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.
As the war-torn disunited states confronted fears about the porousness of constructed racial boundaries, facts emerged about the battle-torn Black Sea region of the Caucasus that challenged the very idea of racial whiteness and exposed the area associated with white racial purity to visual scrutiny. The change in the perceptions of the Caucasus from racially white to a site of Muslim leadership and anticolonial resistance seemed to disqualify it as a legible, transparent homeland of whiteness.12 This emergent focus positioned the Caucasus as its own antagonist, a racial contranym, and a contradiction in the public imagination, making it an arena for sorting out concerns about the boundary lines of race in the United States.
Frederick Douglass’s 1855 narrative My Bondage and My Freedom even centered this splintering incoherence about the Caucasus as a racial concept, a 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 Caucasus, 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.”13 The prominence of this comment in the widely popular narrative hints at the breadth of focus on the region, not only in the history of racial and natural science, but also in American popular culture, visual art, and political discourse during the nineteenth century.
The groundlessness of the constructed image of the Caucasus endured in the minds of those involved in the cultural complex in the United States. We see this in the work of a range of figures—from P. T. Barnum to Woodrow Wilson—all involved in the international project of racial formation from the Civil War to World War I and beyond. This hidden history betrays an earlier interest in the region than has been previously understood.
The collapsed racialization of the Caucasus put pressure on visual culture and assessment to sustain, assemble, and challenge narratives about racial formation and hierarchies. It made assessment a visual negotiation used to determine, regulate, and uphold racial hierarchies as social rule. The urgent need to shore up the idea of race despite its false foundations profoundly transformed racial society in the United States.
When I first came across the history of interest in the Caucasus, unaware of the full nature of its impact on racial domination, I tried to dismiss it. After all, we think we know how the story ends: the idea of the Caucasus region would remain an incongruous relic with the idea of homogenous whiteness—an ignored, curious, but irrelevant source of the foundational fiction turned into fact in the United States. This process was critical for understanding how, as Charles Mills maintains, “racial superiority insulates itself from refutation,” such that unmarked whiteness retains its power.14
What I was finding in the archives, however, startled me enough to continue. Scholars have long thought that the confusion about the idea of the Caucasus and being Caucasian was mainly articulated in scientific literature, not reaching popular discourse until the twentieth century. After Reconstruction, other terms were used, from Anglo-Saxon to Nordic to Aryan. Matthew Frye Jacobson deftly outlines how a range of immigrant groups—from Irish to Italian—were replaced by the category Caucasian with a sense of “certainty.”15 The use of the term Caucasian came about through a determined effort to bear the incoherence, resulting in “amnesia,” as Jacobson puts it, regarding the idea “that today’s Caucasians had ever been anything other than a single, biological, unified, and consanguine racial group.”16
The growing, unsettling dissonance between the Caucasus region as a racial emblem on the world stage and the actual appearance of its inhabitants mattered, even in Supreme Court cases. From the period of Reconstruction to the mid-twentieth century, who could be considered “Caucasian” preoccupied nearly every federal or Supreme Court case about the racial prerequisites of citizenship.17
Beginning in the 1870s, when whiteness was no longer the sole racial precondition of naturalization in the United States, the Supreme Court had to confront these fabrications about the Caucasus and excise them from American life. The courts determined that “common knowledge”—our collective stories about race, our everyday assessment—was the new “legal meter of race.”18 These crucial cases, now “largely forgotten,” as Ian Haney López notes, would often lay out in detail the absurdities surrounding the term Caucasian. Although these cases were once “at the center of racial debates in the United States for the fifty years following the Civil War, when immigration and nativism were both running high,” there is little discussion about what created the common knowledge that masked the false foundations created by racial science. There is little mention about the work of culture in conditioning sight to create this collective judgment.19
During this nineteenth-century moment when the idea of the Caucasus was revealed to be contradictory in racial nature, the sutures or “visible seams” of race were exposed. Visualizing the Caucasus developed a way of seeing that required piecing together fragments.20 This history is generally unseen. Circassians were so decimated during a conflict sustained over decades—now considered a genocide—that few people in the United States have even heard of their diaspora, which spans the world from New Jersey to Jordan and Turkey.21 It is not uncommon to see in a standard atlas of the environs around the Black Sea both an early map indicating where Circassians lived from 1800 to 1860, and another, later map that simply omits them, as if they were a mythical group.22 Yet in the United States, this history once mattered. In the nineteenth century, to contemplate the history of Circassia was to consider the racially complicated fate of America itself.
