The view, however, is not unanimous, nor is the manner in which these “environmental” views are advanced universally acclaimed.
“If we in America are going to make any sense out of the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision,” Dr. Frank C. J. McGurk has remarked, “we will have to be more factual about race differences and much less emotional. We can have our dreams, if we like to dream, but we should be willing to distinguish between dreams and reality. Already, we have gone too far toward confusing these two things. As far as psychological differences between Negroes and whites are concerned, we have wished—and dreamed that there were no such differences. We have identified this wish with reality, and on it we have established a race relations policy that was so clearly a failure that we had to appeal to distorting propaganda for its support.... There is ample evidence that there are psychological differences between Negroes and whites. Moreover, these differences are, today, of about the same magnitude as they were two generations ago. These differences are not the result of differences in social and economic opportunities, and they will not disappear as the social and economic opportunities of Negroes and whites are equalized.”
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.
What are the facts? First, the illegitimacy rate among Negroes in this country is roughly ten times the illegitimacy rate among whites. Second, the condition is not improving, but on the contrary appears in many areas to be growing worse. Third, a disproportionately high rate of illegitimacy among Negroes obtains not only in the South, but throughout the United States.
These are the grim figures from the National Office of Vital Statistics:
| Illegitimates as a Percentage of Total Live Births | |||||
| United States, 1940-1959 | |||||
| 1940 | 1945 | 1950 | 1955 | 1959 | |
| White | 1.95 | 2.36 | 1.75 | 1.86 | 2.21 |
| Nonwhite | 16.83 | 17.93 | 17.96 | 20.24 | 21.80 |
Consider the record in two Southern States, Mississippi and Virginia. Here are the figures from Mississippi:
| Illegitimate Births, Mississippi, 1935-1960 | ||||||
| WHITE | NEGRO | |||||
| Per cent | Per cent | Per cent | ||||
| of all | All White | All Negro | ||||
| Year | Number | Births | Number | Births | Number | Births |
| 1960 | 8,407 | 14.2 | 388 | 1.4 | 8,019 | 25.0 |
| 1959 | 8,091 | 13.4 | 370 | 1.3 | 7,721 | 23.7 |
| 1958 | 7,581 | 12.8 | 310 | 1.2 | 7,271 | 22.4 |
| 1957 | 7,815 | 12.9 | 272 | 1.0 | 7,543 | 22.2 |
| 1956 | 7,791 | 12.5 | 294 | 1.1 | 7,497 | 21.5 |
| 1955 | 7,909 | 12.5 | 274 | 1.0 | 7,635 | 21.4 |
| 1950 | 6,778 | 10.5 | 283 | 1.0 | 6,495 | 17.4 |
| 1945 | 5,499 | 10.2 | 223 | 0.9 | 5,276 | 17.5 |
| 1940 | 4,699 | 8.9 | 268 | 1.2 | 4,431 | 15.0 |
| 1935 | 3,978 | 8.2 | 265 | 1.2 | 3,713 | 14.1 |