Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/378

374 of his thought they will be profoundly modified, and they will take on a different meaning in the Negro's consciousness from what they have in the white man's consciousness. Concomitantly, these cultural elements will modify the brain of the Negro; but this modification will not follow the same pathways and will not give the same results as it would in the untutored brain, say, of a white child. The modifying forces acting upon the Negro's brain will have to start with an anatomical structure already formed and set by heredity, an anatomical structure different from that of the white race, which produced the modifying forces in question, and the final result in the Negro's brain will be determined and directed by this preexistent anatomical make-up. So that the brain and the consciousness resulting from the absorption of our culture by the Negroes will be a brain and a consciousness different from our own to the same extent that the Negro differs from us in other respects, and both will be characteristically Negroid in nature, not European.

It follows, therefore, that present ideals in regard to the "solution" of our Negro problem (ideals, as has been pointed out and which it is well to reiterate, resulting from the confusion of ethical and scientific principles) are biologically fallacious, and impossible of attainment. We can never make the Negro like the white man mentally. We can never have a bi-racial state based upon an identity of ideas and political philosophies in both races.

The Negroes will continue to progress, undoubtedly. But they will progress along the lines laid down by their evolutionary history. They will take our cultural elements and make them part of themselves; but they will modify these elements according to their nature, and when they have assimilated them, they will be our cultural elements no longer, but will be profoundly and permanently modified. The two races will continue to develop side by side, but the development can never be parallel—it must be divergent, even though its successive steps may perchance maintain approximately the same level, as long as the races remain pure. It will be like two men, thrown together by fortuitous circumstances, who start walking up the same slope toward the same hill-top; but because of differences in the nature of their interests, one goes east while the other goes northeast; each step will carry them closer to the top of the hill, but further and further apart.

This fact, rather than ethical theory, should form the foundation of American thought in regard to the Negroes and the Negro problem. The Negro as an intellectual being should be studied as a Negro—not as a potential white-man; and if we wish to help him, we should at least try to be sure that he is allowed to develop as a Negro in the freest, broadest manner possible, and to the full extent of his racial potentialities.