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 Races, published in the 1850s. Against that backdrop, in 1859, Paul Broca, a French physician and brain researcher interested in the study of human origins, founded the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, one of the first anthropological societies in Europe. Broca believed he could use skull measurements to identify human populations, which could then be categorized into a racial hierarchy. When Firmin joined that society in the 1880s, such racist views had become foundational to anthropology.
Few anthropologists outside of Firmin’s native Haiti have heard of The Equality of the Human Races, anthropologist Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban of Rhode Island College in Providence wrote in American Anthropologist in 2000. “This is hardly surprising since most of the early [Black] pioneers of anthropology have only recently been brought to light.”
Those leaders include many other Haitians, such as doctor and writer Louis-Joseph Janvier, who wrote The Equality of Races in 1884, and…
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