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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 4. Racial Beliefs - 5. The Position of the Negro Writers - 6. The Racial Beliefs of the Unsophisticated
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Chapter 4. Racial Beliefs 97
time, be considerable. Research and education are bolstering the American
Creed in its influence toward greater equalitarianism.
6. The Racial Beliefs of the Unsophisticated
Our characterization of the race dogma as a reaction against the equali-
tarian Creed of revolutionary America is a schematization too simple to
be exact unless reservations are added. Undoubtedly the low regard for
the Negro people before the eighteenth century contained Intellectual
elements which later could have been recognized as a racial theory in
disguise. The division of mankind into whites, blacks, and yellows stretches
back to ancient civilization. A loose idea that barbarism is something
inherent in certain peoples is equally old. On the other hand, the masses
of white Americans even today do not always, when they refer to the
inferiority of the Negro race, think clearly in straight biological terms.
The race dogma developed gradually. The older Biblical and socio-
political arguments in defense of slavery retained in the South much of
their force long beyond the Civil War. Under the duress of the ideological
need of justification for Negro slavery, they were even for a time becoming
increasingly elaborated. Their decline during recent decades is probably a
result of the secularization and urbanization of the American people, which
in these respects, as in so many others, represents a continuation of the
main trend begun by the revolutionary ideological impulses of the eight-
eenth century. In this development, the biological inferiority dogma
threatens to become the lone surviving ideological support of color caste
in America.
In trying to understand how ordinary white people came to believe in
the Negro’s biological inferiority, we must observe that there was a shift
from theological to biological thinking after the eighteenth century. As
soon as the idea was spread that man belongs to the biological universe,
the conclusion that the Negro was biologically inferior was natural to the
unsophisticated white man. It is obvious to the ordinary unsophisticated
white man, from his everyday experience, that the Negro is inferior. And
inferior the Negro really is; so he shows up even under scientific study.
He is, on the average, poorer j
his body is more often deformed j
his
health is more precarious and his mortality rate higher; his intelligence
performance, manners, and morals are lower. The correct observation that
the Negro is inferior was tied up to the correct belief that man belongs
fo the biological universe, and, by twisting logic, the incorrect deduction
was made that the inferiority is biological in nature.
Race is a comparatively simple idea which easily becomes applied to
certain outward signs of ^‘social visibility,” such as physiognomy. Explana-
tions in terms of environment, on the contrary, tax knowledge and imagi-
nation heavily. It is difficult for the ordinary man to envisage clearly how
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