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1 Introduction
the possibility of enabling scientific study to arrive at true knowledge. Every
social study must have its center in an investigation of people^s conflicting
valuations and their opportune beliefs. They are social facts and can be
observed by direct and indirect manifestations. We are, of course, also
interested in discovering how these inclinations and loyalties came about
and what the factors are upon which they rest. We want to keep free, how-
ever, at least at the outset, from any preconceived doctrine or theory,
whether of the type making biological characteristics, or economic inter-
ests, sexual complexes, power relations, or anything else, the ^^ultimate”
or ‘‘basic” cause of these valuations. We hope to come out with a type of
systematic understanding as eclectic as common sense itself when it is open-
minded.
When we thus choose to view the Negro problem as primarily a moral
issue, we are in line with popular thinking. It is as a moral issue that this
problem presents itself in the daily life of ordinary people 5
it is as a
moral issue that they brood over it in their thoughtful moments. It is in
terms of conflicting moral valuations that it is discussed in church and
school, in the family circle, in the workshop, on the street corner, as well
as in the press, over the radio, in trade union meetings, in the state legis-
latures, the Congress and the Supreme Court. The social scientist, in his
effort to lay bare concealed truths and to become maximally useful in
guiding practical and political action, is prudent when, in the approach to
a problem, he sticks as closely as possible to the common man’s ideas and
formulations, even though he knows that further investigation will carry
him into tracts uncharted in the popular consciousness. There is a pragmatic
common sense in people’s ideas about themselves and their worries, which
we cannot afford to miss when we start out to explore social reality. Other-
wise we are often too easily distracted by our learned arbitrariness and our
pet theories, concepts, and hypotheses, not to mention our barbarous ter-
minology, which we generally are tempted to mistake for something more
than mere words. Throughout this study we will constantly take our
starting foint in the ordinary matins own ideas, doctrines, theories and
mental constructs.
In approaching the Negro problem as primarily a moral issue of con-
flicting valuations, it is not implied, of course, that ours is the prerogative
of pronouncing on a ’priori grounds which values are “right” and which are
“wrong.” In fact, such judgments are out of the realm of social science,
and will not be attempted in this inquiry. Our investigation will naturally
be an analysis 0/ morals and not in morals. In so far as we make our own
judgments of value, they will be based on explicitly stated valuq premises,
selected from among those valuations actually observed as existing in the
minds of the white and Negro Americans and tested as to their social and
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