The Negro on Native Grounds

...Weyl characterizes An American Dilemma as follows: "The Myrdal study was carried out by a carefully selected group of leftist sociologists who shared a common ideology...

...But he jumps to conclusions that his evidence will not support when he argues that these differences show Negroes are on the average less capable of intellectual development, and are childish, immature...

...points, one could take his arguments as to the hereditary intellectual incapacity of the Negro as pretty much disproved...

...A school policy based on stipends to parents who may choose public or private schooling, and join together to make any kind of school they wish, has a good deal to commend it...

...What is the point of prefacing the name of Frazier with the description of "pro-Soviet" if it is not to discredit a position which Weyl finds it too hard to argue with...

...What of those schools with sizeable numbers of Negroes from middle-class homes...

...All I know is that they are more relevant to the consideration of the Negro problem in America than Weyl's scanty studies from Africa...

...But even though Weyl begins without prejudice, and with a real concern for real problems, he has become such a strong and impassioned advocate that he has written a brief, and not a very good one, rather than made an important contribution to the problem that concerns him...

...His evidence on the difference between I.Q.s of Negroes and whites in the United States is richer...

...We are familiar with some of the problems of impassioned advocacy...

...Indeed, if the overwhelming evidence of a mass of studies of intelligence—as he sums them up—shows that the difference between Negroes and whites is of the order of 15 I.Q...

...How well do they do, what kind of problems do they have...

...But what of the rapidly expanding areas of middle-class Negro housing, Negro suburbia...

...Weyl also writes: "The pro-Soviet sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier, declares: 'Because of race prejudice and social subordination of the Negro, the Negro is more likely to be fined and imprisoned than the white man.'" This seems to me to be a simple matter of fact...

...Negro children, it turns out, are physically precocious...

...It does not offer equality of reward where inequality exists in ability or effort...

...First, the problem he raises is serious and requires much more discussion and study than it has as yet received...

...And Myrdal bases this characterization of the National Negro Congress on a report from Bunche...

...What about the pattern of Negro achievement...

...The Negro brain is smaller...

...No one could disagree with his conclusion that "the American system aims to guarantee liberty and equality under law to all...

...Yet we may read in An American Dilemma this characterization of the National Negro Congress: "In April, 1940...

...Geniuses, according to Weyl, will also be found among Negroes, though in much smaller proportion than among whites, and a public policy designed to encourage intelligence cannot take account of color...

...One hundred years of freedom and the efforts devoted to the advance of the Negro by friends, philanthropists and governmental agencies...

...Weyl is enough of an expert on Communism, even if Senator Eastland is not, to know how meaningless and irrelevant such a statement is...

...One is surprised only at his inability to discern that the type of argument that might influence morons is quite ineffective in a scholarly book addressed to people capable of reading and reasoning...

...He is as concerned about the fate of Negro students in schools with unteachable children as he is about the fate of white students...

...His involvement with this problem seems to have begun with the fact that the Negroes create enormous problems for the Northern and Western cities in which they form an ever increasing part of the population...

...He is also to be commended for his views on what kind of policies we might adopt...

...He is no supporter of school segregation, though he opposes a school policy whose central objective is to create a balance of racial distribution...

...For example: Throughout his book he suggests that the monumental study of Gunnar Myrdal and his associates, An American Dilemma, is affected by Myrdal's socialist bias and the Communist associations of his staff...

...For, in view of what we know of the Negro family, the environment of Negro northern urban areas, the impact of awareness of discrimination and prejudice on motivation to learn, one would think a difference of the order of only 15 I.Q...

...Since 1940 the Congress has been kept up by the Communist party as a paper organization...

...Weyl believes that Negroes are by and large incapable of participating as equals in contemporary society...

...Weyl is, I believe, on firm grounds when he says that there is no reason to believe that the evolutionary processes that have produced such striking physical differences between the races have not also produced psychic differences...

