"Variety: On the Evolution of the Black Race"
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On the Evolution of the Black Race
(Continued)The Indian race is a fixed race, whose evolution has stopped for a long time.
The Black race is on the path of evolution, of formation.
The Indians resemble, according to many reports, the Chinese. Like the latter, they acquired, long before the Mongolic races, a degree of intellectual superiority that manifests itself in their political, social and religious organization, and in their scientific and artistic achievements. I only need to take, as an example, the civilization of the epoch of the Incas. Then, like the Chinese, they experience a retrograde movement, and remained in a stationary state. From the anthropological point of view, they have not varied; the cephalic hints of the skulls found in the most ancient tombs is the same as those found today. They thus have all the characteristics of a fixed race, and consequently durable and viable. Like the Jews and the Chinese, they are not mixed, they did not fuse with an invading race; they have kept themselves pure of all hybridization. And if their number will keep decreasing, it is because they are the victims of the brutal methods used against them by the conquerors. The latter destroyed them with arms and with diseases they imported, but not through assimilation or absorption. In our days, do we not see the United States decreeing the invasion on a given day of some portion of the territory occupied by the Indians; and to push back the latter, all methods are authorized. The Indian is disappearing because they have destroyed them like wild game. But this disappearance is not taking place for the same reasons as that of the races on the path of evolution, by slow, progressive extinction. These are human reasons, and not natural and inevitable laws that are the cause.
For the Black Race, it is something else entirely. It is worth asking if they are really declining in numbers. Many regions are still unexplored in Africa, and we do not even know if they are inhabited. In those that we know about, there has never been a census to prove the assertion. If we see, conversely, Blacks in the countries where they are imported and where they can develop freely, their number grows significantly. Furthermore, in Africa, slavery and slave raiding were the principal reasons that made us think that this race would end up being destroyed. But, next to an illness, Nature always gives a remedy; and, in that regard, we affirm that the Black Race, which is exposed to so many causes of mortality, is able to maintain their numbers by an exceptional power of fertility. Infertility is the worst of all misfortunes for a négresse; and the man will often not buy a woman unless she has already proved her productive faculties.
If the Black race must disappear one day in the distant future, it must cede its place to a new race, and this extinction will not be caused by anything other than the natural laws invoked by Dr. Vernial on the subject of the Latin race.
Between these two races, the analogy is more complete that it might seem on first glance. Like the latter, the Black Race is "in transition," in a constant physical and moral evolution. It is incessantly and rabidly transforming. It is subject, more than any other, to the influence of its context; it rapidly assimilates to the people with which it mixes. Its customs, its ideas, its physical characteristics, not yet specific and fixed, are changing daily under numerous influences. Its evolution is like that of a child, of a being on the path of formation, whose physical and moral matter can easily be shaped.
What more striking proof of this perfectibility can be found than in the comparison of the groups of nègres living in Central Africa and the Blacks transported to other countries, America, the Antilles, etc.? It is difficult to write the history of the Black Race, since it is difficult to trace it back to an origin as far back as that of the Mongolic and Semitic Race, for example; but, as recent and as incomplete as its history may be, it shows us what rapid processes, what incessant transformations are accomplished among these groups that give us the impression of what must have been the evolution of the human Species.
Let us see, indeed, the Black peoples that we have seen in their home country, and compare them to those transported into a milieu that is more favourable for their intellectual development. I will not go on about the examples that can be found, by the way, in all of the Ethnographical works. Suffice it to cite, from the social point of view, the Dinkos, Chillouks, Foriens, who still go around naked. In Senegambia, the Feloups, Papels, Bissigos who have nothing but a loincloth for clothing.
Among all of these people, as among all primitive peoples, the role of the woman is very inferior, like a beast of burden that one purchases for the profit one can pull from it and who is aware of its abjection. Among them, the government is despotic, religion is pure and simple animism, fetishism.
(More to follow)
Dr. de Gleygnon
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