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Chapter 4. Racial Beliefs 105
tendency to relegate all educated Negroes to this group also belongs to the
defense system.*
Since he has a psychological need to believe the popular theory of Negro
racial inferiority, it is understandable why the ordinary white man is disin-
clined to hear about good qualities or achievements of Negroes. “The
merits of Negro soldiers should not be too warmly praised, especially in
the presence of Americans,” reads one of the advices which the French
Military Mission, stationed with the American Expeditionary Army during
the First World War, circulated but later withdrew.^® It should be added
that white people who work to help the Negro people and to improve race
relations see the strategic importance of this factor and direct their work
toward spreading information about Negroes of quality among the whites.
Another difficulty has always been the mulatto.*’ White Americans want
to keep biological distance from the out-race and will, therefore, be tempted
to discount the proportion of mulattoes and believe that a greater part of
the Negro people is pure bred than is warranted by the facts. A sort of
collective guilt on the part of white people for the large-scale miscegenation,
which has so apparently changed the racial character of the Negro people,
enforces this interest.
The literature on the Negro problem strengthens this hypothesis. Only
some exceptional authors, usually Negroes, gave more adequate estimates
of the proportion of mixed breeds,®^ and it was left to Hrdlicka and
Herskovits in the late ’twenties to set this whole problem on a more
scientific basis.^’ The under-enumeration of mulattoes by the census takers
decade after decade and also, until recently, the rather uncritical utilization
of this material, indicate a tendency toward bias. The observations of the
present author have, practically without exception, indicated that the non-
expert white population shows a systematic tendency grossly to under-
estimate the number of mulattoes in the Negro population.
It may, of course, be said against this assumption of a hidden purpose
that one should not assume the ability of uninformed and untrained persons
to distinguish a mulatto from a pure bred Negro. But the facts of historical
and actual miscegenation are fairly well known, at least in the South, and are
discussed with interest everywhere. And if a wrong estimate systematically
goes in the same direction, there is reason to ask for a cause. It has also
• See Chapter 3 1 . The term “uppity” is a Southern white man’s term for all Negroes
who try to rise, or have risen, out of the lower classes. Negroes use the term also, but are
more inclined to substitute “biggity” for it.
“The term “mulatto” is, according to American custom, understood to include all
Negroes of mixed ancestry, regardless of the degree of intermixture and the remoteness of
its occurrence. The term includes in addition to “true” mulattoes also quadroons and
octoroons and all other types of cross-breeds. In America they are all grouped with the
Negro race. (See Chapter 5, Section i.)
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