AIRING OUR PREJUDICES
Kennedy, Kenneth R.
Airing Our Prejudices ONE NATION, by Wallace Stegner and the Editors of Look. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston. $3.75. Reviewed by Kenneth R. Kennedy THIS book, One Nation, probes disturbingly...
...Thus, on the evidence of the 1928 election, the nation is debarred from selecting a President from among its 22,000,000 Catholics, or profiting from the talents of many a potential scientist like the Negro, Dr...
...Implicit in the book is the gathering body of anthropological evidence that there is no biological basis for the notion of superior and inferior races and that, given equal opportunities, each group will prove to have its quota of geniuses and morons and all the gradations between...
...Altogether, it is a book which Americans can hardly read with pride but one which they ought to read for the healthy, cathartic effect on the body politic...
...STEGNER and the Editors of Look do not rate as crusaders in One Nation...
...These groups include "a total of roughly 40 million, almost a third of the nation...
...Reviewed by Kenneth R. Kennedy THIS book, One Nation, probes disturbingly beneath...
...Among them are 13,000,000 Negroes, 3,500,000 Mexicans, 377,000 American Indians 4"a race," as O. Henry once wrote, "to which we owe nothing but the land on which the United States is situated"), 127,000 Japanese, 77,000 Chinese, 22,000,000" Catholics, and 4,500,-000 Jews...
...Charles R. Drew, of Howard University, whose work in solving the problem of preserving blood plasma helped save thousands of American lives on the battlefield...
...Stegner's text sets forth simply and ably the prejudices and handicaps which beset each of these groups because of the intolerance or lack of understanding by the dominant groups, and the accompanying pictures, mostly by Look photographers, bring the story home in graphic fashion...
...What they have done is to drag our national prejudices out into the light, which in itself ought to do a great deal of good...
...the facade of American democracy, among the minority groups in the United States which include many of those who make the nation laugh and those who bear its arms...
...Aside from the unfairness of prejudice, the restrictions rob the nation of the full contributions which might be made by thousands of talented but repressed citizens...
Vol. 9 • November 1945 • No. 44
