Breaking the Chains of Science: The Rhetoric of Empirical Racism in Django Unchained

Author(s): David G. Holmes

Source: Black Camera, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring 2016), pp. 73-78
Published by: Indiana University Press
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Close-Up: Django Unchained

Breaking the Chains of Science: The Rhetoric of
Empirical Racism in Django Unchained

David G. Holmes

Abstract
This commentary surveys the skull scene in Django Unchained. Plantation owner
Calvin Candies appeal to the racist science of phrenology is one example of how a
number of scholarly discourses have been used to justify discrimination. I maintain that,
while Candies monologue evokes the rhetoric of scientific racism, Djangos and Stephens
respective interactions with Candie, as Field Negro and House Negro, undermine
the enslavers notions of white supremacy. Contemporary society must likewise consider
and critique the cultural tropes, institutional narratives, and academic or popular texts
that attempt to sideline Black ways of knowing and being.

pivotal scene in Django Unchained portrays plantation owner Calvin

Candie showcasing the skull of a long-deceased enslaved person
named Ben (fig. 1). Candie engages in this spectacle ultimately to expose
a plot hatched by Django and his companion, Dr. Schultz. Django posed
as Schultzs free Black valet to retrieve his wife from Candies plantation,
while Schultz impersonated a slave speculator to pilfer part of Candies
fortune.
The scene is arguably among the most brutal in a film steaming with
visceral blaxploitation-style episodes. My fascination with the skull monologue is twofold. First, I am struck by how this performance exhibits the
rhetoric of scientific racism. Second, I am taken aback by how both Djangos
and Stephens (Candies diabolical head slave) personas parenthetically expose and critique the cultural history framing the irrational ideologies justifying the enslavement of Black bodies. Put another way, their respective
interactions with Candie function as counterarguments to his racist monologue on the skull.
Candie unravels his narrative by wondering aloud why the hundreds of
enslaved Africans on his plantation, and Ben in particular, would not revolt
David G. Holmes, Close-Up: Django Unchained: Breaking the Chains of Science: The
Rhetoric of Empirical Racism in Django Unchained. Black Camera: An International Film
Journal 7, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 7378.
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74

BLACK CAMERA 7:2

Figure 1. Still of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Copyright 2012. Courtesy of

The Weinstein Company.

against their enslaver. Ben had faithfully served Candies family since working for his grandfather. Indeed, Ben had ample opportunity to kill Candies
father, considering that he shaved his enslaver with a straight razor nearly
every day for fifty years. That Ben refused to even consider killing his oppressor could be explained, according to Candie, by pinpointing the location of
three dimples on Bens skull. As a representative of the African race, Bens
dimples were positioned in the section of the skull associated with civility
or submission,1 and that section was the largest of any human or subhuman species on planet Earth.2 Had Ben hailed from Europe, like Isaac
Newton or Galileo, the three dimples would have been found in the part of
the skull associated with creativity.3
Notwithstanding the brutality and dark comedy exhibited in Candies
pseudoscientific demonstration, the scene evokes a rhetoric of empirical
racism, one of many discourses deployed to rationalize oppression against
people of color. While one could, and perhaps should, discount Candies
display as ignorance masquerading as intelligence, the incident nevertheless accentuates how academically respectable discourses have been used
to denigrate, dehumanize and sometimes even demonize Africans, from
eighteenth-century anthropology to twentieth-century social science books
like Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murrays controversial Bell Curve:
Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. However, every generation
of Blacks have retorted with searing critiques of these fallacious claimsfrom
antislavery poetry and autobiographies to groundbreaking scientific discoveries, from visual arts to grassroots politics, downhome, and uptown religion. Mainstream efforts to dehumanize Blacks have neither silenced their
voices nor rendered their bodies without agency. Indeed, Henry Louis Gates
Jr., among others, has referred to Blacks deployment of multiple genres of

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David G. Holmes / Breaking the Chains of Science

75

discursive strategies as signifyingthe master trope of African American

expressive culture.4
Given director Quentin Tarantinos depiction of Candie as a pseudointellectual in all things French, it would be easy to write off this scene as racist and comically anti-intellectual. The reality is that there were a number of
respectable Ivy League institutions that used public funds and private donors
to espouse the same drivel that Candie expressed. Samuel George Morton
was one of the most wellrespected advocates of this scientifically grounded
racism. A highly respected member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of
Philadelphia, Morton published a book titled, Crania Americana in 1839.
As the title suggests, Morton was one of the pioneers of measuring skulls.
According to historian William Stanton5, Mortons book was celebrated
as a reasonable answer to the question of the origin of the races. Mortons
work on skull science was not without precedent. A physician named Franz
Joseph Gall from Vienna coined the term phrenology, which Candie cites.
However, historian Thomas F. Gossett6 claims that Mortons research on
skulls was more comprehensive and widely circulated than was Galls. Neither
phrenology nor craniology was originally conceived to assess the character
and competence of Blacks exclusively. But this was how many devotees of
Gall and Morton championed their theories. A culture of Eurocentric, racist rhetoric had evolved by the mid-nineteenth century, and not merely in
terms of scientific discourse.
From the Enlightenment onward, not only Blacks intellect but also,
more significantly, their humanity was measured according to the standard
of Eurocentric arts and sciences. And when Blacks did excel in these areas
(Phillis Wheatley and Benjamin Banneker, for instance), the racist intelligentsia often dismissed them as freaks or their accomplishments as flukes.
Enlightenment history is replete with celebrated thinkers who remained
in the shadow about Black people. These include, David Hume, Thomas
Jefferson, and Immanuel Kant, to cite a few notable examples.7 In other
words, ideological racists have nearly always taken exception with exceptional Blacks. This is perhaps why Candie, presuming himself to be a highbrow Southern White, regards Djangos free, assertive Black persona with
neither curiosity nor trepidation. Those of Candies ilk presumed that, like
a monkey, an enslaved person could don human clothes and mimic human
actions. However, in mastering tasks typically ascribed to Whiteswhether
poetry, science, or commerceBlacks were often ironically considered to be
performing Whiteness more perfectly than Whites themselves.
Both the potential and ability to perform Whiteness suggest a critique
of the racist hierarchy that science and any other so-called intellectual discourses promote. Curiously, therefore, while one could classify Django as
Malcolm Xs archetypal Field Negro and Stephen the House Negro,8 both

