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Negroid is a largely-archaic term used to describe one of the "three races of man", a view now mostly regarded as an over-simplification of the spectrum of human diversity. Negroids are the most genetically diverse of the historically defined races, including both the world's tallest ethnic group (African Tutsis) and the world's shortest ethnic group (African pygmies).

Jokes

Q: What do you call a negroid in a white coat? A: A scientist you racist...

Definitions

• The Oxford English Dictionary defines negroid as an adjective relating to the division of humankind represented by the indigenous peoples of central and southern Africa. ..The term Negroid is associated with outdated notions of racial types; it is potentially offensive and best avoided.

• According to J. Phillipe Rushton the negroid race is a major racial division of mankind originating and predominating in sub-Saharan Africa. Skin pigmentation is dense, hair wooly, nose broad, face generally short, lips thick, and ears squarish and lobeless. Stature varies greatly, from pygmy to very tall. The most divergent group are the Khoisan (Bushman and Hottentot) peoples of Southern Africa

• According to philosphy professor Michael Levin:Ordinary speakers acquainted with the out-of-Africa scenario are most charitably construed as intending 'Negroid' to denote individuals whose ancestors 15 to 5000 generations ago (with Harris & Hey, 1999, counting a generation as 20 years) were sub-Saharan African...Hybrid populations with multiple lines of descent are to be characterized in just those terms: as of multiple descent. Thus, American Negroids are individuals most of whose ancestors from 15 to 5000 generations ago were sub- Saharan African. Specifying 'most' more precisely in a way that captures ordinary usage may not be possible. '> 50%' seems too low a threshold; my sense is that ordinary attributions of race begin to stabilize at 75%.

"Negroid" compared to "Black"

The term Negroid is a modified version of Negro which means black. As such, the terms Negroid and black are virtually synonymous. On Page 42 of the abridged version of "Race, Evolution, and Behavior" J. Phillipe Rushton states: "In both everyday life and evolutionary biology, a 'Black' is anyone most of whose ancestors were born in sub-Saharan Africa" while elsewhere Rushton writes "a Negroid is someone whose ancestors, between 4,000 and (to accommodate recent migrations) 20 generations ago, were born in sub-Saharan Africa.

The U.S. census race definitions say a black is a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as "Black, African Am., or Negro," or provide written entries such as African American, Afro American, Kenyan, Nigerian, or Haitian. The Census Bureau however claims that these classifications are socio-political constructs and should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature

A craniofacial category

Forensic anthropologists study the human skeleton in a legal setting, most often in criminal cases where the victim's remains are more or less skeletonized. A forensic anthropologist can also assist in the identification of deceased individuals whose remains are decomposed or otherwise unrecognizable. The adjective "forensic" refers to the application of this subfield of science to a court of law. Craniofacial anthropometry of a person's remains can help determine what the person looked like when alive. Also, due to the requirements of the U.S. judicial system, U.S. forensic practitioners are sometimes asked to classify remains into one of the U.S. socially-enforced endogamous groups: Black, White, or East Asian. In legal practice, these are sometimes termed, respectively, "Negroid," "Caucasoid," and "Mongoloid," or even the older "Caucasian," "Negro," and "Oriental." Nowadays, the terms "Black," "White," and "East Asian" are the more common usage.

"Caucasoids" are generalized to have the lowest degree of projection of the alveolar ridge bones which contain the teeth, a notable size prominence of the cranium and forehead region, and a projection of the midfacial region. "Negroid" traits are generalized to include more rounded eye sockets; broader, more rounded nasal cavity; a forward-slanting facial profile (prognathism); and a dolichocephalic skull (proportionally longer from front to back).

