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Chapter 5. Race and Ancestry 117
of individuals, has tremendous cultural consequences. Under the
exposure of science and education the white people in America might, in
times to come, gradually rectify their opportunistic beliefs and even change
their valuations to agree more with the national Creed of justice and
equality of opportunity, so that these cultural consequences will be
mitigated or obliterated. But for the time being, this is not so.
From one viewpoint the entire Negro problem in America hinges upon
this social definition of ^^race.” Should America wake up one morning with
all knowledge about the African ancestry of part of its population and all
memories of color caste absolutely forgotten and find all the outward
physical characteristics of the Negro people eradicated, but no change in
their mental or moral characteristics, nothing we know about this group
and other population groups in America would lead us to believe that
the American Negro would not rapidly come to fit in as a well-adjusted
ordinary American. His poverty and general backwardness would mean
a low starting point and cause a larger portion of this population group to
remain in the lower social strata. But, having been relieved of the specific
caste deprivations and hindrances, his relative preponderance in the dis-
advantaged classes would, from the beginning, decrease.
His earlier relative isolation in America through slavery and subor-
dinate caste position and, perhaps, also a few faint traditions and customs
kept from Africa, would, for a time, endow him with remnants of some
peculiar cultural and personality traits. But they would be negligible even
in the beginning—if, as we assume, they are unrelated through social
visibility to his caste status—compared with the much more glaring and
‘^non-American” peculiarities of various groups of recent immigrants.
But this is only a dream. The Negro has to be defined according to
social usage, and his African ancestry and physical characteristics are fixed
to his person much more ineffaceably than the yellow star is fixed to the
Jew during the Nazi regime in Germany. With the social definition comes
the whole stock of valuations, beliefs, and expectations in the two groups,
causing and constituting the order of color caste in America.
This defines our problem in this and the next chapters. Our task is to
describe the ancestry and the characteristics of this clearly delineated social
group in America which is known under the somewhat incorrect term
of the Negro “race.”
2. African Ancestry
Part of the ancestry of the American Negro people is African, and it
is proper to start out from this line of parentage as it is the one from which
their name and status are derived. Too, the fact must not be ignored that
the major proportion of their ancestors, back to the time of the first con-
tact between Negroes and whites, is African Negro.®
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