Shufeldt Americas Greatest Problem The Negro pdf

Excerpt: ...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 preexisting 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 biracial state based upon 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...