The unseen truth, p.1
The Unseen Truth, page 1
Praise for The Unseen Truth
“Absolutely brilliant. Uniquely astute. Sarah Lewis grows The Unseen Truth from her superb Vision & Justice project into a work of stunning originality. There is so much here as Lewis ‘unsilences’ the past in a voice both informative and seductive. Her astonishing cast of characters stars Caucasians, Circassians, and most revealingly, Woodrow Wilson. Each chapter exposes the ‘racial detailing’ that has constructed a repressive racial regime that, once seen, can be undone.”
—NELL IRVIN PAINTER, author of the New York Times bestseller The History of White People
“Sarah Lewis’s The Unseen Truth isn’t just a groundbreaking work of visionary scholarship. It’s an earthquake. Here is the map key to seeing—or, as she shows, re-seeing—the fault lines of race and how, after the Civil War, they were buried beneath an onslaught of constructed American fictions diabolical in their details and devastating in what they taught generations to filter out, allowing them to see only in Black and white. All credit to Lewis for removing the blindfold.”
—HENRY LOUIS GATES, Jr., author of The Black Box: Writing the Race
“Race is a fiction, even as it overwhelms and shapes our history. In The Unseen Truth, born of her long study of visuality, Sarah Lewis returns innovatively to the story of race as a creation of how we see or unsee. She beautifully illuminates an American and human tragedy—that we may be much better at seeing race than we ever are at understanding it. In a sweeping history from the Civil War to the Great War era, Lewis shows historically how Americans forged a lethal racial regime with their eyes as much as their minds.”
—DAVID W. BLIGHT, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
“In a work of great originality and scholarly imagination, Sarah Lewis opens our eyes to what we have been too blinded to see in the narratives of race that have defined our nation. Her insights are transformative and indispensable.”
—DREW GILPIN FAUST, author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
“In The Unseen Truth, it is almost as if Sarah Lewis has given us a new pair of glasses that allow us to see history in ways that were previously unclear. Every chapter is suffused with revelations that expand and clarify our understanding of the past. This book has changed the way I look at history. It has changed the way I observe the world. Lewis has provided us with an indispensable resource to better see ourselves.”
—CLINT SMITH, author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
“An engaging, compelling read from a remarkable scholar. The Unseen Truth shines light on a long-silenced history, offering endless ways to realize the possibilities for justice.”
—DEBORAH WILLIS, prizewinning photo historian and author of Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present
“Writing about race is like hunting for the origins of a lie. In this masterpiece of American history, written with verve, delicacy, and imagination, Sarah Lewis takes the color line and blows it up, capturing a moment in the late nineteenth century when the older rhythms of racial sight broke down and a new, pernicious attention to detail emerged. The supposed truth of tiny distinctions, she shows us, is a lie of enormous, heartbreaking consequence for the decades that followed.”
—MATTHEW PRATT GUTERL, author of Skinfolk: A Memoir
“A watershed in the study of art, social, and cultural history, The Unseen Truth is probing and brilliant, based on superb research and filled with remarkable discoveries. Sarah Lewis illuminates what it means to both ‘see’ and create race, deepening our ability to pursue justice.”
—IMANI PERRY, author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, winner of the National Book Award
“Exhaustively researched, deeply original, and analytically brilliant, The Unseen Truth is a landmark in the literature on race. Sarah Lewis has uncovered elements that are both literally and metaphorically hidden in plain sight and offered a new way of seeing the racial fictions that surround us. The canon of indispensable books on the volatile alchemy of race has just grown by one.”
—JELANI COBB, author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress
“In this richly researched and capacious text, Sarah Lewis traces the fictions of race that subtend racial domination and the ways that their maintenance demands a simultaneous seeing and unseeing. With its sustained attention to art, photography, popular culture, and performance, The Unseen Truth enacts ‘a system break in the usual circuits’ of ‘racial sight’ and representation. This is necessary reading.”
—CHRISTINA SHARPE, author of Ordinary Notes
“In this extraordinary book, Sarah Lewis opens our eyes to the centuries of sedimented prejudice that continue to shape our present. Taking us on a journey from the Caucasus to America, where new racial imaginaries were being forged, she shows how the instability of the Caucasus as a signifier of race reveals the fragile, spurious nature of racialized thinking itself.”
—REBECCA RUTH GOULD, author of Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus
“The Unseen Truth is a call to arms.”
—MAURICE BERGER, author of For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights
THE UNSEEN TRUTH
When Race Changed Sight in America
SARAH LEWIS
Harvard University Press
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS | LONDON, ENGLAND | 2024
Copyright © 2024 by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis
Excerpt from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is copyright 1947, 1948, 1952 by Ralph Ellison. Copyright © renewed 1975, 1976, 1980 by Ralph Ellison. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Excerpt from The Black Book by Toni Morrison is copyright © Estate of Chloe A. Morrison, 1973. Reprinted by permission of Estate of Chloe A. Morrison.
