nifested
in the external events of the Negro's life in America, our analysis
suggests that this racial character of the Negro has exhibited itself
everywhere in something like the role of the _wish_ in the Freudian
analysis of dream-life. The external cultural forms which he found here,
like the memories of the individual, have furnished the materials in
which the racial wish, i.e., the Negro temperament, has clothed itself.
The inner meaning, the sentiment, the emphasis, the emotional color,
which these forms assumed as the result of their transference from the
white man to the Negro, these have been the Negro's own. They have
represented his temperament--his temperament modified, however, by his
experience and the tradition which he has accumulated in this country.
The temperament is African, but the tradition is American.

If it is true that the Jew just because of his intellectuality is a
natural-born idealist, internationalist, doctrinaire, and revolutionist,
while the Negro, because of his natural attachment to known familiar
objects, places, and persons, is pre-adapted to conservatism and to
local and personal loyalties--if these things are true, we shall
eventually have to take account of them practically. It is certain that
the Negro has uniformly shown a disposition to loyalty during slavery to
his master and during freedom to the South and the country as a whole.
He has maintained this attitude of loyalty, too, under very discouraging
circumstances. I once heard Kelly Miller, the most philosophical of the
leaders and teachers of his race, say in a public speech that one of the
greatest hardships the Negro suffered in this country was due to the
fact that he was not permitted to be patriotic.

Of course all these alleged racial characteristics have a positive as
well as a negative significance. Every race, like every individual, has
the vices of its virtues. The question remains still to what extent
so-called racial characteristics are actually racial, i.e., biological,
and to what extent they are the effect of environmental conditions. The
thesis of this paper, to state it again, is: (1) that fundamental
temperamental qualities, which are the basis of interest and attention,
act as selective agencies and as such determine what elements in the
cultural environment each race will select; in what region it will seek
and find its vocation in the larger social organization; (2) that, on
the other hand, technique,