The Southern Case for School Segregation — John Shaqi
The Southern Case for School SegregationKilpatrick, James Jackson
History
The Southern Case for School Segregation
Kilpatrick, James Jackson
African Americans -- Segregation; Segregation -- Southern States
Dr. McGurk is associate professor of psychology at Villanova. The
quotation comes from his famous (or infamous, depending on one’s
point of view) article in _U. S. News & World Report_ of September
21, 1956. Several years later, Dr. McGurk provided an introduction
for Nathaniel Weyl’s _The Negro in American Civilization_, in which
he expanded briefly on the same theme. Weyl’s book, published by
Public Affairs Press in 1960, is an almost indispensable work to
the student of this subject who is sincerely interested in getting
“both sides.” (Another valuable work, also published by Public
Affairs Press, is Carleton Putnam’s _Race and Reason: A Yankee
View_; Putnam has driven the Liberal anthropologists practically
to apoplexy by the unfair tactic of reading their works and taking
them seriously--something no layman is expected to do. The rule is
that non-anthropologists must treat anthropologists respectfully,
even when anthropologists write nonsense). Like Putnam, Weyl was
raised and educated in the integrated North. He set out to write his
book with Northern preconceptions; but the more deeply he dug for
facts, the more he discovered that “material which passed for the
objective findings of social scientists could more accurately be
characterized as rationalizations and propaganda wearing academic cap
and gown.” He demonstrated the intellectual courage to abandon his
preconceived ideas, and to conclude after an exhaustive study that
“the presumption is strongly in favor of innate psychic differences.”
In his introduction, Dr. McGurk describes Weyl’s book as a refreshing
antidote to the one-sided, environmentalist argumentation that is
all most college students ever receive, and he goes on to urge that
from the standpoint of the scientist, the problem of race should
be studied in an objective manner: “Appeals to beliefs, morals,
ethics, or political philosophy are out of place; the issue is one
of fact.... Ethnic differences are facts. In the psychic area, these
differences are important facts. It seems much more sane to face
these differences and investigate their causes impartially than to
play ostrich about them.”
Let us go back, for a moment, to Dr. Johnson’s “stereotype.”
Manifestly, many of the characteristics he finds most widely
attributed to the Negro are incapable of statistical measurement.
Empirical data could not well be compiled, for example, on “relative
lack of self-reliance,” or “love of subtlety and indirection.” But
one characteristic found to be more typical of the Negro than of the
white is “high sexual indulgence, larger sphere of permissive sexual
relations, ... and high rate of illegitimacy.” The illegitimacy, at
least, can be statistically tabulated, and the appalling facts can be
faced.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account