Negroid (less commonly calledCongoid) is anobsolete racial grouping of various people indigenous toAfrica south of the area which stretched from the southernSahara desert in the west to theAfrican Great Lakes in the southeast,[1] but also to isolated parts ofSouth andSoutheast Asia (Negritos).[2] The term is derived from now-disproven conceptions of race as a biological category.[3]
With the rise of moderngenetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. In 2019, theAmerican Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: "Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations."[4]
Etymology
Negroid hasPortuguese orSpanish andAncient Greek etymological roots. It literally translates as "black resemblance" from the Portuguese and Spanish wordnegro (black) fromLatinnigrum, and Greek οειδές-oeidēs, equivalent to-o- + είδες-eidēs "having the appearance of", derivative of είδοςeîdos "appearance".[5][6] The earliest recorded use of the term "Negroid" came in 1859.[7]
History of the concept
Origins
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a scholar at the then modernGöttingen University developed a concept dividing mankind into five races in the revised 1795 edition of hisDe generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Variety of Mankind). Although Blumenbach's concept later gave rise toscientific racism, his arguments were basically anti-racist,[8] since he underlined that mankind as a whole forms one singlespecies,[9] and points out that the transition from one race to another is so gradual that the distinctions between the races presented by him are "very arbitrary".[10] Blumenbach counts the inhabitants of North Africa among the "Caucasian race", grouping the other Africans as "Ethiopian race". In this context, he names the "Abyssinians" and "Moors" as peoples through which the "Ethiopian race" gradually "flows together" with the "Caucasian race".[11]
In the context of scientific racism
Before Darwin
The development of Western race theories took place in a historical situation where most Western nations were still profiting from the enslavement of Africans[12]: 524 and therefore had an economical interest in portraying the inhabitants ofsub-Saharan Africa as an inferior race. A significant change in Western views on Africans came about whenNapoleon's1798 invasion of Egypt drew attention to the impressive achievements ofAncient Egypt, which could hardly be reconciled with the theory of Africans being inferior.[12]: 526–527 In this context, many of the works published on Egypt after Napoleon's expedition "seemed to have had as their main purpose an attempt to prove in some way that the Egyptians were not Negroes",[12]: 525 but belonged to a "Hamitic race", which was seen as a subgroup of the "Caucasian race". Thus the high civilization of Ancient Egypt could be separated from the allegedly inferior African "race".[12]: 526
Illustration of Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid skulls shown from above (Samuel George Morton, 1839)
As historian Edith Sanders writes, "Perhaps because slavery was both still legal and profitable in the United States... there arose an American school of anthropology which attempted to prove scientifically that the Egyptian was a Caucasian, far removed from the inferior Negro".[12]: 526 In hisCrania Aegyptiaca (1844),Samuel George Morton, the founder of anthropology in the United States, analyzed over a hundred intact crania gathered from the Nile Valley, and concluded that the ancient Egyptians were racially akin to Europeans.[13]
Discussions on race among Western scholars during the 19th century took place against the background of the debate betweenmonogenists andpolygenists, the former arguing for a single origin of all mankind, the latter holding that each human race had a specific origin. Monogenists based their arguments either on a literal interpretation of thebiblical story ofAdam and Eve or on secular research. Since polygenism stressed the perceived differences, it was popular amongwhite supremacists, especiallyslaveholders in the US.[14]
Throughcraniometry conducted on thousands of human skulls, Morton argued that the differences between the races were too broad to have stemmed from a single common ancestor, but were instead consistent with separate racial origins.[15] InCrania Aegyptiaca, he reported his measurements of internal skull capacity grouped according to Blumenbach's five races, finding that the average capacity of the "Caucasian race" was at the top, and that "Ethiopian" skulls had the smallest capacity, with the other "races" ranging in between.[16] He concluded that the "Ethiopian race" was inferior in terms of intelligence. Upon his death in 1851, when slavery still existed in the southern United States, the influentialCharleston Medical Journal praised him with the words: "We of the South should consider him as our benefactor for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race."[17] While a controversy about the correctness of Morton's measurements has been going on since the late 1970s, modern scientists agree that the volume of the skull and intelligence are not related.[18]
