending match (putting European colonizers in the roles of Penelope’s parasitic suitors) and his accusing them of ruining an Edenic innocence.? But we also talked about the need for some kind of rhetorical tools that might re-humanize those that ideology has de-humanized and about Diderot’s genuine attempt to do so by bringing the Tahitians into the stories that Europeans find most compelling.
So it wasn’t my best lesson, but it wasn’t my worst either.? I suppose some days one just breaks even.
