On the first point: The South earnestly submits that over a period of thousands of years, the Negro race, as a race, has failed to contribute significantly to the higher and nobler achievements of civilization as the West defines that term. This may be a consequence of innate psychic factors. Again, it may not be, but because contemporary evidence suggests little racial improvement, the South prefers to cling to the characteristics of the white race, as best it can, and to protect those characteristics, as best it can, from what is sincerely regarded as the potentially degrading influence of Negro characteristics.
Now, that is a “racist” thesis, and if one would listen to no more than the horrified gasps of the Liberal left, the very statement is a dreadful example of racism at its worst. Hitlerism!Fascism! Kluxism! White supremacy! To the doctrinaire theologians of a Liberal socio-anthropology, the thesis is blasphemy, and it is mortal sin even to consider it. A Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, in May 1957, denounced such heresy in unequivocal terms: “Thefactis,of course, that the Negro possesses the same capacities and potentialities as does the white.”
But if this is afact, how did it get to be a fact? How “of course”? Is the question of innate aptitudes and characteristics no more arguable than the sum of two plus two? Is the flat statement that “the Negro possesses the same capacities and potentialities as the white” to be regarded on a level with “Washington was the first President,” or “the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the square of its other two sides”? If this “fact” has in truth been so positively established, discussion of the subject is wholly pointless; nothing remains to be said, and those readers whose minds are closed to reconsideration will flee from these pages and soothe their wounded sensibilities with the balm of Ashley Montagu’s hairless prose.
But those who are agreeable to pursuing truth,wherever the quest may lead them, will stick around; they will keep their minds open; they will acknowledge at least an outside possibility that the disciples of Boas and Klineberg could be in error; they will formulate questions, and they will insist upon honest and straightforward answers to them. And if intellectually satisfying answers to their questions cannot be adduced, they will honestly acknowledge at the end:The question is still open.
Now, that is all the defense can ask. Few Southerners have made any serious attempt to read up on anthropology or to acquaint themselves with the results of intelligence tests. Their judgments and attitudes—or if you please, their prejudices—are based largely upon personal observation, instinct, upbringing, the cumulative experiences of a lifetime, stored up day by day and hour by hour. An advocate for the South does not wish to be dogmatic. He does not insist that the South has all the right answers. He does not say, “thefactis,of course.” But the South does suggest that it raises some of the right questions.
Even to raise the right questions has become an almost impossible undertaking in today’s emotionally charged atmosphere. For the past twenty years at least (I write in 1962), a systematic and well-financed campaign has been under way to obliterate the entire concept of race. This calculated perversion of honest scholarship has drawn a rebuke from Dr. Carleton S. Coon, one of the world’s foremost anthropologists, who himself believes that classification by race “is a nuisance.” InThe Story of Man, Coon departs from his masterly narrative long enough to register a serious protest against the activities “of the academic debunkers and soft-pedalers who operate inside anthropology itself.”
“Basing their ideas on the concept of the brotherhood of man,” Coon comments sharply, “certain writers, who are mostly social anthropologists, consider it immoral to study race, and produce book after book deploring it as a ‘myth.’ Their argument is that because the study of race once gave ammunition to racial fascists, who misused it, we should pretend that races do not exist. Their prudery about race is equaled only by their horror of Victorian prudery about sex. These writers are not physical anthropologists, but the public does not know the difference.”
Typical of the doctrinaire Liberals who shrink from the very notion of race are the scientists who make up the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. In their disdainful view, race is no more than a “myth.” In particular, the Group denounces the “myths which have grown up about the Negro.” These “myths,” it is said, serve merely to rationalize and to justify the white man’s disparaging attitudes, because he cannot clearly recognize or understand the real source of his prejudice. We should realize, says the Group, that such “myth formation” psychologically seeks to protect individual and group security; and if we realize that, we can better understand why the “myths of prejudice” are so resistive to logic: The powerful need for safety, which “the myth” is created to insure, explains why it is clung to despite facts and logic to the contrary. Moreover, the damaging consequences of “racial myths” are misconstrued as evidence to support them.
Ashley Montagu has suggested, inHuman Heredity, thatthe very wordracebe struck from the English language. There is, he says, “sound sense in the argument that the long-standing abuse of the meaning of a word constitutes the best reason for its total exclusion from common usage.” Unsound words make for unsound ideas, and the unsound ideas tend to result in unsound action: “The word ‘race’ is a horrid example.” To Dr. Montagu, race is a notion, a myth, a fallacy, an error. In the sense that the term suggests distinguishing characteristics on the part of a particular people, “the word is beyond rescue and it had better be dropped altogether.” He suggests that the term “ethnic group” be employed instead, and the most he will concede is that “slight differences may exist between some ethnic groups in the frequencies of certain genes underlying mental capacity.” This is possible, says Dr. Montagu, “but in spite of all attempts, no one has, in fact, ever demonstrated that they do.”
