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Line 69: ==African as a race== [[Image:AlekWek.jpg|right|frame|150 px|Supermodel [[Alek Wek]] is a Sudanese Dinka. Some would classify her as ''Caucasoid''. Afrocentrists dispute such a characterization as misleading and inaccurate.]] Afrocentrists hold that Africans exhibit a range of types and physical characteristics, and that such elements as wavy hair or aquiline facial features are part of a continuum of African types that do not depend on admixture with Caucasian groups. They cite the nonracial approach of Hiernaux (1975)<ref name="Hiernaux">Hiernaux J (1975) The People of Africa. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 147</ref> and Hassan (1988)<ref>Hassan FA (1988) The predynastic of Egypt. J. World Prehist. 2: 135-185</ref> which demonstrates that populations can vary based on microevolutionary principles (climate adaptation, drift, selection), and that this variation is present in both living and fossil Africans (AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 87:245-254 (1992))<ref>S. Keita, AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 87:245-254 (1992)</ref>They condemn attempts to split African peoples into racial clusters as new versions of older, discredited theories such as the "Hamitic Hypothesis" and the [[Dynastic Race Theory]] that attempted to separate out African groups like Nubians, Ethiopians and Somalians into "Caucasoid" groups that entered Africa to bring civilization to the natives. They also charge a double standard at play in Western academia which has made little attempt to define a "true white", <ref>Keita, op. cit</ref>but does not hesitate to define Blacks as narrowly as possibly, while allocating as much as possible to broad "Caucasoid" or other categories when it comes to Egypt or other African civilizations. Afrocentric writer C.A. Diop captures this belief in a double standard as follows: <blockquote>"But it is only the most gratuitous theory which considers the Dinka, the Nouer and the Masai, among others, to be Caucasoids. What if an African ethnologist were to persist in recognising as white only the blond, blue-eyed Scandinavians, and systematically refused membership to the remaining Europeans, and Mediterraneans in particular--the French, Italians, Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese? Just as the inhabitants of Scandinavia and the Mediterranean countries must be considered as two extreme poles of the same anthropological reality, so should the Negroes of East and West Africa be considered as the two extremes in the reality of the Negro world. To say that a Shillouk, a Dinka, or a Nouer is a Caucasoid is for an African as devoid of sense and scientific interest as would be, to a European, an attitude which maintained that a Greek or a Latin were not of the same race." (1964) <ref>Evolution of the Negro world' in Presence Africaine (1964)</ref></blockquote> | |||