But if this is a _fact_, how did it get to be a fact? How “of course”? Is the question of innate aptitudes and characteristics no more arguable than the sum of two plus two? Is the flat statement that “the Negro possesses the same capacities and potentialities as the white” to be regarded on a level with “Washington was the first President,” or “the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the square of its other two sides”? If this “fact” has in truth been so positively established, discussion of the subject is wholly pointless; nothing remains to be said, and those readers whose minds are closed to reconsideration will flee from these pages and soothe their wounded sensibilities with the balm of Ashley Montagu’s hairless prose. But those who are agreeable to pursuing truth, _wherever the quest may lead them_, will stick around; they will keep their minds open; they will acknowledge at least an outside possibility that the disciples of Boas and Klineberg could be in error; they will formulate questions, and they will insist upon honest and straightforward answers to them. And if intellectually satisfying answers to their questions cannot be adduced, they will honestly acknowledge at the end: _The question is still open._ Now, that is all the defense can ask. Few Southerners have made any serious attempt to read up on anthropology or to acquaint themselves with the results of intelligence tests. Their judgments and attitudes--or if you please, their prejudices--are based largely upon personal observation, instinct, upbringing, the cumulative experiences of a lifetime, stored up day by day and hour by hour. An advocate for the South does not wish to be dogmatic. He does not insist that the South has all the right answers. He does not say, “the _fact_ is, _of course_.” But the South does suggest that it raises some of the right questions. Even to raise the right questions has become an almost impossible undertaking in today’s emotionally charged atmosphere. For the past twenty years at least (I write in 1962), a systematic and well-financed campaign has been under way to obliterate the entire concept of race. This calculated perversion of honest scholarship has drawn a rebuke from Dr. Carleton S. Coon, one of the world’s foremost anthropologists, who himself believes that classification by race “is a nuisance.” In _The Story of Man_, Coon departs from his masterly narrative long enough to register a serious protest against the activities “of the academic debunkers and soft-pedalers who operate inside anthropology itself.”