Otto Klineberg, who cannot bring himself to write the wordsraceorracialwithout putting them in quotation marks, says the same thing: “In all probability, inherent intellectual differences between Negroes and whites do not exist.” Other writers—Kenneth Clark and Ruth Benedict, for example—are impatient with such academic impedimenta as “probabilities.” More in anger than in sorrow, they denounce the bigoted Southerner, who dares to suggest that in terms of his capacity to adjust fully to Western values, the Negro may be innately inferior. The very idea! And any recourse by the Southerner to history, as Miss Benedict puts it, is mere “special pleading.” All good historians know of the greatness of Negro achievements. To doubt this truth is to substitute for historical processes “an unashamed racial megalomania.” This is a “travesty of fact.”
In 1960, a group of distinguished anthropologists, psychologists, and social scientists, rebelling against the obstinate attitudes of the Benedict-Montagu school, launched a small publication in Edinburgh,The Mankind Quarterly. They ventured to suggest that some of these questions of “race” are not altogether closed; they commented that it was a pity to see responsible scientists so influenced by emotion and political bias that they had closed their minds to objectiveinquiry; and the editors proposed to publish occasional monographs exploring aspects of these issues that were banned from exploration elsewhere.Mankind Quarterlyscarcely had raised its mild voice before shrill cries from the Liberal left united in a ritual chorus of denunciation. Late in 1961, the chief editor, Dr. R. Gayre of Gayre, replied to his assailants in an editorial that sums up so much of the Southern view on these matters that I should like to quote from it at some length. He began by expressing regret that persons who do not slavishly subscribe to egalitarian dogmas should be denounced automatically as “racialists” and their teachings condemned as “racism.” He continued:
The fear of being so abused has for the last one or two decades been sufficient to silence many, if not most, scholars and prevent them from writing what they believed and thought to be the facts in connection with anthropological subjects. They have, in the main, confined themselves to negative action, such as protesting when the notorious UNESCO pamphlet on race was produced, and being happy to gain, as a result, some modification of the more extreme and nonsensical assertions of the a-racist egalitarians.That there has been such a clearly marked reactionary influence, if not domination, over our studies, is so patently obvious that it hardly needs to be stressed. Even those who have not subscribed to any form of political doctrine have felt it safer to make interpretations of the facts of race and heredity in such terms that they can bear a clearly egalitarian interpretation.... The anxiety which is shown to suppress publications and expositions which do not support egalitarianism is entirely consistent with this political direction of, and domination over, science....[W]e wish to state categorically what are the views of the editors on the matter of racial equality. While rejecting racial egalitarianism as having no warranty in honest scientific expositions and investigations, we do not, on the other hand, subscribe to doctrines of racialsuperiorityorinferiority. We believe that just as all individuals within a particular stock are different, so is one racial group in relation to another. In respect of some characters, various stocks will be superior to others; and in othercases inferior; but in many cases no perceptible differences may be apparent. While environment, both physical and social, may influence these characters, we believe that heredity is by far the most important single factor, and the current fashion to eschew the significance of heredity is a definite disservice to the understanding of what makes for differences in the various characters which distinguish one group from another.Furthermore, we do not presume to judge what is desirably superior or not. We think that within the ambit of the type of civilizations erected by the White-Brown stocks or the Yellow races, the Black, which has shown no natural predilection to that form of organization, will be at a disadvantage in any competition—and isin that senseinferior. After all, aprioriconsiderations alone would lead to this conclusion, and if modern science thinks this is not the case, it has yet to show why and how the Melanoids have remained technologically backward compared to both the Mongoloids and the Caucasoids. For the Egyptian civilization, which was basically Caucasoid (Mediterranean, Atlantic, Nordic, and Armenoid strains being the basis of that nationality), abutted on the Negroid world of Africa, and its ideas were there to be accepted and copied, so that urban technological civilizations could have been erected in Africa, if that way of life had appealed to the inherent Negroid genius and temperament. It is only within this last millennium that certain ideas generated in Egypt four millennia ago began to reach West Africa—long after the Nile Valley civilization had decayed and disappeared.
The fear of being so abused has for the last one or two decades been sufficient to silence many, if not most, scholars and prevent them from writing what they believed and thought to be the facts in connection with anthropological subjects. They have, in the main, confined themselves to negative action, such as protesting when the notorious UNESCO pamphlet on race was produced, and being happy to gain, as a result, some modification of the more extreme and nonsensical assertions of the a-racist egalitarians.
That there has been such a clearly marked reactionary influence, if not domination, over our studies, is so patently obvious that it hardly needs to be stressed. Even those who have not subscribed to any form of political doctrine have felt it safer to make interpretations of the facts of race and heredity in such terms that they can bear a clearly egalitarian interpretation.... The anxiety which is shown to suppress publications and expositions which do not support egalitarianism is entirely consistent with this political direction of, and domination over, science....