All rights reserved
Publication of this book has been supported through the generous provisions of the Maurice and Lula Bradley Smith Memorial Fund.
Cover photograph: © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Barbara Gladstone, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin
Cover design: Elizabeth Karp-Evans (Pacific)
ISBN 9780674238343 (cloth)
ISBN 9780674297739 (EPUB)
ISBN 9780674297722 (PDF)
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Lewis, Sarah Elizabeth, author.
Title: The unseen truth : when race changed sight in America / Sarah Lewis.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024001351 (print) | LCCN 2024001352 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Racism against Black people—United States—History. | Black race—Color—United States—Public opinion—History. | Caucasian race—Public opinion—History. | Color vision—Social aspects— United States—History. | Visual communication—Social aspects— United States—History. | Race awareness—United States—History. | Scientific racism—United States—History. | African Americans— Segregation—History. | Caucasus, Northern (Russia)—History— Russian Conquest, 1831–1859—Influence. | United States—Race relations—History.
Classification: LCC E185.61 .L535 2024 (print) | LCC E185.61 (ebook) | DDC 305.800973—dc23/eng/20240212
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024001351
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024001352
In memory of
Shadrach and Ann, Margaret, Enoch, Shadrach, and Keziah Lee,
My great-great grandparents and their children,
My ancestors from Montserrat,
and Sarah Lewis, a spiritual ancestor from Antigua,
who saved me
In memory of Maurice Berger, Greg Tate, and Robert Farris Thompson,
Friends, Mentors, and Advisors
With gratitude to the forces in the form of dear ones around me
who know that love sustains our pursuit of truth.
All things work together for good.
CONTENTS
A NOTE ON LANGUAGE
Introduction
1 Ungrounding
The Caucasian War and the Second Founding of the United States
2 Racial Adjudication
Frederick Douglass and the Circassian Beauties
3 Unsilencing the Past
The Production of Race, Culture, and History
4 Negative Assembly
Mapping Racial Regimes and the Cartography of Liberation
5 The Unseen Dream
Racial Detailing and the Legacy of Federal Segregation in the United States
Epilogue
It Takes So Long to See
NOTES
APPRECIATION
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
I am all the things I have seen: The New York Caucasian newspaper, the scarred back of Gordon the Slave, the Draft Riots, darky tunes, and merchants distorting my face to sell thread, soap, shoe polish, coconut.
—TONI MORRISON, Preface, The Black Book (1973)
The term “Caucasian” is dropped by recent writers on Ethnology; for the people about Mount Ca
—JAMES MCCUNE SMITH, Introduction to Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)
Some things are just too unjust for words … and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.
—RALPH ELLISON, Invisible Man (1952)
A NOTE ON LANGUAGE
Throughout the book, I have largely chosen not to capitalize black or white. There is some equivocation about the style convention at the moment: some insist on capitalizing the word black, others do not. This moment in history does not permit equivocation about the facts. As Wesley Lowery notes, “racism is deadly real” but “race itself is a fiction.” Retaining the lowercase, following writers including Toni Morrison and Lowery, challenges how we legitimate race as a biological fact at a time when it is critical to do so. This book addresses how the construction of race required turning fictions into fact, with deadly consequences in American life. To capitalize black or white would undermine the very evidence I present in these pages.
Introduction
Race changed sight in America. The transformation, difficult to observe, has led to a way of seeing that is now so practiced that this very fact can seem unremarkable.
I caught a glimpse of the legacy of this shift in vision when I saw the headline of the verdict in the case of the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri. I had come home late after teaching a course entitled “Vision and Justice,” which considers how images have both expanded and limited our notions of national belonging. Upon checking the news online, I found a Time magazine article with the headline “Ferguson Decision Reveals the Brutality of Whiteness.” Twenty minutes later, the headline had changed. The word “whiteness” had been edited out. It now read “Ferguson Decision Reveals the Brutality of Racism.”1
The decision to replace “whiteness” with “racism” did not surprise me. The magazine had used the term whiteness to describe a system of oppression rather than a racial identity, breaking the script of the American racial vernacular. What made me pause was the unnerving ease of the headline change, the all too nimble cut-and-paste operation. The deletion appeared as if a flicker, a system break in the usual circuits, the revelation of a set of decisions being made, constructed, then unmade. I was asked to picture one culprit—whiteness—and then asked to forget what I might have seen and picture another: racism. Even the argument of the article itself had changed. The dynamic mimicked how the unstable production of the nation’s racial regime required a shift in vision to stabilize racial ideology resting on specious facts.2
We often narrate the history of racial domination around overt actions. These are legion. “Anything but unmoored or isolated, white power was reinforced in this new era by the nation’s cultural, economic, educational, legal, and violently extra-legal systems, including lynching,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. deftly notes.3 Yet in the United States, the stability of racial ideology was also shaped, crucially, by what was left out. Racial domination under white supremacy came to have the critical feature of erasure, of negative assembly. Sight became a form of racial sculpture; vision became a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. From the nineteenth century through the segregationist age, cementing racial hierarchy meant disregarding contradictions and falsehoods through conditioned sight, an enduring legacy.
