A great many white Southerners accept this thesis implicitly and unquestioningly; they infer the innate “inferiority” of the typical Negro, in terms of Western cultural values, simply on the basis of their lifelong observation of the Negro people about them. No other explanation appeals to their common sense, or to their native prejudice, or to both. This is something they _know_, and they profess to know it not in anthropological terms (the weight of brains, the pigmentation of skins, the length of appendages, the formation of skull and jaw), but in terms of ordinary human observation. I incline toward this view myself, but I certainly would not assert, as Myrdal asserts the contrary, that I “know” it to be true. I would be agreeable to accepting the temperate and tentative conclusion voiced by Professor G. M. Morant, of England, in a most unlikely place--an essay in UNESCO’s _Race and Prejudice_ (Columbia, 1961). The volume as a whole is almost worthless to the objective student; most of the essays are no more than special pleading by propagandists against racial prejudice. But Morant examines the evidence of intelligence tests and other data with a scientist’s objectivity, and he concludes by saying this: “There seems to be no reason why the general rule regarding variation within and between groups should not apply to mental as well as to physical characters. If variable characters of the former kind showed identical distributions for all racial populations, that would be a situation unparalleled, as far as is known, as regards any physical character in man or in any other animal. It seems to be impossible to evade the conclusion that some racial differences in mental characters must be expected. Existing evidence may not be extensive and cogent enough to reveal them, but it must be inferred that some exist....” Morant makes the point, in analyzing intelligence-test scores, that obviously white and Negro scores overlap. Consistently, the most superior Negroes will score higher as a group than the most inferior whites as a group. Moreover, the difference between the average scores of two racial populations may be quite small compared with the range of scores in either group. But even when this is so, says Morant, “there may be a marked difference between the relative frequencies in the population of individuals having extreme values of the measurement.” And this distinction may be important in the case of some mental characteristics: “There may be almost equal proportions of stupid, mediocre, and able people in two populations; even so, exceptional ability may be found with a frequency of 1 in 1,000 in one group, and of 1 in 10,000 in the other. Having a larger proportion of exceptionally able members may be a factor which tells decisively in favor of a population in the course of centuries or millenniums.”