Strivings of the Negro People

PvF

W.E.B. DuBois was an educated black scholar and author that had attended Harvard. He explains his feelings as being a “problem” because of his race. Even if you were well-educated, you would still be viewed differently due to being black.

DuBois describes the time of the Reconstruction movement, which was when all blacks were denied equality. He also goes into explaining that all blacks’ voting rights shall be protected if considered as equals to the white race.

Race Amalgamation

Frederick L. Hoffman, a German-American scientist, spread the idea of scientific racism. Hoffman believed that children of white men and black women were considered more physically lesser to normal blacks, but more intellectually higher-up. He compared bodily measurements between members of the white race, black race, and mulattos.

Hoffman had many different beliefs. He believed that Christians and Jews should not intermarry because it would result in having fewer children. He obtained data on mixed marriages, attempting to relate the results to people having less children. Hoffman also believed that to maintain the “purity” of race, there should be no race-mixing or inter-marriages.

The Mismeasure of Man

Morton believed that he could identify both races and subgroups between races from characteristics of the skull. Sizes of brains are related to the sizes of bodies that carry them, therefor larger people would be expected to have larger brains than smaller individuals.

From Egyptian skulls, there were mummified remains from their possessors that allowed for the sex to be identified. If Morton’s designations and separate averages for males and females would be able to be recognized, which Morton never did. The correlation of brain and body can be affirmed easily.

After Morton changed his method of cranial measurement from mustard seed to lead shot, there was a rise of the black mean. The method of seed allowed a lot of error and variability, which with the lead shot the results never varied by more than a cubic inch.

All of the Hottentots skulls were all female, and very small. The author claims that Morton’s conventional ranking reveals no significant differences between races.

Morton’s finagling was categorized into four different classifications. First, favorable inconsistencies and shifting criteria: Morton often chose to include or delete large subsamples in order to match group averages with prior expectations. Second, subjectivity directed toward prior prejudice: Morton’s measures with seed were sufficiently imprecise to permit a wide range or influence by subjective bias; later measures with shot, on the other hand, were repeatable, and presumably objective. Third, procedural omissions that seem obvious: Morton was convinced that variation in skull size recorded differential, innate mental ability. Fourth and finally, Miscalculations and convenient omissions: All miscalculations and omissions that were detected by the author were in Morton’s favor.

The polygenist argument did not occupy a primary place in the ideology of slavery in mid-nineteenth-century America. Polygenists forced defenders of slavery into a quandary, if they should accept a strong argument from science at the cost of limiting religion’s sphere.

Among nonpolygenist, “scientific” defenses of slavery, no arguments every matched in absurdity the doctrines of S.A. Cartwright. He traced the problems of black people to inadequate decarbonization of blood in the lungs. Cartwright reerred to this as dysesthesia, a disease of inadequate breathing. He also wondered why slaves often tried to escape, and identified the cause as a mental disease called drapetomania, or the insane desire to run away.

Religion stood above science as a primary source for rationalization of social order.