[W]e wish to state categorically what are the views of the editors on the matter of racial equality. While rejecting racial egalitarianism as having no warranty in honest scientific expositions and investigations, we do not, on the other hand, subscribe to doctrines of racialsuperiorityorinferiority. We believe that just as all individuals within a particular stock are different, so is one racial group in relation to another. In respect of some characters, various stocks will be superior to others; and in othercases inferior; but in many cases no perceptible differences may be apparent. While environment, both physical and social, may influence these characters, we believe that heredity is by far the most important single factor, and the current fashion to eschew the significance of heredity is a definite disservice to the understanding of what makes for differences in the various characters which distinguish one group from another.
Furthermore, we do not presume to judge what is desirably superior or not. We think that within the ambit of the type of civilizations erected by the White-Brown stocks or the Yellow races, the Black, which has shown no natural predilection to that form of organization, will be at a disadvantage in any competition—and isin that senseinferior. After all, aprioriconsiderations alone would lead to this conclusion, and if modern science thinks this is not the case, it has yet to show why and how the Melanoids have remained technologically backward compared to both the Mongoloids and the Caucasoids. For the Egyptian civilization, which was basically Caucasoid (Mediterranean, Atlantic, Nordic, and Armenoid strains being the basis of that nationality), abutted on the Negroid world of Africa, and its ideas were there to be accepted and copied, so that urban technological civilizations could have been erected in Africa, if that way of life had appealed to the inherent Negroid genius and temperament. It is only within this last millennium that certain ideas generated in Egypt four millennia ago began to reach West Africa—long after the Nile Valley civilization had decayed and disappeared.
H. L. Mencken once remarked that the most costly of all follies, which he viewed as the chief occupation of mankind, is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. The aphorism applies with special force to the Negrophile social anthropologists who are so passionately determined to propound that which is palpably not true, or at least palpably not demonstrable, that in their zeal of advocacy they lose all sense of proportion. Thus, in their raptures, the most primitive mud-hut cultures of the Congo must be praised for their “sophistication” and “complexity.” Crude works of art tend to be equated with the sculpture of Periclean Athens. In the rhythmic thump of an African tom-tom, they findblack Beethovens at work. Miss Benedict, inRace: Science and Politics, is fairly transported. Her technicolor illusions of African history produce “great kingdoms of wealth and splendor ... great political leaders ... men of wealth ... the spread of higher culture.” In seventeenth-century Nigeria, she sees “prized cultural achievements,” and of these African tribes she girlishly cries that “their elaborate and ceremonious political organization, the pomp of their courts, the activity of their far-flung economic life, with its great market centers and tribute collected over great areas, their legal systems with formal trial of the accused, with witnesses and with prosecutors—all these excite the admiration of any student.”
Well, one is reminded of Mark Twain’s comment that there is something fascinating about science: “One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” Let it be granted that there is much of archeological and anthropological interest to be found in the obscure and sketchy “histories” of various African kingdoms and empires. One might wish, abstractly, to know more of the Ghana Empire, the Almoravid Empire, the Mali Empire, the Songhai Empire; the teachers and the curriculum and the libraries of the Universities of Timbuktu and Sakoré might usefully be contrasted with those of the Universities of Paris and Bologna; we should like standard reference works that offered full and scholarly expositions of the kingdom Miss Benedict terms the “culmination” of African civilization, the “great empire of Bornu.” It is an empire not even mentioned by Herskovits inThe Myth of the Negro Pastand barely touched upon by J. D. DeGraft Johnson and W. E. B. DuBois in their works on African civilization. (DuBois does say that Bornu, a Northern Nigerian kingdom, had in the tenth century a civilization that “would appear to compare favorably with that of European monarchs of that day.” It is an assessment that leaves very little to the Carolingians, and it is the sort of tossed-off grandiloquence of the Negrophile propagandist that leaves the ordinary student more mystified than informed.)
In terms of enduring values—the kind of values respected wherever scholars gather, in the East no less than in theWest—in terms of values that last, and mean something, and excite universal admiration and respect, what has man gained from the history of the Negro race? The answer, alas, “virtually nothing.” From the dawn of civilization to the middle of the twentieth century, the Negro race, as a race, has contributed no more than a few grains of sand to the enduring monuments of mankind.
One finds no pleasure in rendering such a judgment; one finds no more than the cold comfort of truth, and even that chilly companion is made the less attractive by the disdain in which this unappealing truth is held. Yet the serious students of the South’s position, like the serious pathologist examining an especially distasteful object, ought not to be deterred. If the South is wrong in this appraisal of the contributions of the Negro race (or “culture,” or “ethnic group”), then evidence of this wrongness should be readily attainable in standard works of reference; such evidence should be convincingly documented, objective in its nature, susceptible of proof by accepted tests of scholarship.
