Anténor Firmin challenged anthropology’s racist roots 150 years ago

Sunday, May 21, 2023 - 14:32 in Paleontology & Archaeology

At the end of the 19th century, one of the hottest debates among anthropologists was whether human beings originated from a single ancestor or many (the answer: just one). Members of both camps, though, largely agreed that whatever their origins, some races were superior to others. Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin knew that premise to be false. “Human beings everywhere are endowed with the same qualities and defects, without distinctions based on color or anatomical shape,” Firmin wrote in French in his 1885 book, The Equality of the Human Races. “The races are equal.” Firmin was ahead of his time. Today, genetic research confirms that human populations cannot be divided into distinct racial groups. But few scholars in the nascent field of anthropology, or any other contemporaries, read his treatise. Instead, leaders in the field were deeply influenced by the French white supremacist Arthur de Gobineau’s four-volume Essay on the Inequality of the Human...

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