...He looks with no kindness on Southern prejudice—indeed his views on the significance of race lead him to feel that race mixture, where the two races are Negro and white, in the proportions in which they are to be found in the United States, is an advantage rather than a disadvantage...

...Within that group there was a hard core of Communists and Communist sympathizers who strove to influence the report on issues crucial to the Communist movement...

...Nor does he think any conclusions concerning the characteristics of a group can be the basis of public policy in a free country—for this must deal with the rights of individuals, and no individual can be condemned because of his group...

...Failing to see the actual position of the Negro in America, he has resorted prematurely to a far-fetched racial explanation...

...The great unresearched area in the study of the Negro is success in adaptation, in accomplishment...

...the incapacity of the American state to deal with this problem, owing primarily to an equalitarian social welfare philosophy, which requires that heavy resources be appropriated to the support of a permanently incompetent population...

...Well as I have said, is no bigot...

...Co-author, "The Lonely Crowd" Nathamel Weyl has written two previous books, Treason and The Battle Against Disloyalty...

...And he is uncharitable in failing to recognize how recent is that degree of equality and full citizenship which the Negro has achieved...

...their more rapid increase, which will lead to their becoming a larger and larger proportion of the American population...

...And Weyl also seems to feel that the failure of the Supreme Court to observe the limits of what he conceives to be its constitutional role reflects a growing incapacity to deal with our problems as wisely as the Founding Fathers did...

...Just as he underestimates the significance of slavery as a major trauma (he seems to think American slavery was not very severe and ignores the evidence which suggests that the slaves' position in the United States was much worse than it was in the ancient world, the West Indies or Latin America), he tends to ignore the vast remaining areas of discrimination and prejudice in the most favored American environments, and their possible consequences...

...Weyl exaggerates the significance of certain studies on the African Negro brain, on the African Negro mind, on African Negro children...

...One of them is to exaggerate the significance of the evidence on one's side, which Weyl does...

...But his evidence for this is hardly conclusive...

...As for the Benedict and Weltfish study [which argued that the differences between the test achievements of whites and Negroes were due to differences in environment], its objectivity came into question when Miss Weltfish was queried by a Senate Committee concerning past membership in the Communist party and took the Fifth Amendment...

...One of these Communist staff members, we are given to understand, was Ralph Bunche...

...He accused the Supreme Court (justly, in my mind) of making too much, in its desegregation decision, of rather scanty findings of the social and psychological sciences but Weyl makes a great deal of equally scanty findings...

...But there are as yet few studies, and certainly we know too little about the cultural differences between electrical patterns in the brain, to make too much of this...

...His proposals for the schools are such as to enhance freedom and liberty, rather than to restrict it...

...But here he refuses to take the environmental differences that prevail even in the North between whites and Negroes as seriously as they must be taken...

...I have said that Weyl is unprejudiced...

...And so on, and so on...

...Aside from this, Weyl seems to think it legitimate in intellectual discussion simply to dismiss the work of his opponents because they are Communists or sympathetic to the Soviet Union...

...But he obviously writes from the deepest personal concern for the future of this country...

...But Weyl does not recognize how far Negroes are, even now, from having achieved equality under law, and the full privileges of citizenship...

...another is to associate known evils with those who oppose one's views, which Weyl also does...

...But there is no simple relationship between brain size and intelligence...

...What are we to make of the high Negro rates of crime and delinquency, illegitimacy, family break-up and school dropout...

...Negro brains show different electroencephalograms...

...Such a summary of his views (a fair, if not complete, one) will certainly lead people to think that he must be prejudiced and that he speaks for the South in its passionate defense of irrational feelings...

...Weyl does not think they will ever be able to handle their political responsibilities with the wisdom that whites can bring to them...

...What light may that threw or the conditions which bring out accomplishment...

...It is more important to examine the evidence and the reasoning...

...He is known as an authority on Communist subversion and espionage, and it is surprising to see him as the author of a long, serious, well-researched book on the American Negro...