Well, then, where is this contrary evidence? What library houses the works of a Nubian Thucydides? Who was the Senegalese Cicero? One plows in vain through the works of a score of apologists. In the volumes of the most sympathetic Negrophile writers, one finds little but conjecture, surmise, vague assertions that thus and so “must have been true.” What are the contributions of the Negro culture to enduring art, or music, or literature, or architecture? To law, jurisprudence, government? To science, invention, mathematics, philosophy? Here was a race, if the horrid word may be used (or a culture or subculture or ethnic group), that lived for thousands of years in effective possession of one of the richest continents on earth. Here were a people who lived by the sea, and never conceived the sail; who dwelled in the midst of fantastic mineral deposits, and contrived no more than the crudest smelting of iron and copper. The Negro developed no written language, not even the poorest hieroglyphics; no poetry; no numerals; not even a calendar that has survived. Even so skilled a defender as Toynbee has to conclude, after a desperate flurry of coughs and sighs, that the Black Race is the only one of the primary races “which has not made acreative contribution to any one of our twenty-one civilizations.” Breasted, who wrote in a more objective time, before fashions of social ideology tended to warp critical judgment, says bluntly that “the Negro peoples of Africa were without any influence on the development of early civilization.”
Franz Boas, the father of “modern” social anthropology, posed the South’s question in this fashion inThe Mind of Primitive Man: “Have not most races had the same chances for development? Why, then, did the white race alone develop a civilization which is sweeping the whole world, and compared with which all other civilizations appear as feeble beginnings cut short in early childhood, or arrested and petrified at an early stage of development? Is it not, to say the least, probable that the race which attained the highest stage of civilization was the most gifted one, and that those races which have remained at the bottom of the scale were not capable of rising to higher levels?”
Boas’ answer to his own rhetorical question, needless to say, is that most races have not had the same chances for development, that “the claim that achievement and aptitude go hand in hand is not convincing,” and that “the earlier rise of civilization in the old world ... is satisfactorily explained as due to chance.” He finds nothing to persuade him that “one race is more highly gifted than another,” and besides, he insists, Western critics ought not to judge other races by their own standards. For example, an “impression” exists that primitive men, and the less educated of our own race, have in common a lack of control of emotions; it is thought that they give way more readily to an impulse than civilized man and the highly educated. This impression, says Boas, is entirely unjustified. Too often the traveler or student measures fickleness by the importance he himself attributes to the actions or purposes in which primitive men do not persevere, and he weighs the impulse for outbursts of passion by his own standard. The white traveler, to whom time is valuable, is impatient and irritated at Negro porters, to whom time means nothing. The proper way to appraise the Negro, Boas tells us, is to consider his behavior in undertakings which he considers important from his own standpoint. So considered, the differencesin attitude of civilized man and of primitive man tend to disappear.
This line of defense has a certain plausibility and merit; divorced from reality, it provides a fine topic for a sophomore’s term paper. But the American South is an inheritor of Western civilization; the South’s values are the values of the West, and it understandably must be concerned with the capacity of the Negro people for contributing to these values. The Ubangi’s mud huts may be the most artistic mud huts ever set out in the sun to bake; by tribal esthetics of the African bush, the Ashanti may be vastly more cultured than the Yorubas, and the Balubi superior to the Mogwandi. Or vice versa. These critical judgments are interesting. They are irrelevant, too.
The question that never seems to be convincingly answered iswhythe Negro race, in Toynbee’s phrase, is the only race that has failed to make a creative contribution to civilization. What can account for the singular failure of the Negro people, alone among the major divisions of man, to enter the mainstream of political, cultural, and economic history?
The first rationalization that is given is that the physical conditions of sub-Saharan Africa imposed such fearful disadvantages that the development of a “civilization” was patently impossible. The argument simply will not hold up. As many geographers and anthropologists have observed (in a day before such observations were reviewed as blasphemy), parts of Africa were perhaps “uninhabitable,” but other parts were not. In any event, the jungles of the Congo imposed no obstacles to Negroid peoples greater than those faced by the Mayans in the jungles of Chiapas.
And consider the Mayans: They carved out of the rain forests of Yucatán—out of an area Van Hagen has termed “the least likely place one would choose for developing a culture”—a civilization that can be identified, and studied, and photographed to this day. They raised great temple cities: Tikal, Uaxactun, Calakmul. They built roads and reservoirs. They developed complex ideographic writing, a twenty-day lunar calendar, a code of laws for crime and punishment, a flourishing industry in dyeing and weaving. To compare thecrude phallic fetishism of Negroid tribes with the highly developed art of the Mayan and the Incan civilizations is to engage in a travesty upon critical judgment.
