Answer to Question #307565 in History for lala

Question

What does Douglass mean when he claims that race scientists sacrificed “what is true to what is popular”? Why is it so easy to accept and support popular ideas, even if they are incorrect, and so difficult to challenge them?

Answer 1

Douglass, a former slave and the most prominent nineteenth-century opponent of slavery in the United States, also argued against the idea that Africans are less human than Anglo-Saxons (the descendants of people who settled in England in the fifth century):

Man is distinguished from all other animals by the possession of certain definite faculties and powers, as well as by physical organization and proportions. He is the only two-handed animal on the earth—the only one that laughs, and nearly the only one that weeps. . . . Common sense itself is scarcely needed to detect the absence of manhood in a monkey, or to recognize its presence in a Negro. . . .