Page 238 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

race and racism 1539

One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts,
two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideas in one dark body, whose dogged
strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. • W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963)

least, settler prejudice against the Native Americans was resulted in infertile hybrids; thereby proving they were
predominantly based on perceived cultural rather than separate species.
physical differences. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, a number
of prominent scientists, including two Germans, S. T.
Scientific Verification and Soemmering and Christopher Meiners, conducted exten-
Theories of Race sive anatomical investigations of different human types,
Until the last decades of the eighteenth century, racial dis- using mainly skeletal remains for which they had only
tinctions and the concept of race itself remained vague limited non-European samples. The purpose of these
and mutable. Early attempts to distinguish basic types exercises in comparative anatomy was to provide an
within the human species in the mid-seventeenth century empirical grounding for determining specific bodily dif-
were crude and impressionistic. It is believed that the first ferences between racial groups and to establish more
of these was by the humanist Isaac de la Peyrère who in precise—hence ostensibly scientific—classifications of
a 1655 treatise on the descendants of Adam and Eve, basic racial types within the human species. Popularized,
chose skin color as his key marker and lumped most hu- and in many cases seriously distorted, by numerous
man groups according to whether they were reported as nineteenth-century racist thinkers, including physicians
“red,” “yellow,” “black,” or “brown.” In the 1680s the inde- who sought to refine or revise the findings of earlier inves-
fatigable traveler François Bernier argued there were five tigators, racial classifications proliferated steadily. In
main types of humans, including a catch-all “light- some cases race studies were merged with “scientific”
skinned” category and an equally variegated “African” explorations of innate criminal types or utilized in tracts
grouping, and opined that the relatively minuscule Lapp by eugenists and other evolutionist thinkers arguing for
herder peoples of the Scandinavian north composed a the prohibition of race mixtures or promoting ones
comparable category. Neither of these writers sought to deemed advantageous for the improvement of domi-
set forth clear criteria on which these differences between nant, hence superior races, whether “Caucasian” or “Mon-
human groups could be discerned and tested. A century goloid.” By the middle decades of the nineteenth century,
later, a number of natural philosophers, most promi- the scientific study of race had fostered the production of
nently the Scotsman Lord Monboddo, who had not even a remarkable variety of instruments to measure the
seen most of the peoples he wrote about, asserted that anatomical features of cadavers, skeletons, and skulls of
Africans, or Negroes, were closer (mainly on the basis of specimens for different racial groups. Increasingly, the
physical appearance) to apes than humans. In contrast focus of these efforts to quantify racial distinctions came
to Lord Monboddo and other armchair naturalists, the to be concentrated on the comparative measurements of
physician Edward Long had lived for decades in the skull samples from different human groups. By the last
midst of the large African slave population in Jamaica. decades of the century, the “science” of phrenology was
Large sections of Long’s History of Jamaica (first pub- pervasive in European societies, a constant presence in
lished in 1774) were devoted to descriptions of the venues as disparate as the ponderous deliberations of sci-
unflattering physical features and signs of cultural debase- entific societies and anthropological associations, such
ment of the slave population that set them off from the best-selling books as the Sherlock Holmes mysteries by
European planter class. Like Monboddo, Long went to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the seaside amusement
great lengths to chronicle the biological differences that stands of Great Britain, where one could have one’s head
made the Africans more akin to “lower” animal species measured in considerable detail for a small fee.The influ-
than “whites.” But Long also argued at great length, and ence of evolutionary thinking, the assertion of Christian
with considerable pretension to scientific authority, that doctrine, and some of the more credible scientific studies
miscegenation between Negroes and “whites” invariably led over the last half of the nineteenth century to the slow