It is complained of the early Negroes that they were “isolated,” that no maritime access was possible to the African interior, hence that they had no opportunity for contact with the cultures of Europe and the Mediterranean. This is a specious argument, too. Every standard history of Africa makes plain, implicitly or explicitly, that early Negroes did indeed have contact with the outer world. Phoenicians, Arabs, Libyans, Hamites all found their way across Africa. Romans came, and Persians, Chinese, Turks, Berbers, Indians, Portuguese. Nothing aroused the Negro from his primitive sleep. He did not adapt. He did not copy. He did not profit.
In 1525, when Pizarro invaded Peru, he found a magnificent Incan civilization flourishing in the almost impenetrable fastness of the Andes. Here, indeed, was isolation from the currents of European thought! No maritime access here! Yet the Incas had built temples and labyrinths and massive palaces of stone. The palace at Cuzco offered fountains, heated pools, intricate goldwork, and polished stones. There were public granaries, a three-hundred-mile road, a decimal system, an advanced astronomy. European explorers who sought trade in Africa found nothing there to compare with this. As Nathaniel Weyl has written, the decisive fact is that centuries of intermittent contact with the growing culture and technology of the West “did not serve to stir the Negroes from their millennial torpor, to quicken their minds and prod their curiosity, to induce them at least to borrow if not to invent.”
Franz Boas has sought earnestly to explain all this away. So has Basil Davidson inLost Cities of Africa. So has W. E. B. DuBois inThe World and Africa. So has Johnson inAfrican Glory. But when it comes down to evidence acceptable to rational appraisal, their romantic conjectures fall pitifully short of the minimum requirements of objective scholarship. It is possible to accept Boas’ judgment that some African wood carvers and potters have produced work “original in form, and executed with great care.” Coon’s slightly more enthusiastic appraisal is that Africa’s Negro tribes “developed social systems of considerable complexity and a high art, the qualityof which the white world is just beginning to appreciate.” There is merit in a thoughtful appraisal by the Oxford anthropologist, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, of the complex system of witchcraft, oracles, and magic that he found among the Azande tribe of Central Africa.Granted certain postulates, he says, inferences and actions based upon a system of witchcraft are sound. But is Western civilization really prepared to “grant the certain postulates” of witchcraft in order to find a rationale for praising African culture? No. Let it be conceded that certain African arts and crafts reached a tolerably interesting stage of development. Modern dance and contemporary jazz doubtless owe much to the instinctive rhythms of ancient tribal rites. But south of the Sahara there was no literate civilization, no intellects at work to comprehend and solve the abstract problems; and Western Europe was not built by basket-weaving.
Let us move along. The story is told of a conversation between Boswell and Dr. Johnson, in which Boswell mentioned Bishop Berkeley’s theory of the nonexistence of matter. Boswell said he was satisfied the theory was not true, but he confessed he was unable to refute it. Whereupon Dr. Johnson kicked a large stone until his foot rebounded from it. “I refute itthus,” he said. There comes a time when the common, uncomplicated observation of ordinary men makes better sense than the partisan inventions of social anthropologists. Against their gauzy dreams of African “civilization,” the obscenities of the Mau Mau and the atrocities of the Congolese provide reality as hard as Dr. Johnson’s stone. One refutes itthus.
In 1944, Otto Klineberg brought together in one volume several of the monographs prepared by American students on the Negro as background memoranda for Dr. Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish sociologist whose subsequentAn American Dilemmawas to be seen generally, and influentially, by the Supreme Court of the United States. The first paper in Klineberg’s collection was put together by Dr. Guy B. Johnson, professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of North Carolina. Dr. Johnson served for three years as executive director of the liberal Southern Regional Council; he is a trustee of Howard University. These credentials strongly suggest that Dr. Johnson was picked by the Myrdal team todescribe “the Stereotype of the American Negro” on the assumption that he would summarize the popular conception of the Negro only to say, in the end, that there isn’t a word of truth in it. If so, the Myrdal associates must have been startled by the blunt memorandum Dr. Johnson prepared. He went through the works of thirty-one representative Negro writers and forty-two representative white writers, covering the entire spectrum of political coloration, and boiled down his findings under twelve headings. His list, he emphasized, was not a list of “race” characteristics. It was “a descriptive list, based upon a fair degree of consensus, of the interests, habits and tendencies which might serve to characterize the ‘typical’ Negro.” This list of “Negro personality and culture traits” follows:
Mental: Relatively low intellectual interests; good memory; facile associations of ideas.Temperamental: Gregariousness or high interest in social contacts; philosophical or get-the-most-out-of-life type of adjustment; high aesthetic interests; love of subtlety and indirection; adaptability.Aesthetic: Love of music and dance; oratory and power of self-expression; high interest in and appreciation of the artistic.Economic: Relatively low interest in material things, such as care of money, property, tools, etc.; line of least resistance in habits of work; relative lack of self-reliance.Personal morals: Double standard of morals and ethics, i.e., one for his behavior toward Negroes and another for his behavior toward whites; in sexual conduct, higher interest in sex, high sexual indulgence, and larger sphere of permissive sexual relations.Family and home life: Relatively low solidarity; high frequency of common-law matings and separations; role of mother strong; warmth of affection toward children; high rate of illegitimacy.Religion and the supernatural: Rather high emotional tone; personalization of God and saints; high interest in “superstition”—i.e., belief in various supernatural forces and ways of controlling them.Law observance: Relatively high incidence of social disorder; drunkenness, fighting, gambling, petty stealing, etc.; resentment against the white man’s law.Public manners: Tendency toward extroversion in public contact; easy sociability, loud talk; relative carelessness in speech and dress.Race pride: Not yet highly developed; inferiority feelings common; acceptance of white standards of physical beauty to a large extent.Race consciousness and leadership: Lack of cohesion; high intragroup conflict and cleavage; distrust of leaders; lack of strong race-wide leadership.
