398 THREE CENTURIES' PERSPECTIVES
udicial form of blaming the victim. Browne, though generally and
refreshingly free of anti-Jewish bias, cites a particularly ugly argu-
ment in explaining high rates of miscegenation between Jews and
Christians—the supposed lasciviousness of Jewish women and their
preference for blond Christian men over swarthy and unattractive
Jews. Browne writes: "Nor are fornications infrequent between
them both [Jewish women and Christian men]; there commonly
passing opinions of invitement, that their women desire copulation
with them rather than their own nation, and affect Christian carnal-
ity above circumcised venery." American racists often made the
same claim during slavery days—a particularly disgraceful lie in this
case, for the argument works to excuse rapists by blaming the truly
powerless. For example, Louis Agassiz wrote in 1863: "As soon as
the sexual desires are awakening in the young men of the South,
they find it easy to gratify themselves by the readiness with which
they are met by colored [half-breed] house servants.... This blunts
his better instincts in that direction and leads him gradually to seek
more spicy partners, as I have heard the full blacks called by fast
young men.")
Obviously, we cannot make a coherent claim for "blacks" being
innately anything by heredity if the people so categorized do not
form a distinctive genealogical grouping. But the category mistake
goes far, far deeper than dilution by extensive intermixture with
other populations. The most exciting and still emerging discovery
in modern paleoanthroplogy and human genetics will force us to
rethink the entire question of human categories in a radical way. We
shall be compelled to recognize that "African black" cannot rank as
a racial group with such conventional populations as "Native Ameri-
can," "European Caucasian," or "East Asian," but must be viewed as
something more inclusive than all the others combined, not really
definable as a discrete group, and therefore not available for such
canards as "African blacks are less intelligent" or "African blacks
sure can play basketball."
The past decade of anthropology has featured a lively debate
about the origin of the only living human species, Homo sapiens. Did
our species emerge separately on three continents (Africa, Europe,
and Asia) from precursor populations of Homo erectus inhabiting all
these areas—the so-called multiregionalist view? Or did Homo sapi-
ens arise in one place, probably Africa, from just one of these Homo