Racial observation is not just about what is seen, but also about what can be disregarded and how. Under discussion here is the double action required to glimpse the fabricated basis of racial hierarchies and nevertheless to naturalize it as part of the social order—to see and then unsee, to publish and then edit out. It is not a narrative we tell often, if at all. Understanding the urgency behind this shift in vision demands attention to a set of largely unexamined visual images, from paintings about the Caucasus to racially coded photographs, that expose the broad sense of internationalism in the transatlantic discourse on American racial formation that, in the nineteenth century, extended beyond the Black Atlantic world to the eastern shores of the Black Sea.
This book traces a hidden story of how the specious grounds of racial domination came to be unseen, and how conditioned this process became through a series of operations, from picturing to negative assembly to detailing. What precipitated this shift was not only the coincidence between the end of slavery and the new era of picturing born of the medium of photography, but also the creation of a new visual regime, an understudied moment when aesthetics had to assume greater authorial language for describing contested racial categories for the public sphere. Without a single fact on which to base the legitimacy of racial domination, by the twentieth century even the Supreme Court was relying on a new form of visual rule, not law and norms alone, to understand governing concepts of race and citizenship.
Silences in the historical record, as Toni Morrison reminds us, are often not mere evidence of lack of significance, but of pregnant recognition. In her seminal work Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison offers a line of inquiry appropriate for the examination of silence in racial provocation. She focuses in particular on the “significant and underscored omissions” and the failure to discuss “startling contradictions” in American literature as suggestive of the “dark and abiding presence,” the “Africanist presence,” that these looming omissions attempt to obscure.23
The project of modernity requires that we modulate our understanding of how race transformed what we even call vision. Race, as W. J. T. Mitchell notes, is a medium and a frame, “something we see through.” It is “a frame, a window, a screen, or lens, rather than something we look at.”24 Yet what do we make of moments of rupture when society realized that the frame, specifically as it related to the idea of the Caucasus and racial science, was not only broken, but unstable from the start? While I follow Mitchell’s argument, the history of seeing the Caucasus exposes that the processes of sight and racial formation are so fused, so bound together, that we must question how we describe the act of seeing itself. The impact of this shift in sight was great enough, and altered the mechanics of sight itself to such an extent, that other descriptions are required.
Viewing through the filter of race changed the very nature of assessment through excision, silencing, and racial detailing. It reframed vision—never purely a retinal act—into a reading exercise, a visual search for narratives to legitimate a social stratigraphy at risk of collapse.25
It has long been overlooked that this period of the “second founding” of the United States made visual culture and especially visuality, what was seen and unseen, central for racial contestation.26 The second founding has been defined as the Civil War period that established the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which abolished slavery, made birthright citizenship a constitutional right along with the equal protection of the law, and granted the right to vote to black men. Together, these amendments worked to modernize the United States by instantiating equality in the law—and faced a powerful backlash.
Visual representation of all kinds—images, culture, performance—became central for showing the blind spots of norms and laws that did not honor the full humanity of all in the United States. As Eric Foner notes, the ongoing struggle to enact the second founding was so anticipated that the amendments end with a clause granting Congress power to enforce them.27 Ultimately, the second founding was gutted; the Supreme Court narrowed the amendments. This meant that representation itself—how we see each other—became the unstated testing ground for justice in American democracy.
Representation is an issue that preoccupied Frederick Douglass even in the midst of the Civil War as he wrote about the transformation of race and pictures on the act of perception. Much of the development between politics and aesthetics has sharpened in recent years due to the examination of Douglass’s philosophy of politics and aesthetics.28 Douglass, the most photographed American man in the nineteenth century, gave a speech in 1861 and again in 1865 that once languished in the Library of Congress but has since been taken up as a framework for our contemporary discourse about what I would call representational justice—the connection between democratic representation and being represented justly.29 In one version of this speech, “Pictures and Progress,” Douglass turned his attention away from the Civil War, to the surprise of his audience, and focused instead on the potential of the new medium of photography, especially on the shift in adjudication that it prompted in viewers. The topic of the speech was perplexing, delivered during a time of heightened American violence, when it might seem unusual to be speaking about pictures and photographs. Yet race would turn images into weapons, a form of representational violence that had the potential to be as insidious as the consequences of combat itself.
