The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919Various
History
The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919
Various
African Americans -- Periodicals
Finally we have societies growing up, as in the United States, by
immigration. These immigrants, coming as they do from all parts of the
world, bring with them fragments of divergent cultures. Here again the
process of assimilation is slow, often painful, not always complete.
In the case where societies are formed and maintained by adoption,
that is by immigration, the question arises: How far is it possible
for a people of a different race and a different culture to take over
the traditions and social inheritance of another and an alien people?
What are the conditions which facilitate this transmission and, in
general, what happens when people of different races and cultures are
brought together in the intimate relations of community life?
These questions have already arisen in connection with the education
of the Negro in America and with the work of foreign missions. If the
schools are to extend and rationalize the work they are already doing
in the Americanization of the immigrant peoples, questions of this
sort may become actual in the field of pedagogy. This paper is mainly
concerned with the Negro, not because the case of the Negro is more
urgent than or essentially different from that of the immigrant, but
because the materials for investigation are more accessible.
Admitting, as the anthropologists now seem disposed to do, that the
average native intelligence in the races is about the same, we may
still expect to find in different races certain special traits and
tendencies which rest on biological rather than cultural differences.
For example, over and above all differences of language, custom or
historic tradition, it is to be presumed that Teuton and Latin, the
Negro and the Jew--to compare the most primitive with the most
sophisticated of peoples--have certain racial aptitudes, certain
innate and characteristic differences of temperament which manifest
themselves especially in the objects of attention, in tastes and in
talents. Is the Jewish intellectual, for example, a manifestation of
an original and peculiar endowment of the Jewish race or is he rather
a product of traditional interest and emphasis characteristic of
Jewish people--a characteristic which may be explained as an
accommodation to the long-continued urban environment of the race?[2]
Is the Negro's undoubted interest in music and taste for bright
colors, commonly attributed to the race, to be regarded as an inherent
and racial trait or is it merely the characteristic of primitive
people? Is Catholicism to be regarded as the natural manifestation of
the Latin temperament as it has been said that Protestantism is of the
Teutonic?
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