Creating from (False) Fundamentals (Sarah Lewis, PhD)
Creating from (False) Fundamentals (Sarah Lewis, PhD)
Listen now (55 mins) | "The Caucasus was where Prometheus had been chained to a rock in eternal punishment for having stolen fire. Beauty, based on subjective categories such as lore and symmetry..."
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Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis has one of the most illustrious resumés of all the guests on Pulling the Thread—and I think we’re the same age. Lewis is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University where she serves on the Standing Committee on American Studies and Standing Committee on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. It was at Harvard that Lewis pioneered the course Vision and Justice: The Art of Race and American Citizenship, which she continues to teach and is now part of the University’s core curriculum—as it were, Lewis is the founder of Vision & Justice, which means that she is the organizer of the landmark Vision & Justice Convening, and co-editor of the Vision & Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Modern, London. She also served as a Critic at Yale University School of Art. I’m not done—in fact, I could go on and on. She’s the author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, a book on Carrie Mae Weems, and innumerable important academic papers. Today, we talk about The Rise and how it dovetails in interesting ways with her brand-new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, which is about the insidious idea that white people are from the Caucasus, a.k.a. Caucasian—an idea that took root in the culture and helped determine the way we see race today. Okay, let’s get to our conversation now.
MORE FROM SARAH ELIZABETH LEWIS, PhD:
The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America
The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery
Sarah Lewis’s Website
Follow Sarah on Instagram
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
We have to talk for a minute about The Rise in part because I want to understand your brain and I can understand thematically how it's connected and yet I also want you to explain it to me too.
SARAH:
Sure, sure. Well first, Elise, it's really just a thrill and an honor to talk to you. I've been looking forward for some time.
ELISE:
My pleasure. Yeah, so The Rise, you wrote this when you were getting your PhD?
SARAH:
I did. I did. I was getting a doctorate at Yale in art history. I had just left curating at the Museum of Modern Art. I was working in the painting and sculpture department, and so I had a lot of questions about creativity and the role of the improbable of failure in the comic works in effect that were put on museum walls or retrospectives. And so I had been writing alongside curating and had a career and then shifted to getting the doctorate. And so what became a set of curious musings about the nature of the creative process resulted in writing the Rise, which is really a book that looks at how improbable foundations are often what catalyze that works that we deem classic or inevitable. And I loved writing it and I did it alongside the dissertation, which is coming out in the form of this next book.
I don't think that it was expected for me to write a book about failure for a number of reasons being a woman, being a black woman being young, but it's a book about not just the creative process as it relates to artists. It's a book about the creative process, but it really is about the process of how it is that we become. And in that I felt that there was, I hoped an offering for people because we all then go through various moments, if not whole years or decades of feeling as if we're coming just shy of where we want to be in our lives and are finding ways we hope to catalyze growth. So that's what the rest
ELISE:
And is The Unseen Truth. Was that your original dissertation or is there another book coming out?
SARAH:
The Unseen Truth is born of my dissertation, in fact.
ELISE:
Amazing. Amazing. There were many things that I loved in The Rise as a fellow creative or creative adjacent. I don't never quite know how to describe. What I do was this idea of the Friday night experiments that really stayed with me, and I think it's related to your work as well, but scientists playing or entering each other's domain to see what might come of that. Can you talk a little bit, but that cross practice, which you do as well in some ways and how that can foster inside breakthroughs or seeing what is so obvious but yet becomes invisible to us because we're so in it.
SARAH:
I love that you're interested in this Friday night experiments in the rise became an avenue through which to discuss that the framework that we all need to give ourselves to lower the barriers to innovation and to create a shame free space to play and to try new things. It came about when I was interviewing these two Nobel Prize winning physicists and they created at graphene, which won the Nobel Prize for physics in 2010. It's the thinnest material known to man all things I didn't know about. It sounds like I'm about to describe Superman. It's the most conductive material we have. It galvanized or rather just revolutionized the electronics industry and they found it using means that were so rudimentary that they were laughed out of their field. In effect when they tried to publish the material. At first they found it using scotch tape and a pencil.
ELISE:
Wow.