Mental: Relatively low intellectual interests; good memory; facile associations of ideas.
Temperamental: Gregariousness or high interest in social contacts; philosophical or get-the-most-out-of-life type of adjustment; high aesthetic interests; love of subtlety and indirection; adaptability.
Aesthetic: Love of music and dance; oratory and power of self-expression; high interest in and appreciation of the artistic.
Economic: Relatively low interest in material things, such as care of money, property, tools, etc.; line of least resistance in habits of work; relative lack of self-reliance.
Personal morals: Double standard of morals and ethics, i.e., one for his behavior toward Negroes and another for his behavior toward whites; in sexual conduct, higher interest in sex, high sexual indulgence, and larger sphere of permissive sexual relations.
Family and home life: Relatively low solidarity; high frequency of common-law matings and separations; role of mother strong; warmth of affection toward children; high rate of illegitimacy.
Religion and the supernatural: Rather high emotional tone; personalization of God and saints; high interest in “superstition”—i.e., belief in various supernatural forces and ways of controlling them.
Law observance: Relatively high incidence of social disorder; drunkenness, fighting, gambling, petty stealing, etc.; resentment against the white man’s law.
Public manners: Tendency toward extroversion in public contact; easy sociability, loud talk; relative carelessness in speech and dress.
Race pride: Not yet highly developed; inferiority feelings common; acceptance of white standards of physical beauty to a large extent.
Race consciousness and leadership: Lack of cohesion; high intragroup conflict and cleavage; distrust of leaders; lack of strong race-wide leadership.
Now, what does Dr. Johnson say about this Negro “stereotype”? Insofar as the list of characteristics has any validity, he comments, it is more applicable to the Negro masses than to the minority of highly sophisticated and acculturated Negroes. But how much validity does it have? Here was the shocker. For Dr. Johnson himself noted that these same characteristics had been attributed to the Negro by both white and Negro writers; and this being so, “there is more than a slight presumption in favor of the reality of the characteristics.” He suggested that the Myrdal associates “assume that after all there issometruth or basis of reality to the traits which are persistently mentioned in literature and in popular thinking.”
“It is true,” Dr. Johnson remarked, “that the whole trend of scholarship at present is to look upon the traits which the dominant group attributes to a minority group as nothing more than stereotypes which have been invented for the express purpose of justifying the position of the dominant group and controlling the status of the subordinate group. These stereotypes are sometimes referred to as myths, the implication being that they have no realistic basis whatever. It should be pointed out, however, that it is probably not necessary for a dominant group such as the white people in America, to invent and perpetuate stereotypes which are wholly unfair and untrue in order to maintain its own status of dominance.... The point here being made, which is simple and which rests upon a common-sense assumption, is that the stereotypes which a dominant group develops concerning the traits of a subordinategroup will be to some extent based upon observable characteristics in the subordinate group, and that while the stereotypes may be permeated with prejudice and with the ideology of inferiority,they may still reflect a certain amount of truth concerning the subordinate group. In other words, if we can deduct from the popular stereotypes the moral judgments and the implications of inferiority and the exaggerations, we may have left a body of belief which affords considerable insight into the traits of the subordinate group.” [Emphasis added.]
The Johnson list goes to the very heart of the South’s resistance to the desegregation of its public schools. When it is asked why the South opposes integration, one might provide a tolerably complete answer simply by citing Dr. Johnson’s twelve summary findings:This is why.The most Dr. Johnson will say of the “stereotype” is that it contains a “certain amount of truth.” In my own observation, and in the observation of the white South generally, the list contains a vast amount of truth. I would dissent from the Johnson findings on a couple of points only: I doubt that the “Negro masses” (any more than the white masses) have a “high interest in and appreciation of the artistic,” and it seems to me the summary of the Negro’s typical “public manners” is overdrawn. Since 1943, when Dr. Johnson prepared his summary, a phenomenal growth has taken place in a Negro middle class, and much of the “loud talk” and “relative carelessness in speech and dress” has given way to cultivated speech and to a certain elegance in dress. In my observation, the colored children of Richmond frequently are cleaner, shinier, and more neatly dressed than many of their white counterparts.
