Let us move along. The story is told of a conversation between Boswell and Dr. Johnson, in which Boswell mentioned Bishop Berkeley’s theory of the nonexistence of matter. Boswell said he was satisfied the theory was not true, but he confessed he was unable to refute it. Whereupon Dr. Johnson kicked a large stone until his foot rebounded from it. “I refute it _thus_,” he said. There comes a time when the common, uncomplicated observation of ordinary men makes better sense than the partisan inventions of social anthropologists. Against their gauzy dreams of African “civilization,” the obscenities of the Mau Mau and the atrocities of the Congolese provide reality as hard as Dr. Johnson’s stone. One refutes it _thus_. In 1944, Otto Klineberg brought together in one volume several of the monographs prepared by American students on the Negro as background memoranda for Dr. Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish sociologist whose subsequent _An American Dilemma_ was to be seen generally, and influentially, by the Supreme Court of the United States. The first paper in Klineberg’s collection was put together by Dr. Guy B. Johnson, professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of North Carolina. Dr. Johnson served for three years as executive director of the liberal Southern Regional Council; he is a trustee of Howard University. These credentials strongly suggest that Dr. Johnson was picked by the Myrdal team to describe “the Stereotype of the American Negro” on the assumption that he would summarize the popular conception of the Negro only to say, in the end, that there isn’t a word of truth in it. If so, the Myrdal associates must have been startled by the blunt memorandum Dr. Johnson prepared. He went through the works of thirty-one representative Negro writers and forty-two representative white writers, covering the entire spectrum of political coloration, and boiled down his findings under twelve headings. His list, he emphasized, was not a list of “race” characteristics. It was “a descriptive list, based upon a fair degree of consensus, of the interests, habits and tendencies which might serve to characterize the ‘typical’ Negro.” This list of “Negro personality and culture traits” follows: _Mental_: Relatively low intellectual interests; good memory; facile associations of ideas. _Temperamental_: Gregariousness or high interest in social contacts; philosophical or get-the-most-out-of-life type of adjustment; high aesthetic interests; love of subtlety and indirection; adaptability. _Aesthetic_: Love of music and dance; oratory and power of self-expression; high interest in and appreciation of the artistic. _Economic_: Relatively low interest in material things, such as care of money, property, tools, etc.; line of least resistance in habits of work; relative lack of self-reliance.