The murder of George Floyd sparked what many referred to as a “racial reckoning” in this country. But to make progress in this conversation, my guests today argue it is helpful to look back at the roots of anti-Black racism and understand when — and why — the concept of race was invented in the first place.

In a new book titled “Who’s Black and Why?” renowned scholars Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew Curran unearth a hidden chapter from the 18th Century invention of race.

The edited volume pulls together essays commissioned by the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences in 1739. They trace European intellectual thinking about racial classification in the age of the trans-Atlantic slave trade – and the struggle to justify the treatment of enslaved Africans.