Confections—racial fictions—are not merely assembled. They are not merely formed through racist caricature and distorting stereotypes. They are carved, formed through removals. Learning to unsee the cracked foundations of the project of scientific racism allowed the myth of racial hierarchy to remain intact, making it more difficult to dislodge today.
Racial regimes became stable through a transformation of vision. It is a near maxim that what we see—representation from portraits to stereotypes—changed perceptions of race. The opposite is also true: the use of race as a fundamental category for making meaning in the world has altered how we see it. What emerged between the nineteenth century through the segregationist age were tactics—from silencing to conditioned sight—required to see around the instability of the foundations that justified racial hierarchy in the United States. It is this transformation of vision that let obvious fictions remain at the basis of the racial project and settle into a kind of truth.
* * *
To understand the birth of this shift in vision means tracing a surprising history little discussed and less known despite its impact on our lives: there was a time when the Black Sea region from which we derive the term Caucasian for whiteness, the Caucasus, was exposed as not racially white at all, nothing like the image put forth by racial science.4 During the Enlightenment era, the influential German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had authoritatively designated the Caucasus region as the homeland of whiteness.5 But the Caucasian War (1817–1864)—the Russian Empire’s centuries-long struggle to conquer the Caucasus in order to gain access to the Black Sea—led to reports that ungrounded the racialized sense of the faraway region in the United States.6
This seemingly irrelevant fact about the Caucasus—distant from the United States and racially illegible—did more than challenge narratives about white racial supremacy. It forced a reckoning with the fictions underneath the foundation of racial hierarchy, ones that had to be shut down for white supremacy to survive. In the context of scientific racism, the narrative of the Caucasus, the locus of racial whiteness, became an unstable point of reference for everyone from students and teachers in segregated classrooms to Supreme Court justices alike.
Yet to glimpse the baselessness of the foundation of racial hierarchy was unspeakable. Sight became more than observation; it meant reading around the lack of evidence used to naturalize racial hierarchies under white supremacy in the United States. Racial domination became a process of conditioning, editing out what had to remain unseen.
There comes a point in history when, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote, a society “must decide if a particular narrative belongs to history or to fiction.”7 Few representations offer us a glimpse of this transformation of vision required to unsee and then challenge the history of racial domination more clearly than this forgotten history of the image of the Caucasus in the United States.
* * *
There was, indeed, a time when the fault lines of race, the fictions underneath the entire structure of racial hierarchy, were exposed in various cultural forms in the United States, only to be reinterred by a new shared language through which to dismiss them. These fictions were never buried completely. Even while segregation was being federalized in the nation’s capital during Woodrow Wilson’s administration, the president himself was privately questioning the fabrications underlying its foundation, asking for a report about women from the Caucasus region. It is one of the hidden facts of the production of race in the United States that Wilson’s own study of images would help define his racialized, visual policy of American federal segregation.
There are moments of racial rupture that reveal the enormous amount of work done to shore up perceptual coherence in the face of fractured racial myths.8 The start of the transformation can first be seen in the unexamined connections between the charnel ground of the American Civil War and the Caucasian War. The battlefields in the Caucasus offered Americans a safely distanced yet clear analogy for strife and disunion in the United States. Photographs, prints, paintings, and performances circulating in the United States about the Caucasian War turned the region into an area bound by purported opposites: Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, groups appropriately nestled between tonally contrasting white and black mountans.9 The effect of this symbolic resonance and rupture was so widespread that at the end of the Civil War, headlines in the United States focused on the demise of Circassia in the Caucasus as if it were an analogy for the end of America’s Confederate South.
News about the Caucasian War had started to blend into news exclusively about the United States. During the American Civil War, both Circassia in the Caucasus and the Confederate States of America were self-governing nations. Both were republics contending with a “War of Northern Aggression,” fighting to avoid becoming aligned with a dominating power. The leader of the Caucasian War resistance, Imam Shamil, was even referred to as the region’s Jefferson Davis.10 Recent estimates show that by 1865, more than 700,000 soldiers had perished in the American Civil War. By 1864, over 500,000 Circassians had died during the last phase of the Caucasian War in the fight against invading Russian forces.11 Many accounts in American newspapers described Circassian bodies being “thrown out”—cast overboard with a frequency that recalled slaving practices—and “washing on shore” on the Black Sea coast. As reports emerged about the Circassian plight, the vision of mass death, suffering, and national upheaval echoed Civil War nightmares.
