The Negro Soldier in the Army of the United States

Abstract

Race PrejudiceAIl or None.Why does this issue of the Yearbook deal with the Negro in World War I and World War II? We who are close to the race controversy in the United States have little difficulty in assuming that we know the answer. For purposes of clarification, however, let us make a radical examination. Race prejudice as it exists in the United States is a callous, all-or-none phenomenon. Every scientific investigation of races has shown a very large over-lap between racial distributions with respect to any important characteristic. In the United States where racial comparison has been the vogue for a number of years, social scientists are keenly aware that the over-lap in the distribution of characteristics of white and Negro Americans rapidly increases as cultural-economic opportunities approach equality. In the North, for instance, the test data from Negro children have a very large over-lap with white children of the North and are indeed superior to those from white children in the more backward areas of the country. This general fact is also supported by the army data gathered from World War I which, it will be recalled, showed that in respect to the median Alpha scorethe literate Negroes from Illinois surpassed literate whites from nine Southern states; literate Negroes from New York surpassed literate whites from five Southern states; and literate Negroes from Pennsylvania surpassed literate whites from two Southern states. The median Alpha score of all Northern Negroes surpassed the median score of whites from Mississippi, Kentucky, and Arkansas.' In spite of scientifically demonstrated over-lap in Negro-white racial characteristics, race prejudice dictates that over-lap shall be ignored. It insists that every white person is superior to every Negro. If racial characteristics were distributed on a linear scale of a common unit, according to this social pathology, there would be bell-shaped curves on the left which describe the characteristics of Negroes and somewhere to the right there would be other bell-shaped curves which describe characteristics of white persons. No part of the curve surfaces on the left would be common to the surfaces under the curves on the right. This picture throws into relief the absurdity and the self-incrimination of American practices stemming from race prejudice. A Challenge.-This chapter and this Yearbook, therefore, challenge a system of practices which often is as unyielding as a robot and just as impervious to fact and simple logic. Hope lies in the fact that this system is very largely imposed from without. There are thousands of white Ameri-