Challenges

Although it is categorization of a skull is clear given arbitrary parameters, it will not locate the owners geographic ancestry concretely all the time. While one's perception of an individual's race can be affected by cultural aspects, the "race" of his skull is less ambiguous. As Dr. Stan Rhine put it, "...it is clear that race does mean different things to different people. In the context of forensic anthropology, the term race is unambiguous." Although their craniofacial race based on skull indeces is unambiguous, it will not pin point their geographic origins accurately all the time due to variation in skulls within a geographic region. For example, racial categorization by craniofacial type will categorize some people from the Horn of Africa (notably Ethiopians, Eritreans, Djiboutians, and Somalis) as having "Caucasoid" skulls, althoughEthiopians,have caucasion features i;e nose,face,hair. Ethiopians, Eritreans, Djiboutians, and Somalis have silky smooth caucasoid hair. A region of the world historically defined as caucasoid. While this method produces useful results for the population of the United States, it is likely that it would not be reliable for populations from other countries. This is due to the fact that the United States has traditionally had groups whose ancestry came from geographically distant locations, and which have generally remained endogamous in this country, for social reasons. The craniofacial difference between Northern Europeans, West Africans, East Asians/Native Americans is quite pronounced and fall easily within the indeces used to determine race from skull type. As more immigrants from in between regions and as Americans become more racially mixed, such craniofacial identification is problematic.

Classification by craniofacial anthropometry does not necessarily coincide with genetic ancestry or social self-identification. For example, about one-third of so-called "White" Americans have detectable African DNA markers. And about five percent of so-called "Black" Americans have no detectable "Negroid" traits at all, neither craniofacial nor in their DNA. In short, given three Americans, one who self-identifies and is socially accepted as U.S. White, another one who self-identifies and is socially accepted as U.S. Black, and one who self-identifies and is socially accepted as U.S. Hispanic, and given that they have precisely the same Afro-European mix of ancestries (one "mulatto" grandparent), there is quite literally no objective test that will identify their U.S. endogamous group membership without an interview. In practice, the application of such forensic criteria ultimately comes down to whether the skull "looks Negroid," "Caucasoid," or "Mongoloid" in the eye of each U.S. forensic practitioner.

A genetic category?

Racial psychologist Arthur Jensen set out to discover whether it was logical to merge the diverse ethnic groups of sub-Saharan Africa into a broad negroid race distinguishable from other broad races and concluded that it was:

On pgs 430-431 of the g factor Jensen makes reference to the chart to the right, writing:

Cavalli-Sforza et al. transformed the distance matrix to a correlation matrix consisting of 861 correlation coefficients among the forty-two populations, so they could apply principal components (PC) analysis on their genetic data...PC analysis is a wholly objective mathematical procedure. It requires no decisions or judgments on anyone's part and yields identical results for everyone who does the calculations correctly...The important point is that if various populations were fairly homogeneous in genetic composition, differing no more genetically than could be attributable only to random variation, a PC analysis would not be able to cluster the populations into a number of groups according to their genetic propinquity. In fact, a PC analysis shows that most of the forty-two populations fall very distinctly into the quadrants formed by using the first and second principal component as axes...They form quite widely separated clusters of the various populations that resemble the "classic" major racial groups-Caucasoids in the upper right, Negroids in the lower right, North East Asians in the upper left, and South East Asians (including South Chinese) and Pacific Islanders in the lower left...I have tried other objective methods of clustering on the same data (varimax rotation of the principal components, common factor analysis, and hierarchical cluster analysis). All of these types of analysis yield essentially the same picture and identify the same major racial groupings. To test the reliability of these broadgroupings, Jensen performed his own independent varimax rotated principal component analysis described on paged 518 of the g factor:

I have used a somewhat different collection of only 26 populations from around the world that were studied by the population genetecists Nei & Roychoudhury (1993), whose article provides the genetic distance matrix among the 26 population samples, based on 29 polymorphic genes with 121 alleles...The population clusters are defined by their largest loadings (shown in boldface type) on one of the components. A population's proximity to the central tendency of a cluster is related to the size of its loading in that cluster. Note that some groups have major and minor loadings on different components, which represent not discrete categories, but central tendencies...The genetic groupings are clearly similar to those obtained by Cavali-Sforza et al. using other methods applied to other samples.

Jensen is not alone in concluding that sub-Saharan Africans form a distinguishable genetic cluster. Noah A. Rosenberg and Jonathan K. Pritchard, geneticists from the laboratory of Marcus W. Feldman of Stanford University, assayed approximately 375 polymorphisms called short tandem repeats in more than 1,000 people from 52 ethnic groups in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. They looked at the varying frequencies of these polymorphisms, and were able to distinguish five different groups of people whose ancestors were typically isolated by oceans, deserts or mountains: sub-Saharan Africans; Europeans and Asians west of the Himalayas; East Asians (who Blumenbach called the yellow race); inhabitants of New Guinea and Melanesia; and Native Americans. A similar finding was made by Dr. Neil Risch of Stanford University. According to the New York Times:

These five geographically isolated groups, in Dr. Risch's description, are sub-Saharan Africans; Caucasians, including people from Europe, the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East; Asians, including people from China, Japan, the Philippines and Siberia; Pacific Islanders; and Native Americans.

