Antenor Firmin - Haiti Observer Blog

Antenor Firmin Debunks French Author Gobuineau's White Supremacy Theory

Haitian intellectual Antenor Firmin was born in the old French colonial city of Cap-Haitien in 1850. He carved out a distinguished career as a journalist, attorney, and writer. He was appointed by President Hyppolite as Minister of Finance and Commerce, and also Minister of Foreign Affairs. But history has remembered him best as the author of the book "The Equality of the Human Races", a refutation of Arthur de Gobuineau's "Essay on the Inequality of Human Races", which argued for white supremacy over minority races.

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Cap-Haitien-born Anténor Firmin was one of the earliest scholars to write on the subject of negritude. Conceivably the first anthropologist of color, he introduced the notion of human anthropology as allied with the study of racial characteristics.

During the late 1800s, a strain of thinking pervaded U.S. and European intellectual circles, arguing the African race as low on the evolutionary scale in comparison to Caucasians. The French were dominating the conversation of the African race as intellectually inferior, due to misguided assumptions of racial differences. A prominent French author, Count Arthur de Gobineau, published "Essay on the Inequality of Human Races" that posited supremacy of the Aryan people over Africans and other dark-skinned races.

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