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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 6. Racial Characteristics - 1. Physical Traits
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138 An American Dilemma
important because of the heterogeneous origin of the American population,
the samples are often too small to allow even for reliability in a formal
statistical sense, especially after differences in age and sex have been taken
into account. There are also differences in criteria and in techniques of
measurement utilized in the various studies which make comparisons
extremely hazardous. Some of these differences can be accounted for, but
some are hidden in the results and, consequently, unknown. Only when
the two groups have been studied by one investigator in one integrated
study is there full security on this point, but few such studies have been
madej and they have no claims to representativeness and reliability.®
The white population most often used for furnishing a standard set of
measurements of whites has been Hrdlicka’s Old Americans.^ HrdliCka’s
sample—which includes 900 complete and i,000 incomplete cases of indi-
viduals measured over a period of 15 years—is not, and was never meant
to be, representative of the white American population. It is instead a
sample of those white Americans whose ancestors had been longest in this
country—predominantly British, Germans and Scandinavians. To get his
sample, Hrdlicka took only Americans whose ancestors on both sides had
been in the United States for at least two generations. The exclusiveness
as to ancestral stock implied in this selection is coupled with a definite bias
toward including a disproportionate number of persons of high socio-
economic status. Only those ^‘Old Americans” who did not marry the
poorer immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were accepted as
proper ancestors to the individuals in the sample. An even stronger source
of bias in the same direction was Hrdlicka^s device of selecting persons
from patriotic societies, especially the Daughters of the American Revolu-
tion, and from large Eastern universities.’^ Also he made an intentional
selection of persons who were healthy and ‘‘normal.” The socio-economic
bias generally, and particularly the demand for healthiness and “normal-
ity,” must be considered to be the more important as several physical traits
are known, and some others are suspected, not to be true hereditary traits
but to be determined also by nutrition and other environmental factors.
Thus, to sum up, when Negroes are compared with whites, in the United
States, and Hrdlicka’s sample is used, they are compared with a vaguely
defined group of “normal,” healthy, white persons of Western European
ancestry in which the upper classes were heavily over-represented.
HrdliCka’s study has many outstanding qualities, but it offers a poor
substitute for the standard set of measurements of a representative sample
of the American white population needed for comparison when Negro
physical traits are to be determined;
It is no exaggeration to say that no physical difference between the
average American Negro and the average American white, not even differ-
ence in color, has yet been measured quantitatively by research methods
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