Readings on the Racial Body

The Black Male Body: Violence and Homophobia

• Rodney King and the justification of a beating
• see black male body as the potential for violence
• see black male body as the potential for rape
• justifies beating by the police.
• black male body is never helpless or innocent. It is always a threat

Anthropometry: Measuring Heads and Racist Perspectives

• The human body can be measured in a thousand ways. Any investigator convinced beforehand of the inferiority of a group can select a small set of physical measures to prove this. 
• Assumption: The races can be RANKED in a linear scale of mental worth. It did not occur to courier, Broca and others that human variation might be random, rather than linear and hierarchical.
• Hottentot Venus and other Living Anthropologies: Ape-like
• she had a way of pouting her lips exactly like what we would have observed in the Orang-utang. Her movements had something abrupt and fantastical about them, reminding one of those of the ape. Her lips were monstrously large. Her ear was like that of many apes, being small, the tragus weak, the external border almost obliterated behind. These are animal characters. I have never seen a human head more like that an ape than that of this woman." (Georges Couvier 1878)
• Broca's Studies of Racial Body
• Measuring forearm bones
• long forearms seen as apelike, so used as a way to rank races with longer forearms as more inferior and place them on a scale from Ape to Civilized European
• did not work (whoops!)
• Measuring Brains
• a table on which races were arranged by order of their cranial capacities would not represent the degree of their superiority or inferiority, because size represents only one element of the problem [of ranking races]. On such a table, Eskimos, Lapps, Malays, tartars and several other peoples of the Mongolian type would surpass the most civilized people of Europe. A lowly race may therefore have a big brain….But this does not destroy the value of small brain size as a mark of inferiority. The table shows that West African blacks have a cranial capacity about 100cc less than that of European races. To this figure we may add the following: Caffirs, Nubians, Tasmanians, Hottentots, Australians. These examples are sufficient to prove that if the volume of the brain does not play a decisive role in the intellectual ranking of races, it nevertheless has a very real importance. (Broca 1873).
• We surmount the problem easily by choosing, for our comparison of brains, races whose intellectual inequalities are completely clear. Thus the superiority of Europeans compared to African Negroes, American Indians, Hottentots, Australians and the Negroes of Oceania, is sufficiently certain to serve as a point of departure for the comparison of brains. (Broca 1878).
• Beliefs about race and the hierarchy of human beings dictates the the conclusion of evidence of race gathered from measurements and imaginings of the human body.
• WOMAN'S BRAINS & BRAINS OF LOWER CLASS
• Broca viewed himself as a liberal and did not condemn groups to permanent inferiority based on their current status. 
• women's brains had degenerated through time due to a socially enforced under usage. They might increase again under different social conditions. 
• Primitive races had not been sufficiently challenged
• European brains grew steadily with the march of civilization. 
• social class is limiting and has led to the lack of brain growth among some Europeans. This has skewed the sample making European brains look smaller than they are.

Of What Importance is Skin Color?

The Racial Nose

• The Camper Index: Camper's facial angle was used to determine a "beautiful face" which meant one that was very different from other primates like apes. 
• too flat or too large noses like those of Blacks and Jews respectively, were signs of their inferiority
• bodies portrayed in art during the 19th century mimicked this angle or even exaggerated it to express the ideal of beauty of the face
• Black Nose is the key to understanding facial deformity in the Enlightenment= facial asthetics is the asthetics of race
•  Buffon, Kant & Montesqieu: All see the black nose as a result of their adaptation to a tropical environment, the result of mother's smashing children's faces at birth, and leprosy or yaws - powerfully associated in the European fantasy with the tropics and interchangeable with the idea of SYPHILIS (hence the syphilitic nose).
• too flat.-lazy, inactive slow...and other moral qualities

• Jewish Nose: closer to African than European, so equally ugly.Also had short, black curly hair and darker skin.
• "their rapid speech and brusk and precipitous actions also come from this source. i believe that jews have more gall than other people. (Lavatar 1751).
• black Orientals
• "the African character of the jew , his muzzle-shaped mouth and face removing him from certain other races (Knox 1791).
• rhinoplasty in the 19th century allowed jews to pass for white 

• Irish Noses: Pug Noses- innovated surgeries by Roe cured the racial nose and allowed the Irish to pass for anglo-saxons. without scars!
•  pug nose defined Irish as black, curing it allowed moral growth as well
•  5 categories of noses distinguished by Roe-all associated with moral qualities
• roman-strength
• greek-refinement
• jewish-commercialism, greed
• pug or snub- weakness, lack of development (Irish)
• celestial-inquisitiveness

• Oriental noses & eyes: un-erotic in American culture
• japanese were particularly concerned with this and developed ideals which looked to Anglo features
• Idealized the ethnic Ainu of northern Haikkaido for their eye lids
• represented themselves in these idealized versions in art
• eyelids have negative impact on sight
• feminizing features, so only men underwent or sought to transform themselves through surgery.=banish negative JIBYO
• bad for women" small eyes, flat nose, big face+ now it is about HEALTH (argument) rather than astheitics

• Disappearing Nose
• fear of racial mixing