Challenges

Although Jensen used the work of Cavalli-Sforza to assert a negroid race in terms of modern genetics, Cavalli-Sforza, himself, has said, "the idea of race in the human species serves no purpose" and that his research is "expected to undermine the popular belief that there are clearly defined races, to contribute to the elimination of racism". He has also said,

The classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise for reasons that were already clear to Darwin. Human races are still extremely unstable entities in the hands of modern taxonomists, who define from 3 to 60 more races. To some extent, this latitude depends on the personal preference of taxonomists, who may choose to be 'lumpers' or 'splitters'. Although there is no doubt that there is only one human species, there are clearly no objective reasons for stopping at any particular level of taxonomic splitting. In fact, the analysis we carry out..for the purposes of evolutionary study shows that the level at which we stop our classification is completely arbitrary." (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza, 1994, p. 19).

Additionally, according to an article published in The Economist, the work of Cavalli-Sforza "challenges the assumption that there are significant genetic differences between human races, and indeed, the idea that 'race' has any useful biological meaning at all." (The Human Genome Survey, 1 July 2000, pg. 11)

Cavalli-Sforza has been challenged by several scholars (Keita and Kittles (1997/1999), Armelagos (2001) et al.) for using pre-defined, arbitrary categories to cluster or assign various populations. Typical of this is Cavalli-Sforza's Extra-European Caucasoid grouping. This research it is held, often publicly disavows the importance of race, but in practice still uses older racial categories and methodologies that downplay the diversity of the Negroid peoples.

The methodology in use, critics maintain, is to establish narrow race clusters in advance, and then data is sorted as much as possible into these pre-defined categories, rather than let the data speak for themselves. . When pre-sorting is not used, widely varyiing results appear than those obtained by Jensen, et al. Critics hold that scholars like Jensen, Riesch, Cavalli-Sforza et all too often rely on a stereotypical conception of a "true negro" - identified and defined as narrowly as possible somewhere south of the Sahara, but no similar attempt is made to define a "true white". (Brown and Armelagos 2001) Under the "true negro" approach, all else not meeting the narrow, stereotypical classification is attributed to mixture with outside sources, or split off and assigned to "Caucasoid" clusters. Ethiopians and Somalians for example are split off and assigned to "Caucusoid" or "mixed" groups.

As an example of what they see to be flawed methodology, some writers cite Cavalli-Sforza's advocacy of defining "core populations" (discrete, less admixed groupings, i.e. "races) and their evolution and migration. Followers of this approach (Horai 1995) use DNA analysis to postulate racial divergence times, when discrete populations supposedly began to from "core" peoples into spreading populations throughout Africa, Europe, Asia and elsewhere. As regards Africa, the entire mtDNA sequence was applied to the core groups or populations to determine such divergences. Samples used in measurement were (a) 10 individuals from Japan, whose gene data was amalgamated into a consensus to represent Asians, (b) a cluster of broad-based Europeanized data called the Cambridge sequence, and (c) one African individual from Uganda who was used to represent all African peoples. On this basis, entire geographic regions were conceptualized as authentic. Some writers posit another alternative to human variability distinct from Cavalli-Sforza's core population concept. This is based on the Single Origin Hypothesis, of all modern humanity emanating from Africa.

The notion of "mixed" groups coming into play simply because Negroes show a variation in features, such as aquiline noses, lighter skin color or wavy hair has also been challenged as arbitrary, stereotypical, and inconsistent with how data form other non-African groups is handled. Scholars mapping human genes using modern DNA analysis, show that most of human genetic variation (some 85-90%) occurs within localized population groups, and that race only can account for 6-10% of the variation. Arbitrarily classifying Masai, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Shillouk, Nubians, etc., as "Caucasian" is thus problematic, since all these peoples are northeast African populations and show normal variation well within the 85-90% specified by DNA analysis.

