The Biological and Cultural Impact of Blacks on the United States

Abstract

FRICANS COMING TO AMERICA from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries and their descendants are a central thread in the cultural, biological, social, political and economic development of the United States. The history of the United States is unintelligible without an understanding of their history. George Bernard Shaw wrote in 1916 that the South is really ruled by the Negro with a hideous tyranny just as the prisoners in a prison dominate everything-dictate the daily habits of the jailers, oppress and obsess their imaginations, color their consciences, force them to share their imprisonment and yet give them none of the prisoners' freedom from care and responsibility.' The entire culture of the United States has been conditioned by the presence of Africans and their descendants: foreign policy, politics, Supreme Court decisions, immigration, the labor market, education, vital statistics, the pronunciation and vocabulary of the language, literature, religious life, civic ideals, art, music, the dance, cooking and recreation all are as they are partly because of the black presence. Blacks, as frequent objects of ridicule and criticism, are a source of laughter, a source of pleasure for white people in discussions about what blacks do, say and think. Contagious feelings of superiority are engendered when conditions of blacks are observed. New vibrations from blacks are constantly affecting the American Way of Life, bending in some degree all American institutions and bringing change and reform in every aspect of America's complex domestic and world view. From the beginning, the anomaly of blacks as slaves plagued the United States, which claimed in its religion a belief in the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, asserted in its Constitution the freedom and equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within the sight and sound of those who made this declaration existed more than a half-million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of the new nation.2 They were 10 percent of the whole population of the nation in 1700, 22 percent in 1750, almost 19 percent in 1800.3 They were not all black and not all slaves. By 1860, at least 90 percent were born in the United States, 13 percent were visibly of white as well as black ancestry and actually more than one-fourth were probably of mixed European, Indian-Ameri-