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(1944) [MARC] Author: Gunnar Myrdal
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Note: Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.

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Chapter 4. Racial Beliefs 107
unreliability, their inborn lack of aptitude for sustained mental activity,
and, particularly, their lower intelligence, help to justify this vocational
segregation and to excuse the barriers against promotion of Negroes to
skilled and supervisory positions. The beliefs that the Negro race is
‘^childish,” immature, undeveloped, servile, lacking in initiative, are used
to justify the denial of full civic rights and suffrage to Negroes.
The Negroes presumed lower intelligence and the belief that the mind
of the Negro cannot be Improved beyond a given level have always been
main arguments for discrimination in education, and, specifically, for
directing Negro education toward developing his hands and not his brains.
The beliefs that Negroes have a much smaller cranial capacity and lower
brain weight, a less complicated brain structure, thicker skull bones, an
earlier closing of the cranial sutures, have a function to explain and fortify
the beliefs in the lesser development of the Negro’s higher brain centers
and, consequently, his lower intelligence and reasoning power.
The beliefs in the Negro’s inborn laziness and thriftlessness, his happy-
go-lucky nature, his lack of morals, his criminal tendencies, and so on,
serve the purpose of easing the conscience of the good, upright white
citizen when he thinks of the physical and moral slum conditions which
are allowed In the Negro sections of all communities in America. They also
rationalize the demand for housing segregation, and tend, on the whole,
to picture the Negro as a menace to orderly society unless ‘^kept In his
place” by the caste system. The exaggerated beliefs in the Negro’s higher
susceptibility to various diseases have, in particular, the function to explain,
in a way less compromising for the larger community, the high mortality
rates and the bad health conditions among the Negro population. Until
recently, these beliefs have discouraged all programs of health improve-
ment among Negroes.
The belief in a peculiar ^^hircine odor” of Negroes, like similar beliefs
concerning other races, touches a personal sphere and is useful to justify
the denial of social intercourse and the use of public conveniences which
would imply close contact, such as restaurants, theaters and public convey-
ances. It is remarkable that it does not hinder the utilization of Negroes in
even the most intimate household work and personal services.
There are many popular beliefs deprecating the mulatto: that they are
more criminally disposed even than Negroes in general; that they tend
to be sterile; that they—shaving parents of two distinct races—^are not
harmoniously proportioned, but have a trait of one parent side by side
with a trait of the other parent, paired in such a way that the two cannot
function together properly; that they are more susceptible to tuberculosis;
that, because Negroes have relatively long, narrow heads, Negro women,
with narrow pelvises, and their mulatto offspring are endangered when
they bear children of white men whose heads are rounder, and so on.

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