m to dismiss
in such a light-hearted way? Are they not based on fundamental
incompatibilities of racial temperament, which in turn are based on
differences in heredity? Modern sociologists for the main part have no
illusions as to the ease with which these differences in racial
tradition and custom can be removed.

The social heritage of the Negro has been described at great length and
often with little regard for fact, by hundreds of writers. Only a glance
can be given the subject here, but it may profitably be asked what the
Negro did when he was left to himself in Africa.

"The most striking feature of the African Negro is the low forms of
social organization, the lack of industrial and political cooperation,
and consequently the almost entire absence of social and national
self-consciousness. This rather than intellectual inferiority explains
the lack of social sympathy, the presence of such barbarous institutions
as cannibalism and slavery, the low position of woman, inefficiency in
the industrial and mechanical arts, the low type of group morals,
rudimentary art-sense, lack of race-pride and self-assertiveness, and in
intellectual and religious life largely synonymous with fetishism and
sorcery."[132]

An elementary knowledge of the history of Africa, or the more recent and
much-quoted example of Haiti, is sufficient to prove that the Negro's
own social heritage is at a level far below that of the whites among
whom he is living in the United States. No matter how much one may
admire some of the Negro's individual traits, one must admit that his
development of group traits is primitive, and suggests a mental
development which is also primitive.

If the number of original contributions which it has made to the world's
civilization is any fair criterion of the relative value of a race, then
the Negro race must be placed very near zero on the scale.[133]

The following historical considerations suggest that in comparison with
some other races the Negro race is germinally lacking in the higher
developments of intelligence:

1. That the Negro race in Africa has never, by its own initiative, risen
much above barbarism, although it has been exposed to a considerable
range of environments and has had abundant time in which to bring to
expression any inherited traits it may possess.

2. That when transplanted to a new environment--say, Haiti--and left to
its own resources, the Negro race has shown the same inability