I don’t date outside my species!

Yesterday’s article in the Black History Month series discussed the caging of the Mbuti Congolese man named Ota Benga. Today, I will discuss how the zeitgeist, or intellectual feel of the times, may have played a role in this atrocity against humanity. Often times, when one thinks of racism and inequality, a vision of “rednecks” or staunch elites come to mind. However, as I describe the movements in science, anthropology and other social science fields, it will become evident that racism was not merely a private distaste for blacks and other races. Rather, it was a sentiment that was supported by scientists and experiments utilized to prove the inferiority of blacks and other races hence making racism harder to dispel. Shattering someones faulty ideas can simply be done by exposing him or her to an exceptional example outside of their stereotypical idea of what it means to be black or non-white. However, when these views are stooped in science and statistics, it becomes an entirely different battle altogether.

Biological determinism is the idea that people are predetermined or hard-wired to live a certain lifestyle or think and feel in a particular way. With this notion, scientists believed that people at the lower levels of the intellectual period (women and non-whites) were thought of as being “intrinsically inferior” due to their biological makeup of bad genes or actual brain structures. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century (1700′s-1800′s), “science” saw several movements that were based on the notion of biological determinism.

Craniometry was the study of brain size in the early 19th century and it concluded that blacks were at the lowest level of brain capacity. Blacks were even lower on the scale than Indians. Because blacks were thought to be intrinsically inferior to whites, slavery could be justified. Evidence of blacks being considered as not equitable to whites is seen in them being consider 3/5 of a person during slavery. The political economic purpose of the 3/5 of a person idea was set up such that Southern states could determine how many representatives each would have in the government. Otherwise, blacks were considered as chattel/property and were recorded in plantation owners’ records as such.

Benjamin Franklin, the man who graces our $100 bill in fact desired that the United States not be “darkened” by the African Negro. He saw a vision for the new United States as it was being cleared of Indians and trees. For Franklin, (perhaps like Hitler), the U.S. could be made a perfectly white society untainted by Africans. This can be read in Benjamin Franklin’s Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751. As discussed in Where’s my Forty Acres and a Mule?, Abraham Lincoln who is falsely deemed the Great Emancipator was of course not the Great Equalizer at all. In his Douglass Debates of 1858, Lincoln says: “there is a physical difference between the white and black races…forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” One’s initial gut reaction may be complete rage, but when considering what scientists and anthropologists were up to at the time, Lincoln’s idea seems compatible. They weren’t intrinsically bad as they thought blacks to be ironically. Rather, they were products of their intellectual environment which also ironically explains their views of blacks and Africans.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, blacks and Indians were considered separate and inferior to whites. From this separate but inferior mindset rose the separate but equal facilities in the post Civil War U.S. Louis Agassiz was a polygeny theorist and Harvard professor up until 1873. Agassiz hailed from Europe and his presence in America gave American science a whole new creditability. Agassiz was exposed to developing minds and leaders in field of medicine and ethics. Hence, his racist theories were influential long after his death as he taught and influenced prominent scholars. For Agassiz, blacks were of a completely different creation or species than whites. Blacks had unequal traits and were genetically disposed to be less intelligent than whites. Aggasiz’s views were very convenient for white slaver holders at the time.

Robert Benet Bean was a Virginia physician who also conducted studies to prove the inferiority of blacks by measuring brain structures. In 1906, the same time as the caging of Ota Benga, Bean measured the corpus callosum of whites and blacks as a means of determining intelligence. The corpus callosum is a fiber bundle that connects the left hemisphere (more logic, sequences, numbers) and the right hemisphere (more creativity and arts) sections of the brain. The prefrontal cortex (the foremost part of the human brain right under the forehead) is where all high-level cognitive thinking takes place such as analyzing and synthesizing ideas. Bean measured a strip of the corpus callosum close to this fore brain with a strip close to the posterior (back of) side of the brain which is thought to be where more emotional responses are processed. Bean found that blacks had a smaller genus (strip of c.c.) than whites. Whites were found to have a larger prefrontal cortex and hence were thought to be more intelligent than women and blacks.

