“Basing their ideas on the concept of the brotherhood of man,” Coon comments sharply, “certain writers, who are mostly social anthropologists, consider it immoral to study race, and produce book after book deploring it as a ‘myth.’ Their argument is that because the study of race once gave ammunition to racial fascists, who misused it, we should pretend that races do not exist. Their prudery about race is equaled only by their horror of Victorian prudery about sex. These writers are not physical anthropologists, but the public does not know the difference.”
Typical of the doctrinaire Liberals who shrink from the very notion of race are the scientists who make up the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. In their disdainful view, race is no more than a “myth.” In particular, the Group denounces the “myths which have grown up about the Negro.” These “myths,” it is said, serve merely to rationalize and to justify the white man’s disparaging attitudes, because he cannot clearly recognize or understand the real source of his prejudice. We should realize, says the Group, that such “myth formation” psychologically seeks to protect individual and group security; and if we realize that, we can better understand why the “myths of prejudice” are so resistive to logic: The powerful need for safety, which “the myth” is created to insure, explains why it is clung to despite facts and logic to the contrary. Moreover, the damaging consequences of “racial myths” are misconstrued as evidence to support them.
Ashley Montagu has suggested, in Human Heredity, that the very word race be struck from the English language. There is, he says, “sound sense in the argument that the long-standing abuse of the meaning of a word constitutes the best reason for its total exclusion from common usage.” Unsound words make for unsound ideas, and the unsound ideas tend to result in unsound action: “The word ‘race’ is a horrid example.” To Dr. Montagu, race is a notion, a myth, a fallacy, an error. In the sense that the term suggests distinguishing characteristics on the part of a particular people, “the word is beyond rescue and it had better be dropped altogether.” He suggests that the term “ethnic group” be employed instead, and the most he will concede is that “slight differences may exist between some ethnic groups in the frequencies of certain genes underlying mental capacity.” This is possible, says Dr. Montagu, “but in spite of all attempts, no one has, in fact, ever demonstrated that they do.”
Otto Klineberg, who cannot bring himself to write the words race or racial without putting them in quotation marks, says the same thing: “In all probability, inherent intellectual differences between Negroes and whites do not exist.” Other writers—Kenneth Clark and Ruth Benedict, for example—are impatient with such academic impedimenta as “probabilities.” More in anger than in sorrow, they denounce the bigoted Southerner, who dares to suggest that in terms of his capacity to adjust fully to Western values, the Negro may be innately inferior. The very idea! And any recourse by the Southerner to history, as Miss Benedict puts it, is mere “special pleading.” All good historians know of the greatness of Negro achievements. To doubt this truth is to substitute for historical processes “an unashamed racial megalomania.” This is a “travesty of fact.”
In 1960, a group of distinguished anthropologists, psychologists, and social scientists, rebelling against the obstinate attitudes of the Benedict-Montagu school, launched a small publication in Edinburgh, The Mankind Quarterly. They ventured to suggest that some of these questions of “race” are not altogether closed; they commented that it was a pity to see responsible scientists so influenced by emotion and political bias that they had closed their minds to objective inquiry; and the editors proposed to publish occasional monographs exploring aspects of these issues that were banned from exploration elsewhere. Mankind Quarterly scarcely had raised its mild voice before shrill cries from the Liberal left united in a ritual chorus of denunciation. Late in 1961, the chief editor, Dr. R. Gayre of Gayre, replied to his assailants in an editorial that sums up so much of the Southern view on these matters that I should like to quote from it at some length. He began by expressing regret that persons who do not slavishly subscribe to egalitarian dogmas should be denounced automatically as “racialists” and their teachings condemned as “racism.” He continued:
The fear of being so abused has for the last one or two decades been sufficient to silence many, if not most, scholars and prevent them from writing what they believed and thought to be the facts in connection with anthropological subjects. They have, in the main, confined themselves to negative action, such as protesting when the notorious UNESCO pamphlet on race was produced, and being happy to gain, as a result, some modification of the more extreme and nonsensical assertions of the a-racist egalitarians.
That there has been such a clearly marked reactionary influence, if not domination, over our studies, is so patently obvious that it hardly needs to be stressed. Even those who have not subscribed to any form of political doctrine have felt it safer to make interpretations of the facts of race and heredity in such terms that they can bear a clearly egalitarian interpretation.... The anxiety which is shown to suppress publications and expositions which do not support egalitarianism is entirely consistent with this political direction of, and domination over, science....
[W]e wish to state categorically what are the views of the editors on the matter of racial equality. While rejecting racial egalitarianism as having no warranty in honest scientific expositions and investigations, we do not, on the other hand, subscribe to doctrines of racial superiority or inferiority. We believe that just as all individuals within a particular stock are different, so is one racial group in relation to another. In respect of some characters, various stocks will be superior to others; and in other cases inferior; but in many cases no perceptible differences may be apparent. While environment, both physical and social, may influence these characters, we believe that heredity is by far the most important single factor, and the current fashion to eschew the significance of heredity is a definite disservice to the understanding of what makes for differences in the various characters which distinguish one group from another.
Furthermore, we do not presume to judge what is desirably superior or not. We think that within the ambit of the type of civilizations erected by the White-Brown stocks or the Yellow races, the Black, which has shown no natural predilection to that form of organization, will be at a disadvantage in any competition—and is in that sense inferior. After all, a priori considerations alone would lead to this conclusion, and if modern science thinks this is not the case, it has yet to show why and how the Melanoids have remained technologically backward compared to both the Mongoloids and the Caucasoids. For the Egyptian civilization, which was basically Caucasoid (Mediterranean, Atlantic, Nordic, and Armenoid strains being the basis of that nationality), abutted on the Negroid world of Africa, and its ideas were there to be accepted and copied, so that urban technological civilizations could have been erected in Africa, if that way of life had appealed to the inherent Negroid genius and temperament. It is only within this last millennium that certain ideas generated in Egypt four millennia ago began to reach West Africa—long after the Nile Valley civilization had decayed and disappeared.
H. L. Mencken once remarked that the most costly of all follies, which he viewed as the chief occupation of mankind, is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. The aphorism applies with special force to the Negrophile social anthropologists who are so passionately determined to propound that which is palpably not true, or at least palpably not demonstrable, that in their zeal of advocacy they lose all sense of proportion. Thus, in their raptures, the most primitive mud-hut cultures of the Congo must be praised for their “sophistication” and “complexity.” Crude works of art tend to be equated with the sculpture of Periclean Athens. In the rhythmic thump of an African tom-tom, they find black Beethovens at work. Miss Benedict, in Race: Science and Politics, is fairly transported. Her technicolor illusions of African history produce “great kingdoms of wealth and splendor ... great political leaders ... men of wealth ... the spread of higher culture.” In seventeenth-century Nigeria, she sees “prized cultural achievements,” and of these African tribes she girlishly cries that “their elaborate and ceremonious political organization, the pomp of their courts, the activity of their far-flung economic life, with its great market centers and tribute collected over great areas, their legal systems with formal trial of the accused, with witnesses and with prosecutors—all these excite the admiration of any student.”