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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - X. The Negro Community - 43. Institutions - 1. The Negro Community as a Pathological Form of an American Community - 2. The Negro Family
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930 An American Dilemma
troversy on social causation has come to turn on the question of the impor-
tance of the African heritage. To a long line of writers, the African heritage
has been regarded as a sign of the Negro’s lack of capacity for higher civi-
lization. Those writers usually attached their interest to the unfavorable
traits they attributed to the Negro: criminality, amorality, lack of ability for
organized social life, little talent for inventiveness, and so on. On the other
hand, a modern school of anthropologists and historians, trying to appreciate
the Negro, shows an equal, though opposite, selectivene^s in their interest.
They attempt, for instance, to derive Negro music, dancing, and art from
Africa and to describe peculiarities in religion and the mother-centered
family as an African heritage, while they leave crime and amorality to be
explained by white pressure. Melville J. Herskovits and Carter G. Wood-
son represent this tendency.® Others, like E. Franklin Frazier, have
regarded the African heritage as insignificant and have sought the explana-
tion in the special circumstances connected with slavery and caste.^ The
latter theory may be said to be predominant in sociological literature.
There are certain variations of the latter theory: some would prefer to
think of Negro Institutions as ^^accommodations” to slavery and caste
conditions j
some would prefer to think of them as the results of isolation
due to slavery and caste j
others would prefer to think of Negro institutions
as a case of ‘‘cultural lag” because of the existence of slavery and caste.*^
Here the interest Is in the fact that American Negro culture is somewhat
different from the general American culture, that this difference is generally
created by American conditions even if some of the specific forms are
African in origin, and that the difference is significant for Negroes and for
the relations between Negroes and whites.^^
2. The Negro Family
The recent book by E. Franklin Frazier, TAe Negro Family in the United
States (1939), is such an excellent description and analysis of the American
‘ Sec Chapter 35, Section 9.
**
It cannot be said that either of these theories, or the theory of a predominant African
heritage, is scientifically proved. The historical evidence is usually so incomplete that, with
some selectiveness on the part of the particular writer, it can easily be fitted into any theory
without proving it. Also, there is no reason why all the theories could not be correct to a
certain degree. For example, the practice of baptism is prevalent among American Negroes
and is also to be found among African Negroes and American whites: it may have been that
the African cult sensitized and predisposed Negroes to like baptism, but the specific pattern
was adopted from white Americans. The scientific problem, which is largely unsolved, is to
show comprehensively how, in specific respects, present-day Negro culture developed when
the Negro slaves—who were certainly not without culture when they reached America—had
to live on for generations under the specific circumstances created for them in America.
• We do not mean to say that the difference between the two theories is not important in
either a theoretical or a practical sense. We have considered the practical significance of
Herskovits’ theory in Chapter 35, Section 9,
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