Friday, May 18, 2007

Friday Dead Racist Blogging: I Know You Are But What Am I Edition

Us:
From him we turn to another--a negro from the West Coast of Africa, tall, strong-looking, with thick-set limbs and a tendency to fat. ... When we look for a moment at an individual of this type, we are involuntarily reminded of the structure of the monkey, and are inclined to admit that the negro races of West Africa come from a stock that has nothing in common, except the human form, with the Mongolian.

--Comte Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, pp. 106-07.

Them:
In early Chinese thought we occasionally discover ideas which are explicitly racist. The historians of the Han Dynasty in the third century B.C. speak of a yellow-haired and green-eyed barbarian people in a distant province "who greatly resemble monkeys from whom they are descended."

--Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, p. 4.

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