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Negroid is an adjective derived from the term Negro and refers to a presumed race of people mostly from sub-Saharan Africa. These people are colloquially referred to as black people.

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 ..The term Negroid is associated with outdated notions of racial types; it is potentially offensive and best avoided.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 philosophy 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

Origin of the term

The term has its etymological roots in the Latin word niger (black), with the earliest recorded use of the term "Negroid" in 1859. In modern use, the term is associated with "the division of humankind represented by the indigenous peoples of central and southern Africa".

Objection to use of the term

The term Negroid is commonly associated with outdated notions of racial typology which have been widely discredited in scientific circles — for modern usage it is generally associated with outdated racial notions, and is discouraged, as it is potentially offensive. Though the term "Negroid" is still used in certain disciplines such as craniometry and epidemiology, its usage is in decline. Even in a medical context, some scholars have recommended that the term Negroid should be avoided in scientific writings because of its association with racism and race science. This mirrors the decline in usage of the term Negro, which fell out of favor following the campaigns of the American civil rights movement — the term Negro became associated with periods of legalized discrimination, and was rejected by African Americans during the 1960s for Black.

Congoid used by some as substitute term

Anti-racist activists such as Elizabeth Martinez have suggested that one reason the term is regarded as offensive is because while other races are identified by the geographical places where it was assumed those people most typical of their phenotype live (the Caucasus for those called Caucasoids and Mongolia for those called Mongoloids), Negroids were identified by their color (niger = black). To remedy this, some have suggested substituting the term Congoid (referring to the Congo region) for those people formerly termed Negroid.

Most people nowadays simply use the term Black African to avoid being labeled politically incorrect.

Scientific use of the term

Use in physical anthropology

In physical anthropology the term is one of the three general racial classifications of humans — Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. Under this classification scheme, humans are divisible into broad sub-groups based on phenotypic characteristics such as cranial and skeletal morphology. Such classifications remain in use today in the fields of anthropology and forensics to help identify the ethnicity, lineage and origin of human remains. For example, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza freely uses the term in his 1994 book The History and Geography of Human Genes to distinguish between various groups that have inhabited and do inhabit Africa.

Later extensions, such as Carleton S. Coon's "Origin of Races" placed this theory in an evolutionary context — Coon divided the species homo sapiens into five groups, Caucasoid, Capoid, Congoid, Australoid, and Mongoloid, based on his belief of their date of evolution from homo erectus. Labeling Congoids the "African Negroes" and "Pygmies", he divided indigenous Africans into these two distinct groups based on their date of origin, and loosened classification from mere appearance — however, this led to disagreement between approaches to dating divergence, and consequent conflicting results.

These theories were quickly criticized on the basis that such "sorting criteria" do not (in general) produce meaningful results, and that evolutionary divergence was extremely improbable over the given time-frames. As Monatagu (1963) said,

The notion that five subspecies or geographic races of Homo erectus "evolved independently into Homo sapiens not once but five times" at different times and in different places, seems to me a very far-fetched one. Coon has striven valiantly, to make out a case for this theory, but it simply does not square with the biological facts. Species and subspecies simply do not develop that way. The transmutation of one species into another is a very gradual process

Today, most scientists view human variation as distributed clinally, often without any sharp discontinuities. While acknowledging the existence of human variation among groups, anthropologists have abandoned the view that clearly delineated, discrete racial entities exist, since there often is considerable overlap in characteristics among the populations. Furthermore, in at least one study most of the variation in physical traits found was among individuals within the so-called racial groups.

Use in craniofacial anthropometry

In modern craniofacial anthropometry, Negroid describes features that typify skulls of Black people. These include a broad and round nasal cavity; no dam or nasal sill; Quonset hut-shaped nasal bones; notable facial projection in the jaw and mouth area (prognathism); a rectangular-shaped palate; a square or rectangular eye orbit shape; and large, megadontic teeth. Still widely used internationally in the identification of human remains, some have challenged its accuracy in different human populations which have developed in close proximity to one another and those of mixed ethnic heritage. For example, one recent study of ancient Nubian crania concluded:

The assignment of skeletal racial origin is based principally upon stereotypical features found most frequently in the most geographically distant populations. While this is useful in some contexts (for example, sorting skeletal material of largely West African ancestry from skeletal material of largely Western European ancestry), it fails to identify populations that originate elsewhere and misrepresents fundamental patterns of human biological diversity.