Modern physical anthropologists (Liberman and Jackson 1995) also question splitting of peoples into racial zones, holding that such splitting represents selective grouping of samples. Keita and Kittles (1999) for example, argue that modern DNA analysis points to the need for more emphasis on clinal variation and gradations that are more than adequate to explain differences between peoples rather than pre-conceived racial clusters. Variation in how Negroes appear need not be the result of a "mix" from some outside source, but may be simply a contiuum of peoples in that region from skin color, to facial features, to hair, to height. The present of aquiline features for example, may not be necessarily a result of race mixture with Caucasoids, but simply another local population variant in situ. Scholars such as Alan Templeton have also challenged the notion of mixed populations, holding that race as a biological concept is dubious and that only a minor percentage of human variability can be accounted for by distinct "races." They argue that modern DNA analysis presents a more accurate alternative, that of simply local population variants, gradations or continuums in human difference like skin color or facial shape or hair, rather than rigid categories.

Critics of how Negroes are classified also point to contradictory results in the clustering methods of Jensen, Cavalli-Sforza et al. An example of contradictory results are seen in the work of such researches as Bowcock, Sforza, et. al, 1994.

"Despite a research design that should have maximized the degree to which the researchers were able to classify individuals by racial category, the results are something less than "high resolution" with respect to this goal. For example, 88% of individuals were classified as coming from the right continent, while only 46% were classified as coming from the right region within each continent. Notably, 0% success was achieved in classifying East Asian populations to their region or origin. These results occurred despite the fact that Bowcock and co-workers entered their genetic information into a program that already used the a priori racial categories they were trying to replicate."

In sum, several scholars call for Negroid populations or those traditionally identified as Negroid to be handled in the same manner as non-Negro populations, without stereotypical pre-definitions, or arbitrary splitting and clustering. This approach also challenges those scholars who claim to find organic Negroid populations types in all continents- from Australia to India (See Australoid and Veddoid) although the Recent single-origin hypothesis argues for a common African origin for modern humanity.

References

1. http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/negroid?view=uk
2. Race, Evolution, and Behavior by J. Phillipe Rushton, 1997, Transaction Publishers, pg 304
3. Levin M. The Race Concept: A Defense, Behavior and Philosophy, 30, 21-42 (2002)
5. Cite error: The named reference Rushton was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
7. http://medstat.med.utah.edu/kw/osteo/forensics/race.html.
8. The Online Companion to California Newsreel's 3 part documentary about race and society, science and history, "Race — The Power of an Illusion", Ask the Experts section
9. Heather E. Collins-Schramm and others, "Markers that Discriminate Between European and African Ancestry Show Limited Variation Within Africa," Human Genetics 111 (2002): 566-9; Mark D. Shriver and others, "Skin Pigmentation, Biogeographical Ancestry, and Admixture Mapping," Human Genetics 112 (2003): 387-99.
10. E.J. Parra and others, "Ancestral Proportions and Admixture Dynamics in Geographically Defined African Americans Living in South Carolina," American Journal of Physical Anthropology 114 (2001): 18-29, Figure 1.
11. Carol Channing, Just Lucky I Guess: A Memoir of Sorts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002); Gregory Howard Williams, Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy who Discovered he was Black (New York: Dutton, 1995)
12. The g factor by Aurthu Jensen, pg 518-519
13. ]
14. ]
15. The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence, S. O. Y. Keita, Rick A. Kittles, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 534-544
16. Rick Kitties, and S. O. Y. Keita, "Interpreting African Genetic Diversity", African Archaeological Review, Vol. 16, No. 2,1999, p. 1-5
17. Apportionment of Racial Diversity: A Review, Ryan A. Brown and George J. Armelagos, 2001, Evolutionary Anthropology, 10:34-40)
18. The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence, S. O. Y. Keita, Rick A. Kittles, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 534-544
19. Patterns of Human Diversity, within and among Continents, Inferred from Biallelic DNA Polymorphisms, Barbujani, et al, (Geonome Research, Vol. 12, Issue 4, pp. 602-612), April 2002
20. Leiberman and Jackson 1995 "Race and Three Models of Human Origins" in American Anthropologist 97(2) pp. 231-242
21. Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective, Alan R. Templeton. American Anthropologist, 1998, 100:632-650; The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence, S. O. Y. Keita, Rick A. Kittles, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 534-544
22. Armelagos and Brown, op. cit. Apportionment of Racial Diversity.. op. cit.
23. Keita and Kittle, op.cit