Friday, November 10, 2006

Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Woolly Edition

The negro is not the equal of the white man, much less his master, as your bill makes him; and this I can demonstrate anatomically, physically, and psychologically too, if necessary. Volumes of scientificc authority establish the fact; I might "pile Pelion on Ossa" to demonstrate it, if this were a hall of science for such discussions, or if there were time for such discussions here. All that I have opportunity to do here is in the fewest words possible to set forth scientific facts. The negro man differs more from the white man than a white man from a white woman, and the difference is essential, organic, throughout, from the crown of the head to the very sole of the feet. The negro is a different creature, with a different brain and different structural organization and in every respect inferior to the white governing man.

The very hair which crowns his head is not hair, but it is wool, wool, and wool only. He who will take the trouble to examine it through the microscope, micrometer, and microtome will see that its structure is that of wool and not of hair. The hair of a white man is cylindrical; the section under the the microscope appears perfectly circular, and provided with a medullary canal, while the wool of the negro is flattened, so that its section exhibits an elongated ellipsis, in the axis of which no medullary canal is seen. It is this lateral compression which effects the peculiar frizzling of the hair, owing to its not taking place exactly in the direction of the longitudinal axis of the hair, but ascending in spirals, so that the hair resembles a spiral spring, which always returns to its shape when drawn out. (See M. Pruner Bey, De la Chevelure comme Caracteristique des Races Humaines, Carl Voght, et alios.)


--Representative James Brooks of New York, Congressional Globe, 40th Congress, 2nd Session, appendix, page 70.

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