Douglass’s “Pictures and Progress” speech dwells upon how race and images changed our notion of vision—a process of seeing the world through what he called “thought pictures.” Many scholars have begun to consider why Douglass would write on the medium when considering racial reconciliation during the Civil War.30 He was a man of action. Yet the very reason Douglass seems an unusual actor is what positions him to be a perfect vehicle for ideas about the phenomenology of pictures, and how pictures and photographs were used as a racial technology. Douglass presciently articulated that the revolution of the new medium was as much about representation as perception; he would become one of the first American thinkers to make a case for the twofold political force of pictures—as both object and prompt, a mental picture that could either reinforce or critique stereotypes. Douglass argued that the same medium that had been used “to read the Negro out of the human family” could be subversively used “to read him back in.”31 Just as images had served to reify racial boundaries, they could also undo them. The innovation was not so much in our ability to picture the world around us, but in how images impacted the politics of assessment and judgment.
Part of the reason that Douglass’s speech languished in the Library of Congress for over one hundred and fifty years was the revolutionary nature of his thesis. For all the focus on pictures in the speech, Douglass spends no time on the work of any one image, despite the fact that he valued images—he bequeathed his pictures to his daughter and a portrait of himself to his wife in his last will and testament, purchased photographs, and redrafted the speech about pictures three times over the course of his life.32 He was most interested in what photographs create in us. It is Douglass’s seeming flight into the metaphysical dimension where we glimpse his theorization of the relationship among race, images, and perceptions. Collective mental pictures, narratives meant to hold a racial order, have had deadly and, as Douglass argued, could also have liberatory consequences on American soil. To do this, he focused on the seemingly insignificant—the political cartoon, the lyrics of a ballad—not the grand work of one well-known photography studio. Embedded in this decision is the recognition that a shift in adjudication required a way of seeing born of the idea of assembly, based on piecing together fragments, some that included even images documenting this interest in the Caucasus.
The Unseen Truth is part of an ongoing investigation about how race has impacted vision and justice in American society. It is a moment in which we are grappling with important truths that we cannot see, but that are nevertheless borne of the constructed image—mental racial pictures, a merger of ideological and visual narratives that we use to tell the story of who we are in the United States. The digital landscape has transformed these moments and events into pictures and videos, making increasingly prevalent instances of racial terror and violence hypervisible. Each of these images offers the reminder that our lives are payment for the failure to comprehend the foundations of these narratives. The filter of race, as a lived construct, continues to shape how images, however dismissed, can increasingly be used as a deadly technology of public policy in American life.
Some might say that a focus on such details about the fragmented image of the Caucasus should not matter in the face of much broader concerns about the history of race and visuality. It is precisely this focus on the granular that defined the shift in vision underway in the nineteenth century, a shift that would solidify in the twentieth century with federal segregation. The primary structure of enforcement that coalesced into segregationist policy cohered around racial detailing—a practice of maintaining racial domination by obscuring it through a mass of discrete, seemingly small procedures that define how one moves through space, society, and institutions in every moment of daily life in a racialized democracy. As the national interest in eugenics heightened the importance of physiognomy, the details of one’s appearance became part of the language of everyday exchanges of assessment and power. Detail was also part of the new attention to precision in the language of rationalization surrounding scientific management, as Wilson discussed in his scholarship on rational administration.
This importance of detail was also the result of a conceptual merger between the arts and the sciences at the turn of the twentieth century, a merger that forged Wilson’s ideas about the “constructive imagination” and so defined his sense of the marriage of modernity, race, and sight for racial governance. After the Civil War, when abolition legally erased the most stubborn visual line of racial demarcation, perhaps the greatest deception concerned the development of a false foundation on which to enforce racial boundary lines. In order to shore up the oppressive logic of the Jim Crow era, precise details of figurative measurement—even those of some individuals in the embattled Caucasus region—became a matter of policy.
