Antenor Firmin was the first scholar of Haitian descent to write a work of anthropology as a response to long held beliefs of race superiority. Published in 1885, in The Equality of the Human Races, Firmin affirmed that " All men are endowed with the same qualities and same faults, without distinction of color or anatomical form. This was a response to Arthur de Gobineau , L'Inegalite des Races (1853-55) which held the long standing beliefs of racial anthropology of the nineteenth century. asserting racial superiority of Aryan peoples and among the many that reinforced the ideas of back inferiority.