Darwin's landmark workOn the Origin of Species, published in 1859, eight years after Morton's death, significantly changed scientific discourse on the origin of humans. British biologistThomas Huxley, a strong advocate of Darwinism and a monogenist, counted ten "modifications of mankind", dividing the native populations ofsub-Saharan Africa into the "Bushmen" of the Cape region and the "Negroes" of the central areas of the continent.[19]
By the end of the 19th century, the influential Germanencyclopaedia,Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, divided humanity into three major races calledCaucasoid,Mongoloid, andNegroid, each comprising various sub-races. While the "Hamites" of northern Africa were seen asCaucasoid, "Australians", "Melanesians", and "Negritoes" were seen asNegroid sub-races, although living outside the African continent. The only sub-races attributed to Africa were the "African Negroes" and the "Hottentots".[20]
"Mentally the negro is inferior to the white... the arrest or even deterioration of mental development [after adolescence] is no doubt very largely due to the fact that after puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro's life and thoughts.... the mental constitution of the negro is very similar to that of a child, normally good-natured and cheerful, but subject to sudden fits of emotion and passion during which he is capable of performing acts of singular atrocity, impressionable, vain, but often exhibiting in the capacity of servant a dog-like fidelity which has stood the supreme test."[22]
Franz Boas andThe Race Question
Since the 1920s,Franz Boas and his school of anthropology atColumbia University were criticising the concept of race as politically dangerous and scientifically useless because of its vague definition.[23]: 248
In 1950,UNESCO published their statementThe Race Question. It condemned all forms ofracism, naming "the doctrine ofinequality of men and races"[24]: 1 among the causes ofWorld War II and proposing to replace the term "race" with "ethnic groups" because "serious errors... are habitually committed when the term "race" is used in popular parlance."[24]
Carleton Coon
American anthropologistCarleton S. Coon published his much debated[23]: 248 Origin of Races in 1962. Coon divided the speciesHomo sapiens into five groups: Besides theCaucasoid,Mongoloid, andAustraloid races, he posited two races among the indigenous populations of sub-Saharan Africa: theCapoid race (named for theCape of Good Hope) in the south, and theCongoid race.[25] In 1982, he usedNegroid andCongoid as synonyms.[26]
Coon's thesis was thatHomo erectus had already been divided into five different races or subspecies. "Homo Erectus then evolved intoHomo Sapiens not once but five times, as each subspecies, living in its own territory, passed a critical threshold from a more brutal to a moresapient state."[27] He thought theCaucasoid race had passed the threshold toHomo sapiens about 200,000 years earlier than theNegroid race,[23]: 248 thus givingsegregationists in the southern US the opportunity to make political use of his thesis in their fight against thecivil rights movement.[23]: 249 Although Coon publicly assumed a neutral stance regarding segregation, some fellow anthropologists accused him of being racist because of his "clear insensitivity to social issues".[23]: 249 In private conversations and correspondence with his cousinCarleton Putnam, a prominent supporter ofwhite supremacy, he went much further, helping Putnam "hone his arguments against integration".[23]: 256
Coon's evolutionary approach was criticized on the basis that such sorting criteria generally do not produce meaningful results, and that evolutionary divergence was extremely improbable over the given time-frames.[28] Monatagu (1963) argued that Coon's theory on the speciation of Congoids and otherHomo sapiens was unlikely because the transmutation of one species to another was a markedly gradual process.[29]
Since Coon followed the traditional methods of physical anthropology, relying on morphological characteristics, and not on the emerginggenetics to classify humans, the debate overOrigin of Races has been "viewed as the last gasp of an outdated scientific methodology that was soon to be supplanted".[23]: 249
Cheikh Anta Diop and "Negroid" primacy
Afrocentrist authorCheikh Anta Diop contrasted "Negroid" with "Cro-Magnoid" in his publications arguing for "Negroid" primacy.Grimaldi Man, Upper Paleolithic fossils found in Italy in 1901, had been classified as Negroid by Boule and Vallois (1921). The identification was obsolete by the 1960s, but was controversially revived by Diop in his work, "The African Origin of Civilizations" in 1974[30] and republished in 1989.[31]
Physical features
General appearance
TheEncyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition (1910–1911), lists the following "well-defined characteristics" of the "Negroid" populations of Africa, southernIndia,Malaysia, andAustralasia: "A dark skin, varying from dark brown, reddish-brown, or chocolate to nearly black; dark, tightly curled hair, flat in traverse section, of the woolly or the frizzly type; a greater or less tendency toprognathism; eyes dark brown with yellowishcornea; nose more or less broad and flat; and large teeth".[22] TheEncyclopædia Britannica sees a tendency towards a "tall stature" and "dolichocephaly" (long-headedness), with the exception of theNegritos who are described as showing "short stature" and "brachycephaly" (short-headedness).[22]
Ashley Montagu lists "neotenous structural traits in which... Negroids [generally] differ from Caucasoids... flattish nose, flat root of the nose, narrower ears, narrower joints, frontal skull eminences, later closure ofpremaxillarysutures, less hairy, longer eyelashes, [and]cruciform pattern of second and third molars."[36]: 254 He also suggested that in the extinct Negroid group termed the "Boskopoids", pedomorphic traits proceeded further than in other Negroids.[36] Additionally, Montagu wrote that the Boskopoids had larger brains than modern humans (1,700 cubic centimeters cranial capacity compared to 1,400 cubic centimeters in modern-day humans), and the projection of their mouth was less than in other Negroids.[36] He believed the Boskopoids were the ancestors of theKhoisan.[36]
Athleticism
In the context of prominent successes of African-American athletes likeJesse Owens during the1936 Summer Olympics, the speed advantage of the "Negroid type of calf, foot and heel bone" was discussed.[37]: 161 [38] Black AnthropologistW. Montague Cobb joined the debate in the same year, pointing out that "there is not a single physical characteristic, including skin color, which all the Negro stars have in common which definitely classify them as Negroes."[38][37] Today, suggestions of biological differences in athletic ability between racial groups are considered unscientific.[39][40][41]
TheOxford Dictionary of English states: "The term Negroid belongs to a set of terms introduced by 19th-century anthropologists attempting to categorize human races. Such terms are associated with outdated notions of racial types, and so are now potentially offensive and best avoided."[42]
In his 2016 essayEvolution and Notions of Human Race,Alan R. Templeton discusses various criteria used in biology to define subspecies or races. His examples for traits traditionally considered to be racial include skin colour: "[T]he native peoples with the darkest skins live in tropical Africa andMelanesia." While those two groups would traditionally be classified as "black", in reality Africans are more closely related to Europeans than to Melanesians.[43]: 359 Another example ismalarial resistance, which is often found in African populations, but also in "many European and Asian populations".[43]: 359
Templeton concludes: "[T]he answer to the question whether races exist in humans is clear and unambiguous: no."[43]: 360
^"A very prominent racial dividing line between African Caucasian and Negroid groups runs west to east, south of the Sahara Desert into Sudan before curving southward toward the Kenyan-Somali border." Stephen Emerson, Hussein Solomon,African security in the twenty-first century: Challenges and opportunities, Oxford University Press (2018),p. 41.
^Templeton, A. (2016). "Evolution and Notions of Human Race". In Losos, J.; Lenski, R. (eds.).How Evolution Shapes Our Lives: Essays on Biology and Society. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press. pp. 346–361.doi:10.2307/j.ctv7h0s6j.26.
^abAmerican Association of Physical Anthropologists (27 March 2019)."AAPA Statement on Race and Racism".American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Retrieved19 June 2020.
^Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1797).Handbuch der Naturgeschichte. p. 60. Retrieved2020-05-24.Es giebt nur eine Gattung (species) im Menschengeschlecht; und alle uns bekannte Völker aller Zeiten und aller Himmelsstriche können von einer gemeinschaftlichen Stammrasse abstammen.
^German: "sehr willkürlich":Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1797).Handbuch der Naturgeschichte. p. 61. Retrieved2020-05-24.Alle diese Verschiedenheiten fließen aber durch so mancherley Abstufungen und Uebergänge so unvermerkt zusammen, daß sich keine andre, als sehr willkürliche Grenzen zwischen ihnen festsetzen lassen.
^German: "Aethiopische Rasse":Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1797).Handbuch der Naturgeschichte. p. 62. Retrieved2020-06-06.Die Aethiopische Rasse: Abbild. n. h. Gegenst. tab. 5. mehr oder weniger schwarz; mit schwarzem krausem Haar; vorwärts prominirenden Kiefern, wulstigen Lippen, und stumpfer Nase. Dahin die übrigen Afrikaner, nahmentlich die Neger, die sich dann in die Habessinier, Mauren ꝛc. verlieren, so wie jede andre Menschen-Varietät mit ihren benachbarten Völkerschaften gleichsam zusammen fließt.
^Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning. The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, New York: Nation Books 2016.ISBN978-1-5685-8464-5, chapters 4, 7–12, 14, 16passim.
^Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning. The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, New York: Nation Books 2016.ISBN978-1-5685-8464-5, chapter 14.
^Michael, John S. "A New Look at Morton's Craniological Research". Current Anthropology, vol. 29, no. 2, 1988, pp. 349–354. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2743412. Accessed 15 June 2020.
^The German legend of the map shows the following names: Hamiten, Australier, Melanesier, Negritos, Afrikanische Neger, Hottentotten.
^Roy L. Brooks uses the adjective "scientific" inside quotation marks in his discussion of that entry and its connection with Jim Crow laws: Brooks, Roy L., editor. "Redress for Racism?"When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy Over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, NYU Press, 1999, pp. 395–398.JSTORj.ctt9qg0xt.75. Accessed 17 Aug. 2020.
^Carleton S. Coon (1962).The Origin of Races. pp. 3–4.[The Congoid race] comprises the Negroes and Pygmies of Africa. I have named it Congoid after the region (not a specific nation) which contains both kinds of people. The termNegroid has been deliberately omitted to avoid confusion. It has been applied both to Africans and the spiral-haired peoples of Southern Asia and Oceania who are not genetically related to each other, as far as we know.
^Coon, Carleton S. (1982).Racial adaptations. Nelson-Hall. p. 11.ISBN978-0-8304-1012-5.The five primary races are the Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Australoid, Congoid (more commonly called Negroid), and the Capoid
^Cited according toJackson Jr., John (June 2001). ""In Ways Unacademical": The Reception of Carleton S. Coon's The Origin of Races".Journal of the History of Biology.34 (2): 248.doi:10.1023/A:1010366015968.JSTOR4331661.S2CID86739986. The reference given there is to "Coon,Origin of the [sic]Races, 1963 [sic], p. 657".
^Carlson, David; Armelagos, George (September 1971). "Problems in Racial Geography".Annals of the Association of American Geographers.61 (3):630–633.doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1971.tb00812.x.
^Dobzhansky, Theodosius; Ashley Montagu; C. S. Coon (1963). "Two Views of Coon's "Origin of Races" with Comments by Coon and Replies".Current Anthropology.4 (4):360–367.doi:10.1086/200401.S2CID145245427.
^Diop, Cheikh Anta (1974).The African origin of civilization: myth or reality (1st ed.). New York: L. Hill. p. 266.ISBN1-55652-072-7.
^Masset, C. (1989): Grimaldi : une imposture honnête et toujours jeune, Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française, vol. 86, n° 8, pp. 228–243. "Cornevin seems to ignore the depth of morphological differences that exist between the Black and the White when he dates these differences back to Antiquity as recent as the eleventh millennium B.C. By doing so he opposes the one hypothesis at the disposal of scholars to confer upon the Whites an antiquity equal to that of the Blacks. He errs most regrettably in claiming that the Asselar man looks more like the Cro-Magnoid European of Grimladi and the Bushman than like modern Blacks. By definition, the Grimaldi Negorid is not Cro-Magnoid, and he is the only one the Asselar man could possibly resemble; he shares no feature with the so-called Cro-Magnon man who lived later in the same cave and is the prototype of the White race as the 'Negroid' is the prototype of the Black race." C. A. Diop,The African Origin of Civilization: Myth Or Reality (1989), p. 266.
^George W. Gill; Stanley Rhine, eds. (1990).Skeletal Attribution of Race: Methods for Forensic Anthropology. Maxwell Museum of Anthropology.ISBN978-0-912535-06-7.OCLC671604288.
^abCited in: Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning. The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, New York: Nation Books 2016.ISBN978-1-5685-8464-5, chapter 27.
^Stevenson, Angus (2010).Oxford Dictionary of English. OUP Oxford.ISBN978-0-19-957112-3. As of 2020, the same text was still present on the website:"Ask Oxford – Definition of Negroid". Oxford Dictionary of English. 2020. Archived fromthe original on 2018-06-30. Retrieved2020-08-05.
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