The chapters of this book focus on the transformation of vision and a highly circulated set of images—from maps to paintings to photographs—that were brought to bear on the formation of race in the United States, from a geography that had largely existed in the US imagination. The first three chapters focus on the period after the Civil War when images of the Caucasus began to circulate in American civic life. The final chapters consider the devastating consequences of this change for both domination and resistance through the period of segregation and Jim Crow rule.
The enduring images about this region tell us as much about the inner worlds of cultural, artistic, and political leaders from Barnum to Wilson as they do about the fugitive notions of racial formation, claims to citizenship, and ultimately the emerging concepts of internationalism in the early twentieth century.
In September 2019, I took a trip to the Caucasus along the Black Sea, traveling with the acclaimed historian Nell Painter. As we toured around, researching and presenting at a conference, we asked the people we met, “How did you learn that the term Caucasian also means racially white?” For the most part, they had no idea what we were talking about. Our translator was so baffled by the question that the picture I took of her shows bemusement and slight alarm.
Yet those we interviewed who had learned about the relationship between the Caucasus and racial whiteness did so through visual culture and policies of racial adjudication found in the United States. One woman, for example, had learned about the term by filling out a US immigration form. She saw a box for Caucasian and her father told her that whatever it meant, she was “the original Caucasian,” so it would be fine to just check that one. Another learned by getting her blood taken and being asked her race on a form at the clinic. Some learned about it from studying anthropology and the history of racial science. One man learned about it from visiting the United States for a study abroad program and meeting a white supremacist who, as he recalled, treated him “like a God.”33
The point of our trip was not to retread the ground of racial science. Instead we wanted to witness the region that had generated such contradictions in the United States that the coherence of the American racial regime had nearly fallen apart. The trip made plain that what had developed in nineteenth-century America was an enduring mode of picturing that compensated for the use of racial terms based on fictions that had hardened over time into so-called facts, but it was a visual regime with limits.
“Why do we continue to use the term Caucasian, given all of this?” I received this question at a presentation at the New York Public Library. It brings up the deliberateness behind our collective double action of seeing and unseeing this region. Yet uprooting the term Caucasian is not necessarily my aim. The issue is not with the term Caucasian, but the process that has let it remain. Indeed, with every use of the term Caucasian as a category for racial whiteness, we are reminded that race changed sight in America.
What is assembled here is a history of what many have refused to see. It is a history most capaciously told by being attuned to the slow, precise consideration of information that falls off the edges of our vision. “If some events cannot be accepted even as they occur, how can they be assessed later?” Trouillot asked. One answer is to look at the shape created by the unacceptable, the “unvisible,” around this history.34 We see it by looking at the untouched files, the resistance to attempts at unsilencing.
The processes that have masked over this hidden history have enacted a form of epistemic violence, naturalizing the reproduction of fictions beneath our racial order. It may be said that there is, as Trouillot writes, an invective, a near representational violence, in silencing this history.
The Unseen Truth assembles a new record, holding a mirror up to the system of assembly that, like the Time piece, is so easy to miss, contained as it is in such scattered shards that you might not see it if you move too quickly past works in galleries, in archives, and on museum walls. The purpose of this book is to make this history significant and so defamiliarized that we pause long enough to see it anew. The longstanding of adjudication is so pervasive and devastating that it is only possible to fully see, withstand, and process by assembling at last these long-ignored fragments.
“We accept the illogic of race because these are the things we have been told,” Isabel Wilkerson deftly argues in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.35 We can be more precise still. We have not been told about the fabricated fictions that have resulted in the illogic of race; we have been conditioned not to see them.
Unearthing the images, texts, and objects from the Civil War through World War I that lay bare this forgotten history offers a view of the country caught off guard, a glimpse of an era coming to terms with the fact that seeing racial ideology—including and because of the construction of racial whiteness—required narrative assistance, namely a conditioned assembly, silencing, and adjudication. It is a view of a nation as nervous about the unfixed boundary lines of race as it was determined to demarcate and reinforce those lines through Jim Crow rule and federal segregation. It exposes a time when the country negotiated a new merger of visual assessment to make sense of a racial regime with specious foundations. Yet the mode of vision birthed during this time is so familiar to us today that if we fail to stop and carefully bear witness to the pieces of the story, trying to grasp the residue of its mechanics is like trying to see air.