Negroid

[3] The concept of dividing humans into three races called Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid (originally named "Ethiopian") was introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history and further developed by Western scholars in the context of "racist ideologies" during the age of colonialism.

[12]: 526 As historian Edith Sanders writes, "Perhaps because slavery was both still legal and profitable in the United States ... there arose an American school of anthropology which attempted to prove scientifically that the Egyptian was a Caucasian, far removed from the inferior Negro".

[14] Through craniometry conducted on thousands of human skulls, Morton argued that the differences between the races were too broad to have stemmed from a single common ancestor, but were instead consistent with separate racial origins.

Upon his death in 1851, when slavery still existed in the southern United States, the influential Charleston Medical Journal praised him with the words: "We of the South should consider him as our benefactor for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race.

British biologist Thomas Huxley, a strong advocate of Darwinism and a monogenist, counted ten "modifications of mankind", dividing the native populations of sub-Saharan Africa into the "Bushmen" of the Cape region and the "Negroes" of the central areas of the continent.

[19] By the end of the 19th century, the influential German encyclopaedia, Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, divided humanity into three major races called Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid, each comprising various sub-races.

the mental constitution of the negro is very similar to that of a child, normally good-natured and cheerful, but subject to sudden fits of emotion and passion during which he is capable of performing acts of singular atrocity, impressionable, vain, but often exhibiting in the capacity of servant a dog-like fidelity which has stood the supreme test.

"[22] Since the 1920s, Franz Boas and his school of anthropology at Columbia University were criticising the concept of race as politically dangerous and scientifically useless because of its vague definition.

[23]: 249  Although Coon publicly assumed a neutral stance regarding segregation, some fellow anthropologists accused him of being racist because of his "clear insensitivity to social issues".

[28] Monatagu (1963) argued that Coon's theory on the speciation of Congoids and other Homo sapiens was unlikely because the transmutation of one species to another was a markedly gradual process.

[29] Since Coon followed the traditional methods of physical anthropology, relying on morphological characteristics, and not on the emerging genetics to classify humans, the debate over Origin of Races has been "viewed as the last gasp of an outdated scientific methodology that was soon to be supplanted".

[35] Ashley Montagu lists "neotenous structural traits in which ... Negroids [generally] 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, [and] cruciform pattern of second and third molars.

[36] In the context of prominent successes of African-American athletes like Jesse Owens during the 1936 Summer Olympics, the speed advantage of the "Negroid type of calf, foot and heel bone" was discussed.