The Southern Case for School SegregationKilpatrick, James Jackson
History
The Southern Case for School Segregation
Kilpatrick, James Jackson
African Americans -- Segregation; Segregation -- Southern States
In general, however, this purported “stereotype” provides an accurate
and faithful mold of typical Negro behavior and personality. Are
these traits a consequence of racial inheritance? The overwhelmingly
popular view of anthropologists, social and physical, is that these
are _not_ innate characteristics. The entire school of Franz Boas,
embraced by Kluckhohn, Benedict, Klineberg, Clark, Rose, Comas,
Montagu, and many others, holds firmly, and in some cases almost
hysterically, that whatever lags may be observed in typically
Negro culture, as contrasted with typically white culture, these
shortcomings are entirely owing to environment. As the Group for the
Advancement of Psychiatry puts it, “these handicaps are a consequence
of racial discrimination rather than of racial inferiority.”
The view, however, is not unanimous, nor is the manner in which these
“environmental” views are advanced universally acclaimed.
“If we in America are going to make any sense out of the Supreme
Court’s desegregation decision,” Dr. Frank C. J. McGurk has remarked,
“we will have to be more factual about race differences and much
less emotional. We can have our dreams, if we like to dream, but we
should be willing to distinguish between dreams and reality. Already,
we have gone too far toward confusing these two things. As far as
psychological differences between Negroes and whites are concerned,
we have wished--and dreamed that there were no such differences. We
have identified this wish with reality, and on it we have established
a race relations policy that was so clearly a failure that we had to
appeal to distorting propaganda for its support.... There is ample
evidence that there are psychological differences between Negroes and
whites. Moreover, these differences are, today, of about the same
magnitude as they were two generations ago. These differences are not
the result of differences in social and economic opportunities, and
they will not disappear as the social and economic opportunities of
Negroes and whites are equalized.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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