SARAH:
So if you successively rip off layers of graphite and a pencil of scotch tape, you will find graphene there. Using fancier means in a laboratory, you'll find graphene there. So they found that property, that material through what they call Friday net experiments, times where in the laboratory they permit themselves to enter domains of expertise that are not their own and to ask questions that experts wouldn't dare, like can you use vegetate? But a pencil and all of their award-winning work has come from that protected time, which approximates to 10 to 12% of their time. It's really analogous though to how we see innovation function in organizations in particular. So when I was doing research, I realized that FE for sure exist all over the place, whether it's Google's 20% time, time where engineers are effectively free to innovate on their own and oftentimes discover things that helped the company like Gmail was created from Friday net experiment time, the Mayo Clinic known for its innovation created something, an award that functions in a way that's akin to a Friday net experiment.
It's a queasy eagle award. So at the beginning of this 18 month trial to see if they could find more patents that would help humanity society, they had 36 ideas for new patents and at the end of this award that really validated ideas that didn't fully make it, but led to things that did. They had 248 I believe, ideas for new patents, but regardless of the exact, it's an exponential level of growth that they hadn't seen prior. So it's really just wild when you think of how little we give ourselves the equivalent space in our lives to veer into domains that we think we have no business being in, but in fact could contribute to greatly. So pride, net experiments function in that way, and it was one of the biggest rewards, practically speaking for writing the rise. It felt as if it was the most actionable way to help think through the nature of creativity and innovation.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, there's something too about the flexibility. I am assuming of your process of interviewing noble scientists, of working across category with people who are ideating or evolving our thinking in different spaces that I definitely relate. In fact, I was just on a call talking to my therapist about how I'm struggling to hire anyone to help me in part because I don't know what I could give up because the things that I value the most about my job and my work are engaging with people's minds through reading their books and drawing connections across category because I read widely as a non-academic generalist and can take license where they might feel constrained by academia or science or whatever it is and maybe create new insights or thoughts, but that's truly the biggest turn on to what I do, and I cannot imagine letting someone else do that on my behalf. It would take the joy out of what I'm making. It's so fun
SARAH:
And you're really hitting on, I think the point of the Friday night experiments. It's play, it's search. That's the juice really. Andre guy, when he won the Nobel Prize, he loved poking fun at his colleagues who didn't think that he really had discovered graphene because he had won, by the way, the IG Nobel Award, which is given to people whose work seems so outlandish and childlike that it makes you laugh and then makes you think. But his point was that play is necessary to really sustain the endeavor of mastery over time, and the opposite of depression effectively is play. It is the way in which we find new possibilities, and you do that through exposure to things that are unlike what it is that So I can imagine why it's hard to outsource that, but then when you do, you have to find ways to retain it for yourself to still let it be under your remit, right?
ELISE:
It's interesting to go to this idea of them playing with something so fundamental. I was just reading Father Time by Sarah Hrdy's, this incredible evolutionary anthropologist who coined this idea of aloe parenting or mainstreamed it, and this is a book that everyone should read because it's about what happens to the brains of men as they engage with babies and essentially that these ancient circuits turn on and that for gay partners in particular where they're both primary and secondary partners for men, their brain chemistry starts to resemble that of a mother. They are just as primary, just as hypervigilant, just as responsive. They don't lactate, but that's almost the only difference. And she makes the point that often the way that we think about science is additive and that evolution has to be about creating new circuitry or adding something. But most often she's like, mother nature is incredibly efficient and she has this cupboard, and it's much more likely that many of the behaviors that we start to exhibit or see or express are just parts of ourselves that are being turned on.
And anyway, it's a fascinating book that you're a nerd like me. You'd probably love it, but also to go to your new book when you go to these things that become so fundamental that we cease to see them or we stop engaging with them or stop playing with them or stop poking them, that's really the premise of the unseen truth, which is this definition of whiteness Caucasian on forms that many of people who look like me have checked is a complete and total fabrication. So why this book? Take us to the beginning. I know you were with Nell Irvin Painter, right?
SARAH:
Yes, yes. And Nell, who I love. So Nell really created a foundation for so much of the work in the field of history and race and whiteness with her book, The History of White People. She and I traveled to the Caucus region 2019 together as I was finishing The Unseen Truth and The Unseen Truth is a book about really as a macro topic, how race changed, how we see now the use of race as a category for filtering and creating a hierarchy in American society is so common and so well used that we forget how much it has changed, how we make meaning in the world, how we look and scan and make sense of what's around us. The most vivid way, I think to understand it is by looking at the strange history of the idea of the Caucasian white racial identity and how that formed.
