Early abolitionists viewed Blackness as a disease to be cured

Evidence

IN 1796, BEFORE the cotton gin had taken hold—feeding cotton production and the demand for more enslaved Africans—Benjamin Rush thought he had found the ultimate abolitionist cure. The good doctor believed he had found a way to cure captives of their abnormal Blackness. The two presidential candidates—Thomas Jefferson and incumbent vice president John Adams—shared the Philadelphia sunlight that summer with a free “white black man.” Henry Moss, unbeknownst to Americans, was suffering from vitiligo, a skin disease that causes the loss of skin color, making one’s dark skin lighten. Moss exhibited his forty-two-year-old whitened body in Philadelphia taverns and before members of the American Philosophical Society. Long before “Black-faced” White entertainers enthralled Americans, “White-faced” Blacks enthralled American believers and skeptics of the theory that Black skin could change to White. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 335

Categorization

• FICTION: A ‘white-faced Black’ exhibiting himself to sell the theory that race is mutable — a vivid scene of performance and belief that could anchor historical fiction.
• ADDENDUM: Ties directly to ‘On Sacrifice’ themes of bodies as spectacles of ideology, though the essay it most resembles is the graft/silk one about how belief systems remake bodies.