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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 4. Racial Beliefs - 10. The Study of Beliefs
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Chapter 4. Racial Beliefs
performed in order to free science itself from the load of inherited racial
bias. Another task which, in the end, might turn out to be of equal practical
importance and which has a more central theoretical relevance is to study
the racial beliefs themselves as social facts: to record them carefully; to
analyze their causation and explain their role in people^s emotions,
thoughts, and actions; their ^^function” in the caste order of American
society.
Practically nothing has been done in a comprehensive and systematic
compass to study the popular racial beliefs as social facts.®® The racial
beliefs have not even been recorded in a scientifically controlled manner.
It is true that the beliefs can be perceived by an observer in America. They
can also be recorded from the press and the popular literature. Selected
fragments of evidence on various sectors of racial beliefs have, for a long
time, been recorded in the scientific literature on the Negro problem.®®
Until a few decades ago, however, even this literature had more the charac-
ter of folklore itself than of a study of folklore. Impressionistic information
of this type permits discussion of the problem in a hypothetical manner.
It allows the outlining of a problem for study but not its solution. The
foregoing pages are written in this vein. In order to lay the factual basis
for a truly scientific analysis, which is more than suggestive and conjectural
in character, beliefs must be observed and recorded in a systematic way
under controlled research conditions?^
In such studies the assumption should be that feople^s beliefs are not
necessarily consistent. The utmost care should be taken not to press upon
the informants a greater systematic order than there actually exists in theii
beliefs. For our assumption is, further, that the very inconsistencies are
illuminating and of highest importance, particularly for the analytical
approach to the deeper problem of the causation of the beliefs. Our hypo-
thesis is that the beliefs are opportunistic and have the “function” to defend
interests. The ordinary Americanos interests in the Negro problem should
not be assumed to be simple and harmonious. They are, instead, complicated
and conflicting. The conflicts are largely suppressed and only vaguely
conscious.
The analysis of the racial beliefs will, therefore, reach down to the
deeper-seated conflicts of valuations. As people’s thought, speech, and
behavior regularly are in the nature of moral compromises, this deeper
analysis cannot be accomplished simply by recording and systematizing
the actual beliefs themselves, but must endeavor—^by comparing various
beliefs and particularly their inconsistencies—to understand them by infer-
ences as to their “function” in the individual’s opportunistic world view.
In this deeper analysis—and only in this stage of the belief study—the
scientific facts of race and racial traits become of importance. They have
no direct importance per se\ indirectly they are of importance in that they
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