page_title: Negroid
section_title: Franz Boas and The Race Question
hierarchical_section_title: Negroid / History of the concept / In the context of scientific racism / Franz Boas and The Race Question
context_page_description: Negroid is an outdated historical grouping of various people indigenous to Africa south of the area which stretched from the southern Sahara desert in the west to the African Great Lakes in the southeast, but also to isolated parts of South and Southeast Asia.
  The concept of dividing humankind into three races called Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid 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. With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. In 2019, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists stated: "The belief in “races” as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past."
context_section_description: 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.
  In 1950, UNESCO published their statement The Race Question. It condemned all forms of racism, naming "the doctrine of inequality of men and races" among the causes of World War II and proposing to replace the term "race" with "ethnic groups" because "serious errors ... are habitually committed when the term “race” is used in popular parlance".
caption: Illustrations of "racial types" from The New Student's Reference Work (1914), edited by Chandler B. Beach and Frank Morton McMurry
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