The common belief runs that the white girl who marries a Negro is morally depraved and certainly sexually abnormal, for no _normal_ white woman could possibly enjoy the average Negro’s savage sexual potency. As for the white man who marries a Negro woman, he will soon “tire of her extraordinary sensuality and return to the safer, saner sex practices” of his own kind. Such assertions, made by the majority race with all the blatant insistence of an uneasy conscience, have conditioned the Negro sufficiently to prevent his speaking out in favor of intermarriage. But no one has bothered to validate the declarations of sexual incompatibility between the races with scientific investigations. (No one, so far as I know, has made a study, for instance, of the comparative sexuality of the Negro American and the white American.) That such incompatibility exists between normal individuals of the two races is an emotion-based assumption which finds sanction and support in statutes prohibiting intermarriage. Such statutes seem to me to be the most fundamental expression of the human inequality to which the Negro is subjected. They strike at the deepest roots of personal dignity and self-respect. It is one thing, and a very good thing, to be acknowledged as a first-class citizen: it is another and a better thing to be acknowledged a first-class human being. This is the ultimate civility. But if the assumption of sexual incompatibility is based in emotion, the beliefs about miscegenation are founded on pure mythology. The myths about Negro-white blood mixture are a curious interweaving of the biological, the moral and the social. The myths are contradictory enough to be mutually exclusive, but emotionalism absorbs the contradictions. In the first place, quite contrary to all other blood-group designations, in America anyone having a single drop of Negro blood is classed as a Negro. In as much as this practice was thought to place a restraint on interracial concubinage (though during slavery its real purpose was to increase the number of human chattels), it once had a kind of left-handed moral sanction. Since that time it has become a national habit and is solidified by law in the Southern states. It has engendered beliefs as irrational and as inexplicable as nightmares.