Erling Haaland is having a World Cup moment, and the internet has decided his face is a riddle. Does he look like an Alien? Like a Neanderthal? Like a Black person?
Candidly, this discourse is disturbing.
There’s a specific video on my feed measuring Haaland’s head. Someone lines up his skull, jaw, and brow to sort him into an ancestral “type.” The clip drops the words “dolichocephalic,” which means “long-skulled.” That pseudoscience is called “craniometry”, and it built the scaffolding for some of the last century’s worst crimes.
To see why “long-skulled” is loaded, meet Madison Grant. In 1916 he published “The Passing of the Great Race,” carving Europeans into three races and crowning the tall, blond, long-skulled Nordic as the master type. Dolichocephalic. Grant helped push the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act that slammed the door on “less desirable” immigrants, and his ideas fed America’s forced-sterilization campaigns. Adolf Hitler reportedly called Grant’s book “my Bible.”
I don’t think the people posting are evil, and they aren’t aiming anything cruel at Haaland. But that’s my point. The eugenics framework is so subtle that it seeps into online discourse unnoticed. This is the same pseudoscience that justified quotas, sterilizations, and gas chambers, and is very much still alive on the forums where the far right recruits today. We can’t let it go beyond that.
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