“This intransigence of the truth”

Anténor Firmin

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/antenor-firmin-anthropology-racism-haiti

This article by Sujata Gupta in Science News introduces us to Anténor Firmin, a Haitian scholar who challenged the racism endemic to the study of human ancestry in the late 19th century. Frimin's 1885 book, The Equality of the Human Races, was mostly unknown outside Haiti until recently. At the time of its publication, one of the main debates among anthropologists was whether humans had a single ancestor or many. Anthropologists supported their racist agendas by dividing populations according to a racial hierarchy.

Firmin's book was intentionally titled as a rebuttal to the extremely influential work by the French white supremacist Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. “Human beings everywhere are endowed with the same qualities and defects, without distinctions based on color or anatomical shape,” Firmin wrote. Since the English translation of The Equality in 2000, a number of anthropologists are calling for Firmin to be recognized as a co-founder of anthropology, since his arguments pre-date the similar arguments of Franz Boas, known as "The father of anthropology", by several decades. Firmin believed ALL of humanity should be studied, and studied with scientific rigor (the lack of which even among his most esteemed colleagues in major European cities at the time was he was highly critical of). 

When the translator, Asselin Charles, began looking for the Firmin’s book, which he had been told about by a colleage who had heard of Firmin through a Haitian student, there were only three copies of the book available in the US. It is interesting to consider how Anthropology as a discipline might have advanced much more quickly if Firmin had been as influential as his racist colleagues became. How many might have been less susceptible to racist ideology? But of course that was not allowed to happen. Thinking in this way though helps to remind us of the potentially vast consequences of not adhering to the scientific method. 

From the article:

The power of Firmin’s writings stem from his deep commitment to following the evidence, says Niccolo Caldararo, an anthropologist at San Francisco State University. “His criticism of European, especially French scientists, was so careful, was so precise, was so perfectly defined that he undermined their practice as bias rather than empiricism.”