Correia's Theory On Race And Miscegenation Summary

Correia’s Theory on Race and Miscegenation Mendes Correia was born in 1888, in Porto, northern city of Portugal, and received a degree in medicine in 1911, and in the same year became a professor of the newly created Faculty of Science at the University of Porto. He was already involved in the opening of the anthropological museum and the laboratory in the same university in 1912. Through the institution he himself created, he purchased Fonseca Cardoso’s unpublished notes on the people in Angola and Timor, and utilized it for his own promotion. Later by 1940s, he was reputed as a great scholar and a public figure, who influenced the national politics and the colonial policy-making. Therefore, it is important to understand his idea on
He viewed that Germany was inferior in environmental conditions to Mexico and Egypt, but superior in economic and politics. The cause of Germany’s relative economic & political superiority, Correia supposed, was racial differences.
However, Correia thought that Gobineau’s theory of white supremacy (which supposed miscegenation as melting down) could not be supported if the only result of European domination of non-European regions was melting down of the superior race. Without conquering other races, how could the superiority of the whites be proved? He knew that Adachi Buntarou, a Japanese anthropologist already insisted non-hierarchical theory of race. And Correia thought that Gobineau and Adachi’s opinions were essentially same on the subject. Against this backdrop, Correia reaffirmed that the hierarchy of races did exist. There he insisted that it is ridiculous to assume that an albino black man could think like a while man, or a white man with an undershot jaw would have a mentality like a black man. In other words, he thought that non-European races could not reproduce a thought pattern of a European. To give a comment from a more recent zoology and anthropology, he was confusing species (e.g. Cat and Chimpanzee) and regional sub-groups (e.g. Negroid &
However, if imagined as a concrete planning of race, it could be a grotesque one. Firstly, a preservation of a superior race as a seed of a mestizo superior race was necessary. Therefore, the Iberian metropole should maintained its whiteness. Otherwise, as Gobineau assumed, the superior race would melt down, and it could result in anarchy. Due to the assumption of innate racial hierarchy (the wall), the indigenous might not reproduce the thought patterns of the pure whites. However, the mestizos would be able to cross the innate racial hierarchy because the children inherit the parents’ abilities. In this way, the sending of the Portuguese (male) to the colony (female), and their miscegenation would be justified. However, the mestizos born out of this procedure would go down to an “inferior race” if they grew up in a poor condition. For this reason, it was assumed necessary to provide Western education and Christian religion to produce a superior mestizo