The danger of craniometric-like studies was that they weren’t restricted to academia or strictly science geeks of their time. Theories, postulations, and studies were published in popular newspapers and released to the local presses. The ideas held by these scientists were latched on to by the common laymen of their time. So we can see that racism was not merely a bi-product of an exploitative economic and political system. It was a result of science and intellectual thought. A standard of craniometry and comparing brains was the Hottentot Venus. These two women were South African women who were put on display in Europe as part of a freak show because of their large lips, jaw line, and physique. (Sarah Baartman is the Hottentot Venus who I will discuss tomorrow.) The significance of the Hottenton Venus for our purposes is that the skeletal structure, facial features, and brain size of these women were compared to apes and were used to suggest that all blacks were similar to gorillas and orangutan. As a result, popular news publications would feature stories of blacks being on equal footing with apes. This notion was common for the time of craniometry well into the 19th century.

Paul Broca was a leading anatomist and anthropologist of his time. Although he is most famous for his work in naming parts of the prefrontal cortex, Broca’s work was part of the scientific racism movement. Broca believed that personality traits and virtually everything in life could be measured. Amongst his many studies, Broca measured the elongation of the forearm which was comparable to an ape characteristic. Broca was infamous for finding what he wanted to find too. In his conclusions, Broca found that whites actually would’ve proved to be inferior to blacks if he used his scale of measurement and so doctored his data in favor of whites. Although Broca’s life ended in 1880, we see that throughout the late 19th century, anatomists and anthropologists were hard lining this theory of black inferiority.

Cesare Lombroso, the father of criminal anthropology was amongst those whose work devalued African-Americans and labeled them as predetermined to be unproductive members of society. Lombroso created the theory of the criminal man. Lombroso used facial features such as the jaw line, high cheeks, ear shape etc…to determine criminality. For Lombroso, degeneration caused criminality. Lombroso also believed that symmetry implied a non-criminality and more pro social set of characteristics. Lombroso concluded that only whites were perfectly symmetrical leaving blacks to be criminals by nature, and something that they couldn’t avoid. Lombroso’s work was influential into the twentieth century and probably fueled things like the convict-lease system in the American south. In my investigations, I wonder if the work of Lombroso contributed to the self-loathing of African-Americans and their facial features.

Investigations to prove the inferiority of blacks did not stop in the early twentieth century. Hans J. Eysenck in 1971 and Arthur Jensen in 1969 conducted studies to this ends. For Jensen, he believed that there were “inherited and ineradicable differences in intelligence between whites and blacks.” Eysenck conducted studies on black children and concluded that because black children developed more sensorimotor (sense and motor) skills than white infants, they did not remain in infancy long enough to fully develop. Eysenck also compared the lower IQ of black children to the higher IQ of white children without considering that black children were reared in poorer neighborhoods during one of the most racially charged periods of our history.

Forty years ago in this country, psychologists were still trying to use hard core numbers to prove blacks were inferior. As the saying goes, old habits die hard. Thankfully, as we continue to study Black History Month, we become increasingly aware of the pervasiveness of racism and its prevalence in our society. Though not held in every heart, these notions mingle in most minds. If not in the memories of Generation X, the fight for equality was definitely waged by our parents and certainly our grandparents. We are not so far on the other side of inequality as some would have us to believe.

The school yard cry: “I don’t date outside my species!” is not as innocent as parents and teachers would have us believe. It is rooted in scientific experiments to prove the inferiority of women and minorities to whites. It undermines interracial dating and for sure interracial marriage. It is important that these little play school chants are understood for what they were meant to mean. Though the meaning has shifted, we must acknowledge that saying any human being is outside one’s species is taking humankind back a whole century. And of course, the endeavor is to progress, not digress.

***A majority of the information found in this article is in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man. This great read includes not only information about scientific racism against blacks but against women as well.

Please stay involved in our Black History Month Series.

Other Posts by Eryn on Black History Month:

Black History’s Leading Literary Lady

Making a Madam

Burning Black Wall Street

The Black Panther Party For Self Defense

In the name of Science…

Intelligence of Interference? COINTELPRO and the Black Panther Party

“How they sold Marcus Garvey for rice”-LH

Trippin on X

Yes you’re a woman…just a different kind

Justin Bua and Urban Realism

And then there was hip hop

Vote to Discontinue Black History Month

So Soulful

Black and Gay? No Way!

Colored People’s Time

Where’s my Forty Acres and a Mule

Too black to be white, too white to be black

I don’t date outside my species!

Caging the Khosian Woman

Branding the Black Woman