And if there were truth in the myths, passing would be all but impossible. The black blood would tell in real life as it is so frequently made to do in fiction. Industrialists and other employers would detect it in absenteeism, gold-bricking and general shiftlessness. Psychologists would spot it by behavior indexes—unmodulated speech, flashy clothes and other forms of exhibitionism. Physiologists would detect it in the shape and tincture of the fingernails and in the thickness of the skull. Anatomists would see it in “the curious heel structure” (which was supposed to account for the speed of Jesse Owens, Ralph Metcalfe, _et al._!) of the Negro male and in the peculiar “ovoid shape of the [Negro] female’s buttocks.”[11] Psychiatrists would mark it in overt aggressive tendencies, or in other forms of emotional infantilism, or in a total absence of emotional response. And everyone would detect it in the “rusty,” “acrid,” “unbearable” odor that Negroes give off. 14 While I am in a petulant mood, let me say that I am race-conscious enough to be shocked and irritated frequently by what even professed white friends do not know, on both the personal and historical level, about Negroes. There is a glaring case in point. During her husband’s administration, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt became acquainted with a black, bosomy and intensely dynamic woman named Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune. The Negro woman was then Deputy Administrator of NYA, and through her the President’s wife, a sincere and fearless woman, got closely involved with the race problem. The white South fretted over the spectacle of Mrs. Roosevelt being shepherded through the intricate mazes of racial and interracial affairs. It was alleged (and the South, as did Negroes everywhere, took it for truth) that Mrs. Bethune, through Mrs. Roosevelt, had special rights to the President’s ear. She certainly seemed to have such rights to the ear of F.D.R.’s wife. More than one photograph shows the two women in earnest conversation in what seem to be intimate circumstances. Mrs. Bethune is very much alive. She is frequently mentioned and pictured in the colored press. She is ex-president of the National Federation of Colored Women. She took a dominant part in a conference on old age at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington in 1950. She spoke at perhaps a half dozen major college commencements in 1951. But in her book _This I Remember_, written in 1949, Mrs. Roosevelt, after words of heartening warmth for the black woman, refers to her as “the late [dead, deceased!] Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune.” Mrs. Roosevelt’s reputation (earned at the cost of great personal criticism) for knowledge about and interest in Negroes, for liberalism, for social intelligence and tact is as a broad pen stroke underscoring the pattern of false belief and cavalier know-nothing-about-the-Negro attitude to which the majority conforms. Yet even she could make this error!