Learning not to see

Art historian Sarah Lewis on how the Caucasus War upended notions of whitness, what monuments hide, and how culture taught Americans to ignore the lies of race

When art and cultural historian Sarah Lewis found out how myths of the origin of whiteness in the Caucasus region were unraveled in the 19th century by P.T. Barnum’s exhibition of “Circassian Beauties” who weren’t white at all — and how most Americans seem to have forgotten about the episode entirely — she began looking into the myriad ways in which American culture has taught people not to see, in order to preserve the lies that support racism and to maintain the country’s racial hierarchies.

Lewis’s forthcoming book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, begins with the struggle of scientific racists to find data to support their theories of the dominance of whiteness, and explores how when Americans were confronted by photography that contradicted those theories, they learned to simply ignore that evidence.

Meanwhile, Black scholars from Frederick Douglass to Freeman Henry Morris Murray saw liberatory potential in the new technology of photography and developed critical theories of culture that would inform the civil rights movement and remain relevant in today’s era of fluid, digitally mediated, and often untrustworthy images.

We talked to Lewis about the Civil War-era American obsession with the Caucasus and the supposed truths of race, about how century-and-a-half-old arguments over the validity of images persist in disputes over the removal of monuments today, and about the many ways racism continues to define not just lived experience but how Americans see the world.

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Your forthcoming book is framed by the story of Woodrow Wilson requesting an investigation into what people in the Caucasian region are really like, as part of his attempt to justify a scientific notion of whiteness. Could you walk us through how “Caucasian” came to mean “white”?  

It's a strange term. This 19th-century naturalist, really well-respected at the time, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, codifies the term in 1795. And it's taken as fact for many reasons based on what would have been considered data at the time, and now would not be.

The beauty of the women from the region, for example, the so-called symmetry of the skulls that were found from those that had been in white slavery, sexual slavery, in the surrounding regions. These were some of the reasons given to designate the Caucasus region as the homeland of whiteness. 

Now, this is happening in a moment in which reporting is taking place through eyewitness accounts. There's no photography yet. There's no way to really see what's happening in this region. But the term gains currency, along with others that become common during this period. 

And how does this lead to the Caucasian War capturing the imaginations of Americans in the mid-19th century?

The Caucasian ideal was always presented from the very start as the apex of humankind, as representing an ideal state regarding physical characteristics, intelligence, and so on. 

Now, what happens during the mid-19th century — and this is what sort of turned me on to writing the book — is an exposure about this region takes place because of something that's been completely forgotten, at least in the United States: the Caucasian War. So at the time of the Civil War, the Caucasian War is taking place along the Black Sea.

Americans are fascinated by this war and are fixated on it. It’s a huge event that ends, I think, in the first big genocide of the modern state era. The death toll was approximate to the U.S. death toll in the Civil War. And the racial resonance is one of the causes of this interest in the Caucasian war. This is, at the time, seen as the homeland of whiteness. 

So we then begin to see reports that come out about the region. We start to see travel accounts from people like George Kennan, who have gone to the region. And what did they find? There's nothing they would call whiteness there at all. And there are photos, you know.

The photographs that are published create a spectacle for the American imagination. The most widely disseminated ones are taken by Matthew Brady, the most famous photographer of the 19th century. And he's documenting this spectacle that P.T. Barnum mounts to engage with the strangeness of the region and the contradiction at the heart of the racial project. That's really, truly irreconcilable, right? 

And that contradiction is that there's no such thing as whiteness at all. He puts on stage an exemplar of so-called white racial purity. And she looks like Angela Davis.