So the book looks at this fiction we've all live with and take is fact the idea that white racial identity has a basis in the caucus region. Now it comes to us from racial science from the 18th century, and we've lived with it ever since. Despite it being debunked, we've still lived with it. We still use the term Caucasian as a near scientific term. Often supreme court decisions will trot out the term instead of racial whiteness. There was a period though when Americans in the 19th century during the Civil War and across the Black Sea region, Caucasian war, when it was clear that there was no such thing as whiteness in this region, none and any even tangential association with the framework of whiteness Christianity, no, not there either. It's territory and none of the languages correspond to ones that are connected to whiteness. The whole thing is a farce, fiction confection.
Okay, so the question, and this is done in a really humorous way, PT Barnum creates the most widely popular spectacle in the 19th century about this phenomenon. They're called this Ashian beauties, the So-called purist part of the Caucasian ideal, but they look like Angela Davis. They have these massive afros, they're white, and so he's lampooning this idea, the fascination with this region and the fiction of whiteness remains. And that's what the book begins with Woodrow Wilson, president End of World War. He asks for a report about the women from the region and from an official source, his chief of staff at the army station there. And that's what got me to begin taking seriously the evidence I was seeing in the archive about the impact of this fiction on thinking in American life because of leaders like Woodrow Wilson because of leaders like Frederick Douglass, who's has an autobiography that begins with this reminder to the reader that this
Idea of racial domination rests on a fiction. But I decided to write about the topic because it became clear that part of the reason that racial domination is such a brutal regime is that it's enforcing what is false. It is enforcing what is not true and not there when you're young and your parents might tell you, look, if someone's forcing you to do something, you don't want to do this because there's something wrong with it. That's a bit of what's happening with the regime. It had to cover up a fiction that everyone began to realize was not based on fact. And so the regime that we live with today is the legacy of that process, and we see it in moments of curricular censorship where there's excision of materials that might reveal the construction of this regime. We see it in the precursor to racial profiling and racial detailing. As I discussed that Woodrow Wilson's regime began in the early 20th century. So in the end, this book is really about how you can love the United States, and we should without lying about it, because the lies were actually not based upon culprits, but more culture. And we're all living with that culture today,
ELISE:
And it's an excellent articulation of our tendency, the human tendency to have a quote feeling about something and then look for the surrounding fact rationalize that report on the legendary beauty. And you think about that region and Armenia, and it's so interesting to me that the Kardashians now are they epitomize for so many people, American beauty, right? It's a very full circle moment.
SARAH:
And it's not side even. It's not the same side. Why? Because it points to the construction of whiteness. Armenia had to petition to be entered under the umbrella of whiteness and believe the days 19 Supreme Court decision allows that to be the case. So it's one vivid example of just how elective and how fabricated this entire racial regime really is. I could have been Kardashians,
ELISE:
And it points to, these are obviously some of the huge questions of the day of indigeneity. Where did I come from? Who am I? What are my composite parts? Does it matter? What's my culture? We are living with that as a current reality and also this incredible hangover of people who, some who chose, some who certainly did not, some who arrived here as refugees in this country and nobody really knows. There are very few people who you can encounter who say, I know exactly, I can trace my family line. I know exactly where I come from. And so it's interesting too to think about that and how that weighs on our collective conscious, even though many of us can't name it, but we all came from somewhere where and doesn't matter.
SARAH:
That's right. And really no one who is defining themselves as white. It came from the caucus region.
ELISE:
No, I definitely didn't come from the caucus region.
SARAH:
It was so funny about going there. You start to see the split, but the point about feeling is so important here. I think we have had this idea that we can have a conversation on race in America, and it becomes, in a way, a clearinghouse regarding feeling when in fact, what we need are the facts
About how we actually created a regime that's based upon narratives of difference and hierarchy. How we use that created a legal system to support it and how it rested on both the unspeakable and fictions. So in a conversation with Brian Stevenson, I had recently for a piece and for the next book I'm finishing, he made the analogy, and I think it's true, it's like having a conversation about smoking without the data or climate change, without the data can't. It's not about experience, it's not about culprits and who did what to you. It's about the culture and the systems that we're a part of as well. And unless you've actually studied them and go down these really tangled pathways to understand how we've arrived here, which means reading, which means studying, which means learning. You can't have a conversation yet or even address your feelings about it.
