Negroid

Main article: Black people

Negroid is an adjective derived from the term Negro and refers to a presumed race of people mostly from sub-Saharan Africa. These people are colloquially referred to as black people.

Origin of the term

The term has its etymological roots in the Latin word niger (black), with the earliest recorded use of the term "Negroid" in 1859. In modern use, the term is associated with "the division of humankind represented by the indigenous peoples of central and southern Africa".

Objection to use of the term

The term Negroid is commonly associated with outdated notions of racial typology which have been widely discredited in scientific circles — for modern usage it is generally associated with outdated racial notions, and is discouraged, as it is potentially offensive. Though the term "Negroid" is still used in certain disciplines such as craniometry and epidemiology, its usage is in decline. Even in a medical context, some scholars have recommended that the term Negroid should be avoided in scientific writings because of its association with racism and race science. This mirrors the decline in usage of the term Negro, which fell out of favor following the campaigns of the American civil rights movement — the term Negro became associated with periods of legalized discrimination, and was rejected by African Americans during the 1960s for Black.

Congoid used by some as substitute term

Anti-racist activists such as Elizabeth Martinez have suggested that one reason the term is regarded as offensive is because while other races are identified by the geographical places where it was assumed those people most typical of their phenotype live (the Caucasus for those called Caucasoids and Mongolia for those called Mongoloids), Negroids were identified by their color (niger = black). To remedy this, some have suggested substituting the term Congoid (referring to the Congo region) for those people formerly termed Negroid.

Most people nowadays simply use the term Black African to avoid being labeled politically incorrect.

Scientific use of the term

Use in physical anthropology

In physical anthropology the term is one of the three general racial classifications of humans — Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. Under this classification scheme, humans are divisible into broad sub-groups based on phenotypic characteristics such as cranial and skeletal morphology. Such classifications remain in use today in the fields of anthropology and forensics to help identify the ethnicity, lineage and origin of human remains. For example, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza freely uses the term in his 1994 book The History and Geography of Human Genes to distinguish between various groups that have inhabited and do inhabit Africa.

Later extensions, such as Carleton S. Coon's "Origin of Races" placed this theory in an evolutionary context — Coon divided the species homo sapiens into five groups, Caucasoid, Capoid, Congoid, Australoid, and Mongoloid, based on his belief of their date of evolution from homo erectus. Labeling Congoids the "African Negroes" and "Pygmies", he divided indigenous Africans into these two distinct groups based on their date of origin, and loosened classification from mere appearance — however, this led to disagreement between approaches to dating divergence, and consequent conflicting results.

These theories were quickly criticized on the basis that such "sorting criteria" do not (in general) produce meaningful results, and that evolutionary divergence was extremely improbable over the given time-frames. As Monatagu (1963) said,

The notion that five subspecies or geographic races of Homo erectus [...] "evolved independently into Homo sapiens not once but five times" at different times and in different places, seems to me a very far-fetched one. Coon has striven valiantly, to make out a case for this theory, but it simply does not square with the biological facts. Species and subspecies simply do not develop that way. The transmutation of one species into another is a very gradual process [...]

Today, most scientists view human variation as distributed clinally, often without any sharp discontinuities. While acknowledging the existence of human variation among groups, anthropologists have abandoned the view that clearly delineated, discrete racial entities exist, since there often is considerable overlap in characteristics among the populations. Furthermore, in at least one study most of the variation in physical traits found was among individuals within the so-called racial groups.

Use in craniofacial anthropometry

In modern craniofacial anthropometry, Negroid describes features that typify skulls of Black people. These include a broad and round nasal cavity; no dam or nasal sill; Quonset hut-shaped nasal bones; notable facial projection in the jaw and mouth area (prognathism); a rectangular-shaped palate; a square or rectangular eye orbit shape; and large, megadontic teeth. Still widely used internationally in the identification of human remains, some have challenged its accuracy in different human populations which have developed in close proximity to one another and those of mixed ethnic heritage. For example, one recent study of ancient Nubian crania concluded:

The assignment of skeletal racial origin is based principally upon stereotypical features found most frequently in the most geographically distant populations. While this is useful in some contexts (for example, sorting skeletal material of largely West African ancestry from skeletal material of largely Western European ancestry), it fails to identify populations that originate elsewhere and misrepresents fundamental patterns of human biological diversity.

Physical traits

Ashley Montagu lists "neotenous structural traits in which...Negroids differ from Caucasoids... flattish nose, flat root of the nose, narrower ears, narrower joints, frontal skull eminences, later closure of premaxillary sutures, less hairy, longer eyelashes, [and] cruciform pattern of second and third molars" "The Negroid skull shows a marked protrusion or bulging out of the profile from the bottom of the nose to the bottom of the chin. Put another way, the maxillary and mandible bones of the Negroid skull are larger than in the Caucasoid and Mongoloid, in ratio to skull size ... Negroid will have a flatter nose bridge than the Caucasoid. The zygomatic bone, commonly referred to as the cheekbone, is structured similarly in both Negroid and Caucasoid. Both of these races have retreating zygomatics."

See also

• -oid (suffix)
• Africoid peoples
• Race (historical definitions)

References