They kept their skulls. 

In the 1870s, nineteen African Americans who had been patients at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana and later died of various causes, were decapitated. Their crania were then sent to Leipzig, Germany, where they were studied under the guise of a pseudoscience known as phrenology. It purported the shape and size of one’s skull was connected to intelligence, with some arguing it was an indication of racial superiority.

“To reiterate, race and modern science had a simultaneous inception,” Eran Alam wrote in “Ordering the Human: The Global Spread of Racial Science.” “Classificatory logics that were the foundation of scientific reason were confronted with disordered human variation and racial ordering was deployed as powerful political technology to tame difference.”

The skulls of Marie Louise, Hiram Malone, Samuel Prince, Henry Allen, Henry Anderson, Issak Bell, Alice Brown, John Brown, Adam Grant, Priscilla Hatchet, Mahala, William Pierson, William Roberts, Hiram Smith, John Tolman, Henry Williams, Moses Willis and two others “unidentified by name” but listed as “Catalog #791” and “catalog #798” were repatriated and buried last month in a multi-faith memorial service. You can read more about what is known about them here.

Thirteen men, four women and two who were unable to be identified survived slavery only to be dehumanized in death as “specimens” at the University of Leipzig. More than a century later, they are finally laid to rest.

“The remains were returned by the University of Leipzig, which in 2023 contacted the city archeologist in New Orleans, acknowledging the skulls had been acquired in a ‘colonial context and unethically,’” Alina Selyukh wrote for NPR. “The two-year return process involved city, state and academic institutions. It culminated in a notable international restitution, a return of African American remains from Europe — with many remains still lingering in archival collections across the U.S. and abroad, at museums and universities.”

“Still lingering”? Why not give them back?

Are persons still studying to prove their superiority? Have we not learned that race has no biological basis?

The Human Genome Project concluded, “In 2003, Phase 1 of the Human Genome Project (HGP) demonstrated that humans populating the earth today are on average 99.9% identical at the DNA level, there is no genetic basis for race, and there is more genetic variation within a race than between them. In addition, genetic isolation, sharp boundaries and distinct evolutionary lineages of ‘races’ do not exist. Thus, the idea of ‘race’ as a genetic category was presumably put to rest.”

Do we not know that race, racism and white-body supremacy are without theological foundation? That there is no Hamitic curse on people of African descent, that they are not damned to eternal subjugation, social alienation, and subservience (cf. Genesis 9:22-26)? That Europeans and European Americans racialized as white and those Ellis Island immigrants who worked for whiteness are not superior?

Have we not read the scholarship in Frank M. Snowden’s seminal text “Before Color Prejudice”? He wrote, “[T]he ancients did not fall into the error of biological racism. Greeks and Romans did not establish color as an obstacle to integration in society; and ancient society was one that ‘for all its faults and failures never made color the basis for judging a man.’”

Also, Biblical scholar, Cain Hope Felder wrote: “In antiquity, we do not have any elaborate definitions of or theories about race. Ancient authors of biblical texts did not have a color consciousness (awareness of certain physiological differences).”

Felder continued, “In fact, the Bible contains no narratives in which the original intent was to negate the full humanity of (African) people or view (African) people in an unfavorable way. Such negative attitudes about (African people) and persons of direct African descent are entirely post-biblical.”

Instead, it is how we have agreed to see each other, as noted by Charles W. Mills in his book “The Racial Contract.” It is a sociopolitical construct that must be questioned unapologetically.

Because Henry Louis Gates Jr. is right. He asked, “Who has seen a black or red person, a white or yellow or brown?” Gates deduced, “These terms are arbitrary constructs, not reports of reality.”

In fact, the reality is that nineteen human beings were decapitated and experimented on to improve the self-esteem of persons racialized as white. With no respect for the dead, the heads of these poor souls were measured and ranked to boost their experimenter’s confidence. Detached from their own humanity and depraved beyond belief, Franz Joseph Gall, a German physician and scientist, created phrenology, which was then used to exaggerate the intellectual ability of Europeans.

What sounds psychotic to me became a “science” for Gall and his ilk. It’s more proof that people who believe in race need to get their heads examined.

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