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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 4. Racial Beliefs - 3. The Ideological Compromise - 4. Reflections in Science
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Chapter 4. Racial Beliefs 89
the North actually think when, year after year, on the national holidays
dedicated to the service of the democratic ideals, they read, recite, and
listen to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Do they or
do they not include Negroes among "all men”? The same question is
raised when we observe how, in newspaper editorials and public speeches,
unqualified general statements are made asserting the principles and the
fact of American democracy. Our tentative answer is this: In solemn
moments, Americans try to forget about the Negroes as about other
worries. If this is not possible they think in vague and irrational terms;
in these terms the idea of the Negroes’ biological inferiority is a nearly
necessary rationalization.
The dogma of racial inequality may, in a sense, be regarded as a strange
fruit of the Enlightenment. The fateful word race itself is actually not yet
two hundred years old. The biological ideology had to be utilized as an
intellectual explanation of, and a moral apology for, slavery in a society
which went out emphatically to invoke as its highest principles the Ideals
of the inalienable rights of all men to freedom and equality of opportunity.
It was born out of the conflict between an old harshly nonequalitarian insti-
tution—which was not, or perhaps in a short time could not be, erased—and
the new shining faith in human liberty and democracy. Another accom-
plishment of early rationalistic Enlightenment had laid the theoretical basis
for the racial defense of slavery; the recognition of Homo sapiens as only
a species of the animal world and the emerging study of the human body
and mind as biological phenomena. Until this philosophical basis was laid,
racialism was not an intellectual possibility.
The influences from the American Creed thus had, and still have, a
double-direction. On the other hand, the equalitarian Creed operates directly
to supress the dogma of the Negro’s racial inferiority and to make people’s
thoughts more and more "independent of race, creed or color,” as the
American slogan runs. On the other hand, it indirectly calls forth the
same dogma to justify a blatant exception to the Creed. The race dogma
is nearly the only way out for a people so moralistically equalitarian, if it
is not prepared to live up to its faith. A nation less fervently committed to
democracy could, probably, live happily in a caste system with a some-
what less intensive belief in the biological inferiority of the subordinate
group. The need for race prejudice is, from (his point of view, a need for
defense on the part of the Americans against their own national Creed
against their own most cherished ideals. And race prejudice is, in this sense,
a function of equaJitarianism. The former is a perversion of the latter.^*
4. Reflections in Science
This split in the American soul has been, and still is, reflected in scien-
tific thought and in the literature on the Negro race and its characteristics.
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