Negro in American civilization.
- Washington Public. Affairs Press 1960
- 360 p.
The Negro in American Civilization is an original, challenging and, I believe, important contribution to a major problem of contemporary American society. It is a book which serious students of the Negro will neglect at their peril. The author has documented his statements excellently. While this book provides good reading, it is so well
referenced that it would also be eminently suitable as a textbook. College students today are plied with volumes on social theory which are loaded with one-sided, environmentalist argumentation. This book is a refreshing antidote. It could serve as a basic reference text in any scientific consideration of race and race difference. The au thor's survey of the historical aspects of the Negro's three centuries in America provides an excellent introduction to the unique American race problem.
From the standpoint of 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. From the subjective point of view of the propagandist, however, appeals to fact have much less utility than appeals to emotion. The scientist. is interested in objective evidence and factual knowledge; the theory ridden propagandist is interested in some kind of actual or supposed social good.
tain groups delight in findings of innate race difference in the Certain paychic area because these findings aid them in propagandizing for social orders based on race differentiation. While these people are at the opposite pole from the environmentalists who wish to deny such ethnle differences as a means toward a completely egalitarian social system, both groups are similarly motivated. Both "investigate" race in order to find supposedly scientific support for social and political ideologies. Neither group ean, terms of the nature and motivation of its inquiry, arrive at dispassionate and scientifically valid sets of findings. The present state of our knowledge about race and race difference is anything but complete. The weight of evidence clearly suggests that bio-genetic factors play a major role in causing psychic differ ences between races. This assertion is made, not because these bio genetic factors have been isolated, but because the environmental factors which have been brought forward as exclusive causal agents have been found incapable of producing the effects claimed for them.
The issue is not whether significant differences exist between the ob served and measurable mental performance of ethnically different populations. It is rather whether these differences are caused ex clusively by environment or by a combination of environmental and hereditary forces. If environment is the sole cause, then it follows that a change in the relevant environmental factors will produce a comparable change in observed differences in the mental performance of the two races. The weight of evidence is that it does not do so.
If it were true that no inherited differences in the mentality of races existed, empirical study would be sufficient to show this. The at tempted suppression of objective race-difference studies by environ mentalists would be self-defeating.
And in a larger sense, suppression is always self-defeating. A free society is nourished by free scientific inquiry. A social science which begins its investigations with morally or politically imposed premises, which it refuses to submit to the acid test of evidence, must wither. Here as elsewhere, work in the social sciences should be judged solely on the basis of such considerations as honesty, objectivity, accuracy of scientific method and scrupulously fair examination of the evidence.