Darwin's Athletes by John Hoberman

Author:John Hoberman [Hoberman, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Minority Studies, Sports & Recreation, Essays, Reference
ISBN: 9780395822920
Google: gF6-YAWoYAYC
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 1997-01-15T05:11:33+00:00

12. African-American Responses to Racial Biology

OVER THE PAST CENIURY, a constant stream of publications on “the biology of the Negro” has forced African Americans to develop their own scientific interpretations of racial biology in order to contest the racist or otherwise unscientific premises on which so much of this writing has been based. One important example is The Health and Physique of the Negro American, by the prolific scholar W.E.B. Du Bois. The purpose of his treatise was nothing less than to establish the biological normality of black human beings. It is poignant to see Du Bois arguing that “in all physical characteristics the Negro race cannot be set off by itself as absolutely different,” that “what has been described as being peculiar in the size, shape, and anatomy of the Negro brain is not true of all Negro brains,” that the Negro is “by far the most prolific” American group rather than a race in decline, that “there is much uncertainty as to the purely racial differences in human liability to disease,” that “the Negro death rate and sickness are largely matters of condition and not due to racial traits and tendencies.”1

The author took this last phrase from Frederick L. Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, described by George M. Frederickson as “the most influential discussion of the race question to appear in the late nineteenth century.”2 Hoffman’s statistics-laden treatise became well known for its prediction that the Negro’s biological decline “must in the end cause the extinction of the race.” “It is sufficient to know,” Hoffman wrote, “that in the struggle for race supremacy the black race is not holding its own; and this fact once recognized, all danger from a possible numerical supremacy of the race vanishes. Its extreme liability to consumption alone would suffice to seal its fate as a race.”3

The theory of black degeneration and decline propounded by Hoffman and others provides a historical perspective that may help to account for the stark contrast between the portrait of black physical inferiority and the images of black physical vitality with which we have become so familiar. The degeneration theory was rooted implicitly or explicitly in the belief that the emancipation of the slaves, or at least the manner in which they had been freed, was a social disaster that southern race discipline could have prevented had it prevailed. Demonstrating the validity of this claim required an invidious comparison between the diseased and profligate emancipated Negro and the healthier and better-disciplined slave he once had been.

Hoffman presented abundant evidence that this physical deterioration had actually occurred. While whites had gained in vitality, he reported, “we have abundant proof of the physical deterioration of the colored race. Before emancipation he presented in many respects a most excellent physical type even superior to the average white man examined for military service under similar conditions.” One Kentucky physician described black men he had encountered in the 1860s in the following terms: “For symmetry, muscular strength and endurance, I do not think the Kentucky negro can be surpassed by any people on earth.

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