“Blacks Ranked Between Whites and Chimpanzees”

The Origins of Scientific Falsehoods

Misleading imagery was used in 1857 to suggest that Blacks ranked between Whites and Chimpanzees. They used bogus science to develop racist theories. One such science was called Phrenology. Supposedly the shape of the skull was used to describe inferior races from superior. This meant White and Black people. As a result of racist science, a “Pygmy” was displayed in 1906 as the so-called “missing link” in the Bronx Zoo in New York City. He was an African that was kidnapped and brought to New York. It could have been that this spurred the idea of the King Kong movie in 1933 which showed a crazed large ape in love with a white woman. These men, who developed Phrenology, were followers of Samuel Morton another racist scientist.

Crainiometry was another attempt by white supremacists to develop white supremacist using fake science to do so. Pieter Camper (1722-1789) was a theorist who used the measure of skulls to justify racial differences. He invented the racist concept of facial angle, used to determine racial intelligence. The angle was determined by drawing two lines; one from the nose to ear on a horizontal plane, the other perpendicular to it from the jaw to the forehead. Whites fell within the 90 degree to 80 degree range, Blacks in the 70 degree range and the orangutan ape at 58 degrees. This established a pyramid of racial inferiority with whites at the top and blacks closers to the animal kingdom. This is where white supremacists came up with the crazy idea of Black people being closer to the animal kingdom than others.

Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), was another white supremacist. He measured the volume of the brain and falsely determined he could determine the actual point at which whites ceased to be whites. This was even more absurd that some of the others, yet this false science was taught at universities in America and Europe as if it were fact. It is interesting and troubling to note that these fake scientists taught this to thousands of students thereby passing this racist infection across the globe. Many of America’s presidents studied this false science and used it as gospel as they wrote laws enshrining slavery and hatred into the founding ideas of the American constitution.

William Z. Ripley (1899) developed the “Races of Europe” which was influenced by U.S. white supremacy. Georges Lapouge (1899) developed the hierarchies model of three races from “Aryan” on down. He became the leading inspiration of the Nazis and much of what Hitler claimed to know was completely false. Christoph Meiners (1747 – 1810) was a German philosopher and historian. He supported the theory of human origins that each “race” had a separate origin. He was a very early practitioner of scientific racism. Meiners studied the physical, mental and moral characteristics of each “race,” and built a racist hierarchy based on evidence that was considered common in scientific and anthropological circles at the time. Meiners split mankind into two divisions which he labeled the beautiful White race,” and the “ugly Black race.”

In Meiners book The Outline of History of Mankind he claimed that a main characteristic of “race” is either beauty or ugliness. He viewed only the white race as beautiful. He considered ugly races as inferior, immoral and animal like. He claimed that the Black ugly peoples are distinct from the white and beautiful peoples by their sad lack of virtue and their terrible vices. This madman was believed in much the same way as the ignorant of today think they know something.