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ABSTRACT This essay shows how Black Americans responded to and challenged scientific racism in the mid-nineteenth century. Specifically, it focuses on how they adopted and coopted the disciplines of physiognomy and phrenology-two sciences based on the notion that people's heads and faces revealed their moral and mental capacity. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, disciplines like physiognomy and phrenology provided the ideological scaffolding for later versions of scientific racism. This article tells a different story. By focusing on how African American intellectuals strategically analyzed heads and faces, it exposes how people of color engaged with antebellum race theory, reformulating it in unique ways and for their own purposes. Although white people relied on physiognomic "evidence" to argue that African Americans were mentally and physically inferior beings, Black Americans coopted the very discourses that undergirded the rise of racial essentialism, crafting an alternative science of facial analysis to argue for racial equality. When wielded by Black hands, physiognomy and phrenology did not solidify white supremacy; they instead became tools for vindicating the mental capacities of people of color.
In 1849, Frederick Douglass published a scathing critique of white painters in the North Star: "Negroes can never have impartial portraits, at the hands of white artists," he argued. "It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features." According to Douglass, even the most sympathetic white portraitists invariably sketched their Black counterparts with "high cheek bones, distended nostril, depressed nose, thick lips, and retreating foreheads." Ignoring the great "variety of form and feature" among Black Americans, white artists drew stereotypes rather than individuals. Through insidious visual caricatures, they conjured up an illusion of Black people's "ignorance, degradation, and imbecility."1
Scholars have cited this quotation repeatedly, using it to explain why Douglass was so invested in sitting for his own photograph. Only photographs were effective portraits, he suggested, for only photographs portrayed African Americans as they truly existed rather than how they looked in the minds of prejudiced painters.2 Yet most scholars have not interrogated a major reason that Douglass thought pictures were so consequential in the first place. Like most antebellum viewers, he interpreted portraits using the popular sciences of physiognomy and phrenology. These...