ELISE:
Yeah.
SARAH:
I hope that this book in effect offers a guide for us to continue that work.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, it's such a great door to open because I'm sure most people haven't thought about you just know to check that box, although I've been seeing more and more just as white, but you just check that box. There's an assumption of, I guess this must be, there must be something, there must be something, even though didn't we all come from Africa? Isn't that the start of the emergence of man? But I don't think people stop to think what does that actually mean and is this an actual place?
SARAH:
Yeah. Writing The Unseen Truth felt to me as if it was one example of the invitation that the archive can offer, especially younger scholars who might be more native with technology to a certain degree to question and what we've received in terms of our understanding how we've constructed the world. Because in many ways, even this topic itself that we're discussing, people thought was done and dusted about whiteness and the Caucasian problem with that term. The idea was for decades or certainly for years that yes, the term is based on specious fact and on fiction, but it didn't matter, right? It still functioned and was constructed and used in this way, but in fact, what the archive showed is what no secondary literature had dealt with, which is that it did matter, right? To Americans did see it actually. It did have material consequences. And here's the evidence, whether it's Frederick Douglas's book, PT Barn and Woodrow Wilson of all people, and if so, if I can write a book about what seemed to be just a kind of footnote in American history, no need to look down that file. We've already handled that. What else have we left unexplored? I mean the figures in the book, my God, Swan Marshall Kendrick, one of the first black clerks working in the federal administration and Witcher Wilson's White House, his archive, Lord, the things we just don't know.
So I hope that this book offers an invitation brothers to do similar kind of spade work.
ELISE:
Again, it goes back to The Rise in this idea of working with fundamentals and reinterpreting them or reapplying them or just being a different reader. So much of our history is written by white men, and so much of our history is written by people who live in the acronym WEIRD Cultures. What is it? White educated, I can't remember the whole acronym, but we have a certain view, and part of it is sustaining what feels right or what feels convenient or what feels tidy. I feel the same way about what we've come to understand or believe about gender. And I say we as a big cultural norms, and then you actually go back to the sources and you reinterpret it or you watch scientists do their thing and you're like, wow. Unexpected. But that also makes complete sense, right?
SARAH:
Yes, yes. I mean, what does unite the projects though is a central question. What are we failing to see about creativity and the nature of how we become? That's The Rise. What are we failing to see about how we actually see the world through the filter of race in the United States and beyond? That's The Unseen Truth. And the next book, the Vision and Justice book asks this question about the work of visual culture. What are we failing to see about how we've shifted narratives of belonging and who counts in racialized America through the work of monuments and visual culture? That's the book I'm finishing now. So failure does run throughout, and what we're failing to see can almost just operationalize the work of being a historian or a writer to pivot from identifying something and calling it say interesting or discovery for yourself to something that can contribute to a new way of seeing the world.
ELISE:
Not to tangent into your new book, but can you please write about the fact that so many of us have seen male genitalia on display for eons and many female breasts, but you never see vulvas.
SARAH:
Oh, can I write about it? Hey, there are a lot of us who want to write about it.
ELISE:
But it's one of those things once you start recognizing it, you're like, well, this is interesting. Why do I have to see ball sacks? And yet
SARAH:
It's true, our social media now will remind us of what you're describing. The algorithm will either block your account or give you some sort of warning that you, and then you're shown what the norms are, right?
ELISE:
Yeah, no, absolutely. It reminds me too of this op-ed that Kate Fagan wrote a while ago. I don't know if you know Kate, but she was A-W-N-B-A basketball player. I think her first novel came out, but she's written several great books and she wrote an op-ed about the dearth of photography glorifying female athletes, and that we don't have the same iconic, we don't give them the same treatment as we give men. And just wondering what the impact of that is on girls. Anyway, you pick rich topics, certainly
SARAH:
You've got to, you got to keep it interesting for yourself, but also do things that are going to let you sustain the pursuit.
