Skin persists today as the most recognizable, prominent, though not reliable, social marker of race. Distinguishing among skin colors is more than denoting difference; it is a reminder of the role skin plays in the structure and organization of human hierarchies. As such, skin not only places some persons on the lowest tiers of society, but it also relegates them to the bottom rung of estimated human worth. That is, skin is a decisive factor in who counts as human; who is deserving of humane treatment, justice, and freedom; who gets to exercise the full rights of citizenship and belonging.

Much of the western politics of skin derive from histories of Black enslavement, so that skin is grafted onto the narrative of justifying human forced labor at the very moment when that Black humanity is being vigorously and brutally denied. But skin, as the literary evidence makes clear, also has a racial prevalence in Shakespeare’s time, even while religion and language were also operative racializing factors. The history of racialized skin, therefore, has a longer history, predating the Enlightenment, the high-water moment of the western, imperial, plantation economy.

Locating racialized skin in Shakespeare’s time also prompts the inquiry: whether the Ottoman imperial threats emanating from North Africa influenced the defensive rhetoric of white superiority embedded in the racialized stage character, the “Moor,” the theater’s denigrated, non-Christian, Black person mostly identified with the North African principalities.

Pedagogies of skin

This brief description lays out the importance of meeting the pedagogic challenge in introducing the early modern dimension of the history of skin. As always, making the topic accessible is critical, so drawing on existing student knowledge is helpful. In this instance, students have been encouraged from their high school education to think of literary analysis as grounded in variations on “appearance and reality,” a bifurcating epistemology that values “reality.” It is the companion to the cliché, “Don’t judge a book by its cover” that, similarly, asks us to look beyond the material surface toward human virtues within.

Reminding students of this trope, therefore, must be followed by the exploration of how and why “appearance and reality” is not typically applied to skin in literary analysis in a society where “appearance” has acquired inordinate social meaning. It is easy enough to find many examples from early modern drama that deploy the term “Moor” to highlight skin color as a way of circumscribing the being and essence of Black people. In Peele, Rowley, Shakespeare, and others, we find multiple instances of defamed Blackness to target and paint not just the individual, but Black people seen as a group of unacceptable, constitutionally different, and dangerous persons.

A distortion of the humanist tradition

We may now place this information within a larger intellectual and historical frame to expand the analysis and propose new claims from what might have appeared initially to be just a simple premise. Premodern societies inherited the Silenus as a figure that embodied the “appearance and reality” proposition but with a signal difference: if applied as consistently as inherited in the western humanist tradition, the logic of racialized skin undergoes a serious challenge.

Presented in Plato’s Symposium (215 BCE) to de-emphasize the social value of appearance, the Silenus is an unappealing statuette on the outside that when opened reveals a beautiful, even golden interior. The Silenus argues for internality—intellect, wisdom, virtue, morality—the intangible human reality that one cannot see on the surface, in a manner that intersects with Desdemona’s poignant commentary on her perception of her Black husband: “I saw Othello’s visage in his mind.” The Silenus persists over millennia, also showing up, for instance, in François Rabelais’s prologue to Gargantua.

Had western humanism remained true to its ethical course, Black skin would not be the logical endpoint of human value. It is the distortion of this humanist tradition, the surrender to the imperative of power, greed, and the capital in human flesh, that has delivered to us this corpse of our own immoral making. Facilitating student understanding of this deliberate rupture in the western humanist tradition, one in which they are still educational consumers, will require excavating and exposing the forms of whiteness that drive the cliché of race and offer students opportunities for more sharply defined social critique and self-interrogation.