Anthropological Measurement: The Mismeasure of African Americans

Abstract

W.E.B. Du Bois's prophetic century-old statements on America's unwillingness to fairly assess its citizens of African descent still provide important insights into the continuing philosophical and methodological problems of Western anthropology and biology. Too frequently, the bias of a "problem of the color line" mentality undermines the accurate measurement, analysis, and valid scientific interpretations of human variation. The history of biological anthropology is replete with instances of "virtual science" being used to camouflage a political and social agenda. Today, as the post-genome era approaches, arbitrary and often capricious evaluations of Africans and African Americans still abound, as Du Bois had predicted. New paradigms such as ethnogenetic layering are proposed to disentangle cultural identity from genetic identity and provide an alternative to static, stereotype-dependent racial models of traditional anthropology and biology. Ethnogenetic layering has been applied in ecological risk assessment studies and has already revealed significant regional biodiversity (genetic substructuring) among African Americans.