ELISE:
Yeah. So when you think about something like The Unseen Truth and you think about its legacy is part of it demonstrating the value of a footnote and demonstrating that there's still so much, I think creatives can often feel, didn't Harold Bloom say that Shakespeare created all the characters and that no one else can truly be original or something like that. But I think so many people labor under this misapprehension that everything has been done or it's hard to do anything new, and particularly in things like history, right? When we're so convinced that we know it.
SARAH:
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know that it was the explicit intention, but it was what allowed the book to live. I wrote it mindful that I was saying something new. I don't think that I can write a book if I don't feel that way, if I don't feel as if it's thinking about this in the context of the baton sort of relay race that I think culture is generation to generation. And initially, I don't know that I was fully convinced that I had the book on my hands. I knew I had the research. I didn't know if the argument seemed as impactful to others as it did to me. And I've had a dinner with Jamaica Kincaid when I first arrived at Harvard, and she's on the faculty in the department, one of the many which I serve African and African American studies. And she took me out to dinner and she said, I will not speak to you if you do not finish this book. You just, if you do not finish this book, you must, if you know her the way she could speak, she meant it. And that was a really defining moment for me. The topic is not, if someone's familiar with my work, what you would expect. I would write on next, maybe the topic of sight and race is, but not necessarily legal history, racial whiteness, geography, maps, performances, all the different fields that I needed to marshal to make the case. But she saw the material and said that, and now as of this week, I'm actually in her office. She recently retired and I into our office. So I've been thinking about the ways in which others grant us license to see the work we're doing as what you described, potentially something truly original, even if you potentially doubt it as you're in process yourself.
ELISE:
One of the characters in this book that I had not really ever thought about, and maybe I am just a poor student of history, this is honestly very likely is Woodrow Wilson. I don't think about Woodrow Wilson. I don't hear about Woodrow Wilson, and yet he's central in your book and maybe has a terrible legacy. Is that known? Do people understand that? Do we talk about him in that context? It's very possible that everyone else knows this.
SARAH:
Yes. No, this is important. So we're in a moment where we're reassessing who we can lionize still despite racial past. And Woodrow Wilson was a figure who's racism for some time was seen as just part and parcel of the culture of the era. And so his name remained on buildings and associated schools, and such recently the Princeton University president himself conducted a review and decided that in fact, and decided, I should say, not decided, but realized that the evidence went much further than this regarding Wilson's own racial bias and history. And that's very much what the unseen truth deals with. What Wilson did inaugurate through the federalization of segregation was a regime that allowed fort racial domination to exist without stating it outright. So today, when you hear about dog whistles, euphemisms, the use of monuments to state what's not being explicitly said in culture, you're looking at the legacy of Witcher Wilson's work. Right? And that's insidious. So I don't want to spoil it in some ways for those who haven't read the book, but should he becomes a spine for the book, I like you understood Wilson to be a figure that needed to be reassessed, but it's only recently that we've understood the depths to which it has to go.
ELISE:
Yeah, yeah. No, in reading the book, I was like, oh yeah, he was the one who famously did screen the Birth of a nation, et cetera. That remained in my mind, but I wasn't fully conscious of everything else that he did. And I'm curious, when you think about people who create history or are even creating art, so across the span, and you think about intention, when you think of someone like Woodrow Wilson, did he know, do you think he fully understood the seeds that he was planting and that he had that level of awareness? Or do you feel like people are responding to the moment, and I'm not justifying him by the way, but I'm curious about how when you look at the long trails of history and you see these insidious inception points, do you see it as a failure on the part of everyone who followed to continue to excavate those things that we held as truth? Or do you feel like these people are truly political masterminds who managed to create these foundations that we're still trying to exercise century later?
