manifested in the external events of the Negro's life in America, our
analysis suggests that this racial character of the Negro has
exhibited itself everywhere in something like the role of the _wish_
in the Freudian analysis of dream life. The external cultural forms
which he found here, like the memories of the individual, have
furnished the materials in which the racial wish, that is, the Negro
temperament, has clothed itself. The inner meaning, the sentiment, the
emphasis, the emotional color which these forms assumed as the result
of their transference from the white man to the Negro, these have been
the Negro's own. They have represented his temperament--his
temperament modified, however, by his experience and the tradition
which he has accumulated in this country. The temperament is African,
but the tradition is American.

I present this thesis merely as a hypothesis. As such its value
consists in its suggestion of a point of view and program for
investigation. I may, however, suggest some of the obvious practical
consequences. If racial temperament--particularly when it gets itself
embodied in institutions and in _nationalities_, that is, social
groups based upon race--is so real and obdurate a thing that education
can only enrich and develop it but not dispose of it, then we must be
concerned to take account of it in all our schemes for promoting
naturalization, assimilation, Americanization, Christianization, and
acculturation generally.

If it is true that the Jew, as has been suggested, just because of his
intellectuality is a natural born idealist, internationalist,
doctrinaire, and revolutionist, while the Negro, because of his
natural attachment to known, familiar objects, places and persons, is
preadapted to conservatism and to local and personal loyalties: if
these things are true, we shall eventually have to take account of
them practically. It is certain that the Negro has uniformly shown a
disposition to loyalty, during slavery to his master, and during
freedom to the South and the country as a whole. He has maintained
this attitude of loyalty, too, under very discouraging circumstances.
I once heard Kelly Miller, the most philosophical of the leaders and
teachers of his race, say in a public speech that one of the greatest
hardships the Negro suffered in this country was due to the fact that
he was not permitted to be patriotic.

Of course, all these alleged racial characteristics have a positiv