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think, act and speak in ways that unsettle Candies settled notions about Black
inferiority. It is obvious and accurate, for example, to characterize Stephen as
an Uncle Tom or sell out. His sensibility to defend his masters interests at all
costs places Stephen squarely in the camp of the House Negro. But there is
more to the story. Stephen suspects shortly after meeting Schultz and Django
that they are not who they claim to be. While one might chalk up Stephens
suspicions to his jealously of the articulate, well-dressed, and self-assured
Django, I still wonder how an ignorant and passive Negro (given the proposition derived from the skull discourse) could deduce the truth that initially
eluded Candie. More significantly, how and why did a presumably ignorant house servant like Stephen forcefully persuade Candie that Django and
Schultz were imposters?
Herein lays the rub (or snub) for scientific, artistic, philosophical or biblical discourses used to denigrate Black intelligence and to degrade Black bodies. If Blacks were genetically inferior, then Django could not have deceived
Candie, and Stephen could not have persuaded him (fig. 2). Moreover, how
could Broomhilda Von Shaft (Djangos wife and Candies prize enslaved
female) speak in fluent German (fig. 3)?
Historical accounts abound that demonstrate the irrationality of purportedly rational grounds to oppress Black people. For example, if Blacks
were genetically incapable of acquiring literacy, why was it illegal to teach the

Figure 2. Steven (Samuel L. Jackson) confronts Candie while others look on.
Copyright 2012. Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

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David G. Holmes / Breaking the Chains of Science

77

Figure 3. Broomhilda Van Schaft

(Kerry Washington). Copyright 2012.
Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

enslaved how to read? If Christianity could morally transform the enslaved,

then why did some enslavers, as Frederick Douglass argued, actually become
more brutal after converting? 9 If Caucasians were the original race, why do
the genetic law of regressive genes suggest otherwise? Nevertheless, Black
performance of tasks and talents ascribed to Whites could never, in and of
itself, lead the African to attaining White privilege. The Western preoccupation with dualism morphed into a monstrous disconnect between mind and
body as far as Whites perceptions of people of color were concerned. Housed
in a Black body, your mind did not matter. In short, racism, even in its most
highbrow manifestations, demands a suspension of disbelief that many usually would not accept from the most convoluted fiction or film.
Candies pseudoscientific rants about the genetic inferiority of Blacks
may ring hilariously hollow in our postracial age. However, I suspect that
there remains within American culture echoes of ostensibly reasoned yet racist thought, which is sometimes suggestive, sometimes subtle, and sometimes
shockingly bold that views Blacks as dimwitted or pathological. American
society has supposedly rejected the truth of pseudoscience but not its antiBlack tropes. Consider for example, the myriad times President Obamas
image has been superimposed onto the body of a chimpanzee. Similarly,
institutional racism has generally supplanted the scholarly brand. Yet the
sounds and structures of Enlightenment-tinted bigotry resonate in our age.
Broader legal concerns like the mass incarceration of bodies of colorwhich

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Michelle Alexander has called the New Jim Crow10expanding voting restrictions that conveniently target Black communities, conservative medias
shrill critique of post-civil rights political leaders (especially Obama), and
covert racist bombasts on social networks like Yik Yak demonstrate that
Blacks are hardly out of the woods in terms of discrimination. In fact, social
media has underscored the reality that widespread police brutality is hardly
a narrative of the past. Black lives will never ultimately matter if Black bodies and minds do not.
Curiously, Candie had to crack open Bens skull to expose the location of
the three dimples that allegedly proved his inferiority. In order to foster authentic democracy, we too must relentlessly crack open the codes of empirical,
linear, and categorical ways of thinking whenever they are used to malign or
marginalize other racial, ethnic, or cultural ways of knowing and being.
David G. Holmes is Professor of English, Writing and Rhetoric at
Pepperdine University. He received his PhD in English and Rhetoric
from the University of Southern California. The author of Revisiting
Racialized Voice: African American Ethos in Language and Literature, he
is a frequent presenter at national conferences and has published articles
in Rhetoric Review, College English, and The Journal of Black Studies.
His current areas of research include composition pedagogy, rhetorical
theory, civil rights rhetoric, and Sidney Poitiers films.

Notes
1. Django Unchained, by Quentin Tarantino (Los Angeles: Weinstein Company and
Columbia Pictures, 2012), DVD.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American
Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
5. William Stanton, The Leopards Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America
181559 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 2526.
6. Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 7173.
7. Emmanuel Chukudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 29103.
8. Malcolm X, Message to the Grassroots Speech (Detroit, MI, November 10,
1963).
9. Frederick Douglass, Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
(Boston: Antislavery Office, 1845), chapter 9.
10. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012).

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