SARAH:
The long answer is more complex than I could offer here. The short version I would say is that Michael Rolfe Trulio is right that we write history as much through declarative statements as we do through strategic omissions and silencing regarding Wilson. When you look at his archives, the totality of them, library of Congress on down, the fact that you can barely find a mention of segregation speaks to the consciousness of the diabolical regime that was being created. You look at those who work for him, Swan Marshall Kendrick, the Black color guide, mentioned Freeman Henry Morris Murray must see them as the heroes that they are regarding civil rights because they were able to read through silencing and to understand the intentional strategy and policies enacted therein. So Freeman Henry Morris Murray in his non-existent free time while working for the federal government, publishes the first book about public monuments in the United States, racialized public monuments. Why? Because it's 1916, he sees the beginnings of what we've now reckoned with the use of these objects to state the unspeakable regarding the confederate lost cause, the desire to maintain racial domination just after slavery and after reconstruction. Swan Marshall Kendrick does the same thing. He's asking for clarity from Wilson. He's in these meetings with William Monroe, Trotter and boys and IB Wells and others asking for clarification about whether the White House really is instantiating federal segregation. Wilson's denying it. He only states it once in his public writings that it's taking place through these denials, he realizes, in fact, we have an admission of guilt in effect that pregnant silence indicates what's really taking place. So it's clear to me that Wilson understood that what he was doing was unjust, but that it was justified by the era. What's I think most difficult about the history is that it created a regime, a system of administration, because he was a mastermind at bureaucratic administration through which the style of writing using euphemism, friction instead of segregation, for example, inaugurated a system through which that could take place for generations.
ELISE:
Isn't it amazing too how these things become contagious and or are just transmitted without or taken wholesale and transmitted without anyone? I mean, I'm sure some people were really aware maybe of what was happening, but I'm sure many were not. I'm always curious about these figures and culture in part because I think rightly and wrongly in some ways, we are quick to be like it's them without taking accountability for the ways in which we support and uphold these systems or refuse. I don't even know if it's a refusal. It goes back to the question or the conversation we were having about creating from fundamentals. It's hard for us to do that, right? We just keep painting on the same canvas with everything that's underneath it without actually stopping and saying, wait, what is happening? What's happening? And I'm always interested in the ways in which we are complicit. And I think because when we think about someone like Trump, it's easy to be, I would like him to go away. I would certainly like him to go away, and yet there's a culture around him that won't go away until we understand it. Anywho long digression. But it's interesting how Wilson has just passed without commentary
SARAH:
For some time. There's been a recent attempt to rehabilitate his reputation as well. I mean, I was startled by how Wilson's biographies have been written, frankly, regarding his racial history. One example that feels kind of anime in this grander scheme of things, but I thought was pretty stunning when he was president at Princeton, remember he had a whole career before being president as well, and he would shift the racial composition of that school by tipping his hand on the scale so right to black. Applicants Princeton had in fact never admitted black students and that they would not feel comfortable because of the number of Southern students, white students who were there. Princeton had admitted black students prior to Wilson being president. And when that evidence surfaced through the reporting that President Princeton currently was doing, you start to see the construction, the fabrication of the history that was used to justify his racial regime. So we can't just attribute work like his to the attributes of the day, the culture of the day, right?
ELISE:
Yeah. This is another digression, but let's go there. I loved this part where you write about the way that this area had captured imagination, but throughout time, right? So you write, it was long said that somewhere between the black and Caspian sea is where Noah's Ark had come to rest. According to Genesis, the caucuses was where Prometheus had been chained to a rock and eternal punishment for having stolen fire. Beauty based on subjective categories such as lore and symmetry became a foundational part of the evidence for Caucasian superiority. And so Caucasians, seemingly white primeval, and supposedly close to God's image for humankind were cast as the most beautiful racial type. That's wild. I had no idea that so much mythology landed at that geographic point.
SARAH:
Yes, yes. We are looking at what passed as data in the written travel narratives. It's one man's eyewitness account, John Shida, that designates the region as the homeland of the most beautiful women he had seen. And everyone took that as fact. And you have poets from Lord Byron to Pushkin corroborating this. So in effect, data was culture. Then you have the biblical Lord that you've described, and the mythological lore associated with the region that passed as data. All of this is now specious as anything like fact, but was the means through which Johan Friedrich Blumenbach in 1795 wrote this dissertation, if per the history of natural science and inaugurated the term Caucasian for whiteness. It was the reasons that you just read from my book that he described. Yeah.
ELISE:
Wow. And how much do you think that this idea of beauty and beautiful women is at the root of this in terms of choosing this area? Or do you think it was the coer? I know you write about the Coer or the Civil War and the Caucasian war and this idea of the black mountain and the white mountain, but how foundational is this idea of beautiful women?
