Hume knew that Black people could read and write; that they were intelligent, articulate, sophisticated, and aristocratic. But he chose to ignore the evidence, not even mentioning the great Black sixteenth-century university in Timbuktu. Consciously or unconsciously, Hume created a discourse that we might call “race and reason,” which became a powerful tool in the justification of the eighteenth-century slave trade. All of the major Enlightenment thinkers who wrote about this discourse took their starting point from Hume.
