The Liberal social anthropologists, to be sure, have denounced this reasonable hypothesis out of hand; and by effectively dominating the professional field, they have managed to elevate their own opinions to the status of truth, to promote speculation to the level of fact, and to convert surmise deftly into incontrovertible proof. I believe they have overdone it. They have lost their own case by their own disgraceful intemperance and intolerance of dissent; they protest too much; they cover up; they propagandize; they set out not to seek truth, but “to combat racial prejudice.” At the same time, I would insert a comment that some of the more intemperate protagonists on the segregationist Right have fallen into the same errors of positivism and unqualified statement. They have tended to think too much in blanket terms--in literal blacks and whites--and they have regularly overestimated the factors of heredity and underestimated the factors of environment. Their position would be improved if they simply acknowledged that the question of the Negro’s innate inferiority has not been proved and hence is still open. In terms of the problem immediately at hand, the question of whether the Negro’s shortcomings are “innate” seems to me largely irrelevant anyhow. The issue is not likely to be proved to the satisfaction of either side any time soon; it may not be susceptible of proof at all. Whether these characteristics are inherited or acquired, they _are_. And communities North and South (but especially in the South, and more especially still, in the rural South) must cope with conditions as they find them. The ruins of Zimbadwe are a long way from Prince Edward County, Virginia, and the finest analysis of electroencephalic findings among the Zulus is of small importance in teaching a class of Alabama sixth-graders. The arguments of anthropology are of interest to the South, and I would not wish to leave any impression that would minimize their importance; the fear of ultimate racial interbreeding, encouraged by prospective generations of desegregated and integrated school systems, is a very real fear in the South and not an imagined one. If these Negro characteristics are innate, the white Southerner sees nothing but disaster to his race in risking an accelerated intermingling of blood lines. And even if these Negro characteristics are not innate, the white Southerner wants no intimate association with them anyhow. And he is determined not to let his children be guinea pigs for any man’s social experiment. VII