When the physical unity of a group is perpetuated by the succession of parents and children, the racial temperament, including fundamental attitudes and values which rest on it, are preserved intact. When however, society grows and is perpetuated by immigration and adaptation, there ensues, as a result of miscegenation, a breaking up of the complex of the biologically inherited qualities which constitute the temperament of the race. This again initiates changes in the mores, traditions and eventually in the institutions of the community. The changes which proceed from modification in the racial temperament will, however, modify but slightly the external forms of the social traditions but they will be likely to change profoundly their content and meaning. Of course, other factors, individual competition, the formation of classes, and especially the increase of communication, all coöperate to complicate the whole situation and to modify the effects which would be produced by racial factors working in isolation. All these factors must be eventually taken account of, however, in any satisfactory scheme of dealing with the problem of Americanization by education. This is, however, a matter for more complete analysis and further investigation.
Robert E. Park
Footnotes:
[1] This address was delivered before the American Sociological Society convened in annual session at Richmond in 1918.
[2] "The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment," American Journal of Sociology, V, 44, March, 1915, p. 589.
[3] Rivers, "Ethnological Analysis of Cultures," Nature, Vol. I, 87, 1911.
[4] W. J. McGee, Piratical Acculturation.
[5] There is or was a few years ago near Mobile a colony of Africans who were brought to the United States as late as 1860. It is true, also, that Major R. R. Moton, who has succeeded Booker T. Washington as head of Tuskegee Institute, still preserves the story that was told him by his grandmother of the way in which his great-grandfather was brought from Africa in a slave ship.
[6] Domestic Manners and Social Condition of the White, Coloured and Negro Population of the West Indies, by Mrs. Carmichael, Vol. I. (London, Wittaker, Treacher and Co.), p. 251.
"Native Africans do not at all like it to be supposed that they retain the customs of their country and consider themselves wonderfully civilized by being transplanted from Africa to the West Indies. Creole Negroes invariably consider themselves superior people, and lord it over the native Africans."