Not to know the Negro on the group and historical level is to rob him of his pride and of his rightful share in the American heritage. He cannot claim what is his, except in an intorted and psychologically unhealthy way. The Negro on the lower levels saves himself from complete madness by following a pattern of neurotic expression that is patent in his lazy-lipped and mumbling speech, in his gay-bird dress, and in his prowlike walk. The Negro on the upper level turns back upon himself with a voracity of egocentrism that bewilders the casual observer. “What a self-conscious people your Negroes are!” a recent French visitor exclaimed. He was right. The Negro lives constantly on two planes of awareness. Watching the telecast of a boxing match between Ezzard Charles, the Negro who happened to be heavyweight champion, and a white challenger, a friend of mine said, “I don’t like Charles as a person [one level] but I’ve got to root for him to beat this white boy—and good [second level].” One’s heart is sickened at the realization of the primal energy that goes undeflected and unrefined into the sheer business of living as a Negro in the United States—in any one of the United States. Negroness is a kind of superconsciousness that directs thinking, that dictates action, and that perverts the expression of instinctual drives which are salutary and humanitarian—the civic drive, for instance, so that in general Negroes are cynically indifferent to politics; the societal drive, so that ordinarily the Negro’s concern is only with himself as an individual; and even the sex and love drive, so that many Negroes suffer sexual maladjustments and many a Negro couple refuse to bear children who will “inevitably grow up under a burden of obloquy and shame that would daunt and degrade a race of angels.” It is impossible to believe with Lillian Smith that the psychological damage caused by the race situation in America is greater to whites than to Negroes. “Every one of us knows,” an internationally known Negro said recently, “that there is no ‘normal’ American Negro.” Public asylums for the mentally deranged offer a telling statistic. Though Negroes are something less than ten per cent of the country’s population, they are eleven per cent of the total population of public institutions for the insane.