The Chemistry of Blackness: Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, Everard Home, and the Project of Defining Blackness through Chemical Explanations

IF 1.3 Q2 ETHNIC STUDIES

Critical Philosophy of Race Pub Date : 2019-07-19 DOI:10.5325/CRITPHILRACE.7.2.0372

E. Driggers

引用次数: 3

Abstract

Abstract:This article examines the chemistry of race at the turn of the nineteenth century. Physicians, philosophers, and intellectuals from Benjamin Rush to Everard Home defined the skin color of Africans as resulting from the changes of the body's humors (or fluids). Radical physicians like Benjamin Rush believed that he could "cure" African slaves of what he identified as indicative of sickness, their skin color, as they were essentially sick white people in his mind. Overall, the study seeks to explain the medical and chemical understanding of race and the potential for "curing" blackness. Often these cures were linked to balancing and unblocking the fluids. A justification for these ideas comes from cases where people seemed to have spontaneously turned black and experiments where black people were turned white.

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《黑色的化学:本杰明·拉什、托马斯·杰斐逊、埃弗拉·霍姆，以及通过化学解释来定义黑色的计划》

摘要:本文考察了19世纪之交的种族化学。从本杰明·拉什(Benjamin Rush)到埃弗拉·霍姆(Everard Home)，医生、哲学家和知识分子都将非洲人的肤色定义为人体体液(或体液)变化的结果。像本杰明·拉什(Benjamin Rush)这样的激进医生认为，他可以“治愈”非洲奴隶的疾病症状，他们的肤色，因为在他看来，他们本质上是生病的白人。总的来说，这项研究试图解释对种族的医学和化学理解，以及“治愈”黑人的潜力。这些治疗通常与平衡和疏通体液有关。这些观点的理由来自于人们似乎自发地变成黑人的案例，以及黑人变成白人的实验。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Critical Philosophy of Race ETHNIC STUDIES-

CiteScore

2.30

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： The critical philosophy of race consists in the philosophical examination of issues raised by the concept of race, the practices and mechanisms of racialization, and the persistence of various forms of racism across the world. Critical philosophy of race is a critical enterprise in three respects: it opposes racism in all its forms; it rejects the pseudosciences of old-fashioned biological racialism; and it denies that anti-racism and anti-racialism summarily eliminate race as a meaningful category of analysis. Critical philosophy of race is a philosophical enterprise because of its engagement with traditional philosophical questions and in its readiness to engage critically some of the traditional answers.