One’s race does not determine character or temperament. “The nineteenth century was obsessed with the idea that it was race which explained the character of peoples. The notion that traits of temperament and intelligence are inborn in races and only superficially changed by environment or education was enough to blind the dominant (so- called) whites.” […]
Did you know that “the structure of human hair was considered as a possible index to race?” “Blumenbach attempted to classify race by their hair but discovered that peoples who resembled one another respects differed so much in their hair structure that no racial system of classification was possible.” Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History […]
There is only one Caucasian. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the “father of craniology”, “coined the word Caucasian to describe the white race. It is curious that this word– which is still widely used– is based upon a single skull in Blumenbach’s collection which came from the Caucasian mountain region of Russia. Blumenbach found strong resemblances between […]
Chapter one of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South begins, “Jim Crow was not merely about the physical separation of blacks and whites. Nor was segregation strictly about laws, despite historians’ tendency to fix upon such legal landmarks as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Brown v. Board of Education (1954) […]