Sociology and Modern Social Problems

by Charles A. Ellwood

It may be noted, however, that taking racial heredity into full account by no means leads to an attitude of fatalism as regards racial problems. On the contrary modern biology clearly teaches that racial heredity is modifiable both in the individual and in the race. It is modifiable in the individual through education or training; it is modifiable in the race through selection. Therefore racial heredity does not foredoom any people to remain in a low status of culture; only it must be taken into account in explaining the cultural conditions of all peoples, and especially in planning for a people's social amelioration.

The Racial Heredity of the Negro.—It is generally agreed by anthropologists and biologists that mankind constitutes but a single species, developed from a single pre-human anthropoid stock. The various races of mankind have had, therefore, a common origin, but having developed in different geographical areas they each present certain peculiar racial traits adapting each to the environment in which it was developed. Now, the negro race is that part of mankind which was developed in the tropics. In all the negro's physical and mental make-up he shows complete adaptation to a tropical environment. The dark color of his skin, for example, was developed by natural selection to exclude the injurious actinic rays of the sun. The various ways in which the negro's tropical environment influenced the development of his mind, particularly of his instincts, cannot be here entered into in detail. Suffice to say that the African environment of the ancestors of the present negroes in the United States deeply stamped itself upon the mental traits and tendencies of the race. For example, the tropical environment is generally unfavorable to severe bodily labor. Persons who work hard in the tropics are, in other words, apt to be eliminated by natural selection. On the other hand, nature furnishes a bountiful supply of food without much labor. Hence, the tropical environment of the negro failed to develop in him any instinct to work, but favored the survival of those naturally shiftless and lazy. Again, the extremely high death rate in Africa necessitated a correspondingly high birth rate in order that any race living there might survive; hence, nature fixed in the negro strong sexual propensities in order to secure such a high birth rate.

It is not claimed that the shiftlessness and sensuality of the masses of the American negroes to-day can be wholly attributed to hereditary influences, but it would be a great mistake to suppose that the African environment did not have something to do with these two dominant characteristics of the present American negro. So we might go through the whole list of the conspicuous traits and tendencies of the American negro, and in practically every case we would find good reason for believing that these racial traits and tendencies are at least in part instinctive, that is, due to the influence of racial heredity.

The question is frequently raised whether the negro is inferior by nature to the white man or not. It is obvious from what has been said that the negro may, on the side of his instinctive or hereditary equipment, be inferior to the white man in his natural adaptiveness to a complex civilization existing under very different climatic conditions from those in which he was evolved. This does not mean, however, that the negro is in any sense a degenerate. On the contrary, from the point of view of a tropical environment, as we have already made plain, the negro may be regarded as the white man's superior. It is only in countries out of his own natural environment, under strange conditions of life to which he has not yet become biologically adapted, that the negro is inferior to the white man. In Africa he is the white man's superior if we adopt survival as the test of superiority.

Influence of Slavery on the Negro.—There is no longer any doubt that the influence of slavery on the negro, as a form of industry, was both beneficent and maleficent. The negroes brought to America by the slave traders were subject to a very severe artificial selection, which, perhaps, secured a better type of negro physically on the whole, and a more docile type mentally; but the chief beneficent influence of slavery on the negro was that it taught him to work, to some extent at least. Moreover, it gave the negro the Anglo-Saxon tongue and the rudiments of our morality, religion, and civilization.

On the other hand, slavery did not fit the individual or the race for a life of freedom, and did not raise moral standards much above those of Africa. The monogamic form of the family was, to be sure, enforced upon the slaves, but the family life was often broken up; for even when the owner of the slaves was kind-hearted and humane, on his death his property would be sold and the families of his slaves scattered. Under such conditions it is not surprising that the negro learned little of family morality. Again, being property himself, the negro could not be taught properly to appreciate the rights of property. Finally slavery failed to develop in the slave that self-mastery and self-control which are necessary for free social life. Admirable as slavery was in some ways as a school for an uncultivated people, it failed utterly in other ways; and it surely should not be difficult to devise methods of training at the present time which are superior to anything that slavery as a school for the industrial training of the negro could possibly have accomplished.

Statistics of the Negro Problem in the United States. The following table will show the percentage of negroes in the population of the United States at different decades (Negro, in census terminology, includes all persons of negro descent):

Per cent.

1790 …………………………….. 19.37 1800 …………………………….. 18.88 1810 …………………………….. 19.03 1830 …………………………….. 18.10 1840 …………………………….. 16.84 1850 …………………………….. 15.69 1860 …………………………….. 14.13 1870 …………………………….. 12.60 1880 …………………………….. 13.12 1890 …………………………….. 11.93 1900 …………………………….. 11.63

In 1860 the total number of negroes in the population of the United States was 4,441,000. Forty years later, in 1900, the number had just doubled, having reached 8,840,000. Nevertheless, it will be seen from the above table that the percentage of negroes in the total population has steadily diminished, although the negro population doubled between 1860 and 1900. Between 1890 and 1900 the comparative rates of increase for the whites and negroes were: whites, 21.49 Per cent; negroes, 18.10 per cent.