...and he tries to suggest that those who defend the rights of the Negroes, who argue for full equality and even favored treatment, are infiltrated with Communists and Communist ideology...

...Their excessive contribution to rates of crime and social delinquency, he asserts, is an inevitable consequence of their contact with civilized societies, for which they are not fully suited...

...This is not the way the "objectivity'' of scholarly investigations is brought into question...

...We have heard a good deal about the Negro slums...

...The problems created by the presence of a racial group that already composes more than 10 per cent of the American population is aggravated by a number of subsidiary developments: the spread of the Negro population out of the South to the cities of the North and West where, in contrast to earlier immigrant groups, it will form a permanently depressed class...

...Certainly the study of hereditary racial differences is an important field, but there is a good deal of work to be done in the way of simple social investigation, before we have to go to such esoteric subjects as the study of African brains...

...Weyl points to the problem and for this he is to be commended...

...It would eliminate the injustice of taxing Catholics for schools they do not use and would provide incentives to groups of parents to create special schools, doing a special job that public schools canrot do...

...He himself is clearly free of any prejudice and he deserves credit for having raised for public discussion crucial aspects of the Negro question which receive little discussion in academic and liberal circles, and which are usually left in the hands of bigots and incompetents...

...I think Weyl has gone the wrong way about in studying this matter...

...What kind of problems are being overcome, what kind of problems are being created...

...I will document these charges briefly...

...How can we avoid concluding that he has consciously tried to discredit an important intellectual position with which he disagrees by accusing those who hold it of being Communists or Communist influenced, when he knows this is not the case...

...Weyl seems to have effected the transition from his books on subversion to his book on the Negro problem somewhat im-perfectly...

...The capable Negro, like the capable white man, demands merely the full privileges of citizenship without regard to race...

...One could still argue that the weakness in the ability to form stable families and good environments, which might be responsible for this intellectual deficiency, reflects some hereditary disadvantages) . If Weyl only tended to use his evidence to support somewhat more than could be proved, he would only be doing what we are all forced to do in the social sciences, where proof is so rarely definite, and where we can only argue from tendencies...

...But in his ardent advocacy he also does something which is indefensible—he tries to associate the environmentalist explanation of Negro problems with Communism...

...Weyl believes, have demonstrated that Negroes will not, on the average, reach the level of intellectual capacity of the white race...

...In addition, the international conflict with Russia, in a context of the rising political power of non-white nations, which requires the United States to undertake every effort to create an equality of which the Negro is incapable, also distorts America's capacity to deal with the Negro problem...

...He is not entitled to more, nor are any of us...

...I do not assume any uniformly favorable result from these studies...

...This may mean that the early development of the nervous system inhibits later more complex development...

...the National Negro Congress sealed its doom by becoming simply a front organization for the Communist party...

...These problems are seen in mixed schools, in crime rates, in the burdens of social problems such as illegitimacy, mental incapacity and the like, and growing Negro voting power...

...But as I have said—Weyl's book is more serious than the use of such argumentative devices would lead one to think...

...points shows that the hereditary disadvantage cannot be very great...

...I think it is perfectly clear from Weyl's book that his concern is not with the South and Southern feelings...

...No careful reader of Weyl's book could fail to conclude that they were successful in this task, and that Bunche was prominent in this enterprise, for "he was reportedly one of a small group which planned the National Negro Congress, the transmission belt of the Communist party among American Negroes...

...What is going on there...

...And Weyl permits himself the really contemptible ploy of quoting Senator James Eastland to the effect "that Frazier's 1949 book which the Supreme Court cited, The Negro in the United States, was officially endorsed by the American Communist Party...

...Weyl has read An American Dilemma carefully...

...a third is to distort the evidence, whether from design or the blindness of strong advocacy one cannot tell—and this Weyl does too...

...We have heard a good deal about the impact of an influx of lower-class Negroes on the schools...

...This incapacity may be in part caused by a poor environment, but he believes the Negro suffers from certain hereditary inadequacies...