“Our Fellow Creatures”: Discourses About Black People in Early American Scientific Societies

Although not officially recognized as scientific practitioners, scholarly societies, including the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, depended upon black people as sources of observation and subjects for inquiry in the eighteenth-century. While their discussions about them were littered with racism from a modern-day standpoint, a close examination of their discourse reveals a complicated relationship with race. This talk on a dissertation chapter in progress seeks to navigate this rocky terrain, where, for example, black people are depicted as both victims of white superiority and as ugly in their blackness.