SARAH:
So we have to remember, and the eugenics movement helps us with this, that the telos of racial construction is designed at identifying the human perfected ideal. And so we have a very complex understanding of beauty now, but at the time, it became a cognate with human ideal. And so the pleasing of physionomy, of the symmetry of a face were all indices for the so-called ideal. So beauty became queen or king in the history of natural science. For that reason, beauty is a scientific index for that reason. One example of just how serious this question about beauty was as it relates to the definition of racial whiteness or the reason that the region was associated with it, is to think about what happened when Worder Wilson makes this request for the support. The high commissioner in the Transco case region, Oliver Op, in fact, does create a party of women from the region. As he writes to his wife, beautiful ladies, he said, none of whom were actually from the caucus region, Oliver Georgian. He said, nobody knew that, so that's fine. Wilson got his report. The fact that he creates this party, 70 women, 70 women, he asses in the midst of end of World War. I just to give Wilson this report gives you a sense of just how seriously that category became for the definition of whiteness
ELISE:
Is fascinating. And I guess that makes sense that it's somehow a measure of the Vitruvian man or this ideal Promethean person. But it's hard to connect to that now.
SARAH:
Of course, because it's insane thinking that any one person is better than the other. We have, in terms of our conversation about equality, it completely explodes the construct of racial hierarchy, right? We're working at a time in which that was the regime, that there was an idea that it was all right to surmount a certain racial group on top of another, call another separate species, and keep going. So yeah, it does take looking at the history of racial construction with 18th century eyes, 19th century eyes, 20th century eyes, to understand how we've arrived here. And that's why earlier conversation, we can't just have a conversation on race without talking about the facts or else you are truly lost.
ELISE:
It's interesting to even think about what the beauty standards of today, and again, our instinct to homogenize, but now it's this homogenized, blended face tuned, really, it's fascinating to me where we've arrived, and I guess it's the Kardashians in some way, but what do you make of that? What is that instinct?
SARAH:
Our conversation about AI brought this to the fore. If you ask at GPT with vision, what does a beautiful woman look like? You can imagine what you're going to get and how it's learning. That is both frightening and instructive for all of us. If you think about the way in which camera technology embeds these questions within it, who looks better in front of their iPhone camera, who has to use filters to shift the lighting, to make sure that they're resolving in a way that's accurate to their likeness, that tells you a great deal about who is privileged in our definition of beauty today, who's seen as the standard. And that's embedded in the technology as well. That's the history of the Kodak film technology process that Lorna Roth's work deals with. That's algorithmic bias, continued that work. So we're still really caught in the legacy of the history of racial science that the book deals with, but we're not aware of it.
ELISE:
Yeah. I love your mind. It's so interesting and it's so fun that you obviously have many lanes, but I love that you have no single lane. Maybe I need to give academics more credit. I probably do, but it's fun.
SARAH:
Well, it's really fun talking to you about this, and I think it's the first time I've been able to see the range of my different interests to come out at once. So I'm really grateful for the opportunity to talk.
ELISE:
Well, I loved having you. Thank you so much. I love Sarah's mind and her ability to just draw from all over the place. I wish I had that level of retention, man. It's impressive. And for those of you who haven't read the Rise, it's a book about creativity, the gift of failure, and the search for mastery. That's the subhead of the book. And that's a pretty good synopsis. And in it, she range, she talks about grit, she talks about Aikido. I mean, it goes all over the place in a way that is one of those, how is she going to put a bow on this? Which she of course manages to do, but it's really this question of creativity and enduring creativity, which is the difference really between success and mastery, success being a moment in time or a mark of achievement and mastery being the ability to keep ongoing and to do it over and over again as a way of life and not as an endpoint.
And then going back to The Unseen Truth, her new book, this I wanted to share with you is the Frederick Douglass moment that she mentioned, and we didn't go into great depth, but this is, she writes, Frederick Douglass's 1855 narrative. My bondage and my Freedom even centered the splintering incoherence about the caucuses as a racial concept place and a demography. In the book's preface, physician and abolitionist, James McCune Smith wrote The term Caucasian is dropped by recent writers on ethnology for the people about Mount caucuses, for the people about Mount caucuses are and have ever been. Mongols, the Great white race. Now seek paternity in Arabia. Keep on gentlemen, you will find yourselves in Africa by and by how prescient.