Physical traits

Ashley Montagu lists "neotenous structural traits in which...Negroids differ from Caucasoids... flattish nose, flat root of the nose, narrower ears, narrower joints, frontal skull eminences, later closure of premaxillary sutures, less hairy, longer eyelashes, cruciform pattern of second and third molars"

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 broad groupings, 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.

ISBN 089789166X</ref>

See also

• -oid (suffix)
• Africoid peoples
• Race (historical definitions)

References

1. ^ O'Neil, Dennis (2007-07-03). "Modern Human Variation: Glossary of Terms". Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College. Retrieved 2007-11-06.
2. http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/negroid?view=uk
3. Race, Evolution, and Behavior by J. Phillipe Rushton, 1997, Transaction Publishers, pg 304
4. Levin M. The Race Concept: A Defense, Behavior and Philosophy, 30, 21-42 (2002)
6. Cite error: The named reference Rushton was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
7. 309540.htm
8. Harper, Douglas (November 2001). "Online Etymological Dictionary". Retrieved 2007-11-06.
9. ^ "Ask Oxford - Definition of Negroid". Oxford Dictionary of English. 2007. Retrieved 2007-11-06.
10. Agyemang, Charles (2005). "Negro, Black, Black African, African Caribbean, African American or what? Labelling African origin populations in the health arena in the 21st century". Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. 59: 1014–1018. doi:0.1136/jech.2005.035964. PMID 16286485. Retrieved 2007-11-06. {{cite journal}}: Check |doi= value (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |doi_brokendate= ignored (|doi-broken-date= suggested) (help)
11. Coon, Carleton S. The Origin of Races (1962)
12. Cavalli-Sforza, L. Luca; Menozzi, Paolo; and Piazza Alberto The History and Geography of Human Genes Princeton, New Jersey: 1994 Princeton University Press See section on "Africa" Pages 158-194
13. Jackson Jr., John (June 2001). ""In Ways Unacademical": The Reception of Carleton S. Coon's The Origin of Races". Journal of the History of Biology. 34 (2): 247–285. doi:10.1023/A:1010366015968.
14. ^ Keita, S.O.Y. (September 1987). "The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence". American Anthropologist. 99 (3): 534–544. doi:10.1525/aa.1997.99.3.534. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
15. ^ Dobzhansky, Theodosius (1963). "Two Views of Coon's "Origin of Races" with Comments by Coon and Replies". Current Anthropology. 4 (4): 360–367. doi:10.1086/200401. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
16. Carlson, David (September 1971). "Problems in Racial Geography". Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 61 (3): 630–633. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1971.tb00812.x. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
17. "Race: The Power of an Illusion - Background Readings". PBS/California Newsreel. 2003. Retrieved 2007-11-06.
18. "American Anthropological Association Statement on "Race"". American Anthropological Association. 1998-05-17. Retrieved 2007-11-06.
19. Forensic Anthropology - Ancestry
20. Brace CL, Tracer DP, Yaroch LA, Robb J, Brandt K, Nelson AR, Clines and clusters versus "race:" a test in ancient Egypt and the case of a death on the Nile, (1993), Yrbk Phys Anthropol 36:1–31, p.18
21. L’engle Williams, Frank (April 2005). "Forensic Misclassification of Ancient Nubian Crania: Implications for Assumptions about Human Variation" (PDF). Current Anthropology. 46 (2): 340–346. doi:10.1086/428792. Retrieved 2007-11-06. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
22. Montagu, Ashley Growing Young Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 1988 ISBN 089789166X
23. The g factor by Aurthu Jensen, pg 518-519
24. ]
25. ]
26. 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
27. Rick Kitties, and S. O. Y. Keita, "Interpreting African Genetic Diversity", African Archaeological Review, Vol. 16, No. 2,1999, p. 1-5
28. Apportionment of Racial Diversity: A Review, Ryan A. Brown and George J. Armelagos, 2001, Evolutionary Anthropology, 10:34-40)
29. 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
30. 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
31. Leiberman and Jackson 1995 "Race and Three Models of Human Origins" in American Anthropologist 97(2) pp. 231-242
32. 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
33. Armelagos and Brown, op. cit. Apportionment of Racial Diversity.. op. cit.
34. Keita and Kittle, op.cit

• Race (historical definitions)