In general, however, this purported “stereotype” provides an accurate and faithful mold of typical Negro behavior and personality. Are these traits a consequence of racial inheritance? The overwhelmingly popular view of anthropologists, social and physical, is that these arenotinnate characteristics. The entire school of Franz Boas, embraced by Kluckhohn, Benedict, Klineberg, Clark, Rose, Comas, Montagu, and many others, holds firmly, and in some cases almost hysterically, that whatever lags may be observed in typically Negro culture, as contrasted with typically white culture, these shortcomings areentirely owing to environment. As the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry puts it, “these handicaps are a consequence of racial discrimination rather than of racial inferiority.”
The view, however, is not unanimous, nor is the manner in which these “environmental” views are advanced universally acclaimed.
“If we in America are going to make any sense out of the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision,” Dr. Frank C. J. McGurk has remarked, “we will have to be more factual about race differences and much less emotional. We can have our dreams, if we like to dream, but we should be willing to distinguish between dreams and reality. Already, we have gone too far toward confusing these two things. As far as psychological differences between Negroes and whites are concerned, we have wished—and dreamed that there were no such differences. We have identified this wish with reality, and on it we have established a race relations policy that was so clearly a failure that we had to appeal to distorting propaganda for its support.... There is ample evidence that there are psychological differences between Negroes and whites. Moreover, these differences are, today, of about the same magnitude as they were two generations ago. These differences are not the result of differences in social and economic opportunities, and they will not disappear as the social and economic opportunities of Negroes and whites are equalized.”
Dr. McGurk is associate professor of psychology at Villanova. The quotation comes from his famous (or infamous, depending on one’s point of view) article inU. S. News & World Reportof September 21, 1956. Several years later, Dr. McGurk provided an introduction for Nathaniel Weyl’sThe Negro in American Civilization, in which he expanded briefly on the same theme. Weyl’s book, published by Public Affairs Press in 1960, is an almost indispensable work to the student of this subject who is sincerely interested in getting “both sides.” (Another valuable work, also published by Public Affairs Press, is Carleton Putnam’sRace and Reason: A Yankee View; Putnam has driven the Liberal anthropologists practically to apoplexy by the unfair tactic of reading their works and taking them seriously—something no layman is expected to do. The rule is that non-anthropologists musttreat anthropologists respectfully, even when anthropologists write nonsense). Like Putnam, Weyl was raised and educated in the integrated North. He set out to write his book with Northern preconceptions; but the more deeply he dug for facts, the more he discovered that “material which passed for the objective findings of social scientists could more accurately be characterized as rationalizations and propaganda wearing academic cap and gown.” He demonstrated the intellectual courage to abandon his preconceived ideas, and to conclude after an exhaustive study that “the presumption is strongly in favor of innate psychic differences.”
In his introduction, Dr. McGurk describes Weyl’s book as a refreshing antidote to the one-sided, environmentalist argumentation that is all most college students ever receive, and he goes on to urge that from the standpoint of the scientist, the problem of race should be studied in an objective manner: “Appeals to beliefs, morals, ethics, or political philosophy are out of place; the issue is one of fact.... Ethnic differences are facts. In the psychic area, these differences are important facts. It seems much more sane to face these differences and investigate their causes impartially than to play ostrich about them.”
Let us go back, for a moment, to Dr. Johnson’s “stereotype.” Manifestly, many of the characteristics he finds most widely attributed to the Negro are incapable of statistical measurement. Empirical data could not well be compiled, for example, on “relative lack of self-reliance,” or “love of subtlety and indirection.” But one characteristic found to be more typical of the Negro than of the white is “high sexual indulgence, larger sphere of permissive sexual relations, ... and high rate of illegitimacy.” The illegitimacy, at least, can be statistically tabulated, and the appalling facts can be faced.
What are the facts? First, the illegitimacy rate among Negroes in this country is roughlyten timesthe illegitimacy rate among whites. Second, the condition is not improving, but on the contrary appears in many areas to be growing worse. Third, a disproportionately high rate of illegitimacy among Negroes obtains not only in the South, but throughout the United States.
These are the grim figures from the National Office of Vital Statistics:
Consider the record in two Southern States, Mississippi and Virginia. Here are the figures from Mississippi:
The vital statistics take on additional meaning when they are translated in terms of human beings. In the five years 1956 through 1960, white mothers in Mississippi gave birth to 1634 illegitimate children. In the same period, Negro mothers gave birth to 38,051 illegitimate children.
