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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 4. Racial Beliefs - 6. The Racial Beliefs of the Unsophisticated
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Chapter 4. Racial Beliefs 99
difficult and complicated thinking about a multitude of mutually dependent
variables, thinking which does not easily break into the lazy form^ism of
unintellectual people.
We should not be understood, however, to assume that the simpler
concept of race is clear in the popular mind. From the beginning, as is
apparent from the literature through the decades, environmental factors
to some extent, hav<. been taken into account. But they are discounted, and
they are applied in a loose way—partly under the influence of vulgarized
pre-Darwinian and Darwinian evolutionism—to the race rather than to
the individual. The Negro race is said to be several hundreds or thousands
of years behind the white man in ^^development.” Culture is then assumed
to be an accumulated mass of memories in the race, transmitted through
the genes. A definite biological ceiling is usually provided: the mind of
the Negro race cannot be improved beyond a given level. This odd theory
is repeated through more than a century of literature: it is phrased as an
excuse by the Negro’s friends and as an accusation by his enemies. The
present writer has met it everywhere in contemporary white America.
Closely related to this popular theory is the historical and cultural
demonstration of Negro inferiority already referred to. It is constantly
pointed out as a proof of his racial backwardness that in Africa the Negro
was never able to achieve a culture of his own. Descriptions of hideous
conditions in Africa have belonged to this popular theory from the begin-
ning. Civilization is alleged to be the accomplishment of the white racej the
Negro, particularly, is without a share in it. As typical not only of long
literature but, what is here important, of the actual beliefs among ordinary
white people in America, two quotations from a fairly recent exponent of
the theory may be given:
To begin with, the black peoples have no historic pasts. Never having evolved
civilizations of their own, they are practically devoid of that accumulated mass of
beliefs, thoughts, and experiences which render Asiatics so impenetrable and so
hostile to white influences. . . , Left to himself, he [the Negro] remained a savage,
and in the past his only quickening has been where brown men have imposed their
ideas and altered his blood. I’he originating powers of the European and the Asiatic
are not in him.^®
The black race has never shown real constructive power. It has never built up a
native civilization. Such progress as certain negro groups have made has been due to
external pressure and has never long outlived that pressure’s removal, for the negro,
when left to himself, as in Haiti and Liberia, rapidly reverts to his ancestral ways.
The negro is a facile, even eager, imitator; but there he stops. He adopts, but he
does not adapt, assimilate, and give forth creatively again. . . .
Unless, then, every lesson of history is to be disregarded, we must conclude that
black Africa is unable to stand alone. The black man’s numbers may increase pro-
digiously and acquire alien veneers, but the black man’s nature will not change/^
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