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CHAPTER II

RACE TRAITS

THAT in a general way heredity plays a large part in determining the individual's attitude toward society has already been suggested. The ideals that go to form the social setting into which every individual is born and which offer the framework for the unfolding of his personality make certain demands upon him from the hereditary and racial point of view. He must be able to learn and what he has to learn is predetermined very definitely by society.1 He must be born with a normal endowment in the way of reflexes and instincts which will insure his development into a social being in harmony with his environment. Even the simple group life of the savage requires of the child the ability to learn certain rites and customs and in the absence of this power he is ruthlessly eliminated. The narrow compass of the savage's social heritage prevents great range of individual variations-a fact of prime importance in the consideration of the race history of the negro.

1 Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations, pp. 80 ff.

In civilised society the individual born with innate traits that lead him to commit crime or to evince signs of moral degeneracy is eliminated. Likewise society denies its privileges to the imbecile or those so poorly endowed with powers of assimilation as to be unable to learn those fundamental categories of conduct that lie at the basis of the normal personality. This is, of course, necessary for the preservation of society. Where the majority of a group are either incapacitated for sharing in its common ideals or are by reason of hereditary traits antagonistic to its social traditions the group would speedily disintegrate. The ideals that make the coöperation of men in a democracy possible are not arbitrarily imposed from without. They are more than conventional. They persist and render effective communal action possible by virtue of the loyalty and sympathetic understanding of them by the individual. The greater the racial diversity of the citizenship, the greater therefore the problem of democracy.

The framers of our democracy were excusable in ignoring entirely the factors of race differences because their political ideals were for the most part inherited from a people which had attained ethnic homogeneity in the insular atmosphere of England. These ideals presuppose, therefore, a uniform background of race instincts and race traditions of which they

are the normal and rational expression. It is impossible to separate Magna Charta, Locke's Treatise on Government, or the Declaration of Independence from the genius of the English people. So intimate and vital are these ideas to us that we have been inclined to make of them a political fetish. Forgetting that in reality these conceptions of political liberty and of the rights of man are the creation of our own political race genius, we set them up as absolute, saying, "these be thy gods, O Israel, that brought thee up out of the land of Egypt and the house of bondage." In Reconstruction days these ideas received their first rude test when with a heaven-defying optimism we proceeded to apply them rigorously to all political recalcitrants, on the assumption apparently that they were the only and original form of democracy and, therefore, all sufficient. However, half a century's experience with the emancipated negro and contact with other races through immigration and our insular possessions have brought us to realise that race is an element which in a democracy especially cannot be ignored. This fact is also modifying somewhat our conception of democracy.1

What, then, are we to understand by race? The term has been variously defined, sometimes as some

1 See Commons' excellent chapter, "Race and Democracy," in his Races and Immigrants.

thing fixed and hereditary, sometimes as plastic and changeable. Struck by similarities in language and culture, some reason from them to underlying hereditary traits that are constant.1 Others, emphasising similarity of bodily characteristics such as colour, hair, skull, and skeleton, have arrived at similar conclusions. Observing the change and variety among races, another school concludes that race is a purely theoretical term and defines it biologically or sociologically according as they limit it to physiological or social processes. Writers cite in support of the theory of the plasticity of race: (1) the facts of race intermingling as it has taken place and is now going on, (2) the humanitarianism born of the doctrine of the oneness and essential equality of all men and inimical, therefore, to the idea of fixed race differentiations, and (3) the inspiration for effort which is destroyed by the idea of character being the result of race heredity. The theory as to the fixity of race has in its favor the indisputable fact that types persist, as in the case of the Hebrew and the negro, in the most widely divergent social and climatic conditions. "It is surprising," says Professor G. Stanley Hall, "to see how few of his aboriginal traits the negro has lost,

1 Gobineau, Driesmann.

2 LaPouge, Ammon.

Hertz, Moderne Rassentheorien, pp. 3 ff.

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although many of them are modified." Sir Harry H. Johnston, remarking upon the recrudescence of race traits in the negroes of Haiti, says, "In fact in almost all the features of their lives, except in dress, language, and rudeness of manners, the Haitian peasantry has returned to African conditions." "

When, as a result of natural selection operating upon a segment of the human family, there arises a group similar in origin, similar in offspring, reacting by virtue of similar endowments in the same way to external forces and guaranteeing through common hereditary characteristics the persistence of the general type it embodies, we have what may be called race. Race is therefore both fixed and changeable,, theoretical and real. Evolutionary biology seems to teach that temperamental racial differences arise. as parallels to the bodily differences produced through the pressure of environment. The maintenance of

1 "The Negro in Africa and America," Pedagogical Seminary, XII, p. 350.

2 The Negro in the New World, p. 194. Of special value in this connection is Tillinghast, The Negro in Africa and America. See also Semple, Influences of Geographical Environment, p. 120. A comparison of Chs. XXXIV-XXXIX of Dowd's The Negro Races with Odum's Social and Mental Traits of the Negro, or Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro will prove very illuminating.

'This is substantially the definition of Ploetz, “Die Begriffe Rasse und Gesellschaft und die davon abgeleiteten Disziplinen," Archive für Rassen- und Gesellschafts-Biologie, I, p. 7.

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