Substantially the same picture may be seen in the records of Virginia. Between 1938 and 1958, the white illegitimacy rate in Virginia declined slightly, from 2.6 to 2.3 per cent. In this same period, which witnessed astonishing gains in Negro education, Negro housing, Negro income, and Negro job opportunities, the rate of Negro illegitimacy increased from 19.5 per cent to 22.9 per cent.
The records of five Virginia cities and five Virginia counties of substantial Negro population are entirely typical:
The U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare periodically releases data on the nation as a whole. The figures for 1957 illustrate the story. In that year, 1.9 per cent of all white births were illegitimate; 21.7 per cent of all Negro births were illegitimate. Negro illegitimacy ran as high as 27.9 per cent in St. Louis, 29.3 per cent in Atlanta, and 34.6 per cent in Knoxville. The influx of Negroes into Washington, D. C., has given the nation’s capital, to the nation’s shame, what the WashingtonPosthas termed “undisputed first place in illegitimacy.” In 1957, nearly 19 per cent of all births recorded in the District of Columbia were illegitimate—5.8 per cent of the whites and 26.5 per cent of the Negroes.
Now, a widespread custom among Negro apologists is to scoff these figures away. It is said, for one thing, that there is “a relatively greater understatement of illegitimacy in the white group than in the nonwhite.” For my own part, I doubt this exceedingly. It is said, also, that a greater percentage of extramarital pregnancies are aborted among white girls than among Negro girls. Perhaps. A third line of rationalization typically has been advanced by theNorfolk Journal and Guide, a Negro newspaper; this has to do with the fact that slaves were not permitted to marry prior to 1865, though they were encouraged to cohabit, and “it isfoolish to suppose that a suppressed and constantly vilified minority group could wholly recover from the practice in a few generations.” A related argument, if it is an argument at all, is that in pre-War times “many white slave-owners promiscuously exploited their slave women sexually.” Other rationalizations put some of the blame for Negro sexual looseness on housing, economic opportunity, low income levels, and the like. Generally, it is all charged to the “system of segregation,” a charge that tends to collapse when it is observed that the high rates of Negro illegitimacy recorded in the South are not materially different in the integrated climes of Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri, and West Virginia.
But the basic validity of the statistics is not entirely discounted, even by Negro commentators. Carl Rowan, the Minneapolis newspaperman who came to the State Department with the New Frontier, faced up to them (after a good deal of preliminary squirming) inHarper’sin 1961. A leading Negro educator, President Thomas H. Henderson of Virginia Union University, offered some thoughtful comments in a paper delivered before the Virginia Conference of Social Work in 1957. He said:
“Let me begin by saying what the problem of a high illegitimacy rate among Negroes is not. It is not, first of all, a statistical illusion.... [T]he illegitimacy rate for Virginia Negroes has been ten times as high as that for whites each year for several decades. After subducting the maximum influence of all possible sources of error in the statistics, the consistency and magnitude of the differential leaves no doubt that a real and disturbing difference exists.”
The problem cannot be blamed, said Dr. Henderson, on any particular desire to obtain public benefits under the program of Aid to Dependent Children. Moreover, “it is not to any great degree a problem of racial interbreeding—every indication points to a steady decrease in interbreeding since before the dawn of this century.” The problem is “overwhelmingly a problem of illegitimacy with both parents colored.” He added:
“The problem is not the result of innate differences between the races. It would be less painful if it were. If the Negro had innate moral weakness or blindness, if he had aninnately inferior intelligence, or in some inborn way either his sex drive or his fertility were somehow different, we could shrug off the problem by saying, ‘God made it that way; there’s nothing to do about it.’ But we are faced with the hard fact that reputable scientists regard as fruitless all efforts to find valid evidence of any innate moral weakness of the Negro or any innate difference in personality, intelligence, or sexual behavior.”
Dr. Henderson went on in his paper to summarize many of the mitigating factors earlier mentioned, including socio-economic status, recreational limitations, inadequate sex education within Negro families and schools, and the tensions generated by discrimination. But he suspected that these various factors together do not account for more than half the problem: “Without a statistically valid basis for it, my opinion is strong that the primary factor is that of motivation.The simple fact is that many Negro boys and girls do not want strongly enough to avoid producing illegitimate children.The rank and file of those who are at the lowest social levels have not changed their attitude to illegitimacy since the days of slavery when sexual laxness in Negroes was tolerated and even encouraged.” [Emphasis supplied.]
A notable comment along that line appeared in the St. LouisEvening Whirl, a Negro newspaper, early in 1960, in an account of a colored woman who complained, after giving birth to her ninth illegitimate child, that her allowance under Aid to Dependent Children had been cut from $185 to $110 a month. She felt “discriminated against.” Said theWhirleditorially: