Phylogenetic Elements in the Psychoses of the Negro1

It is impossible, of course, in the necessarily circumscribed limits of such a paper as this to deal at all adequately with the ethnography of the African, although an acquaintance with certain fundamentals of the subject must be assumed in order to understand later generalizations. It might be well first briefly to review the concepts implied by the term Negro. In using the word in the title of this paper I mean of course the Negro as seen in the United States, the individual of whom it has been said that his father was a slave and his grandfather a cannibal.

It seems necessary first to identify him in some measure with the native African and I have always found a difficulty here in the current conception that the present-day African has reached levels only slightly inferior to the white race. This theory is held most extensively in regions where the Negro is infrequent and by persons having to do only occasionally with individuals of this race and then, only with selected specimens. It will not be found accepted among the intelligent inhabitants of the so-called “black belt” precisely because they are able to observe large aggregations of the race. The Negro, studied judiciously by those who are competent, appears to be at a much lower cultural level than the Caucasian. It is true that with his talent for mimicry, recalling to us in some measure our jungle cousins, he is able to present a remarkably exact, albeit superficial representation of the white man. But no one who has associated with Negroes is willing to believe that this resemblance extends much below the surface. It would be strange indeed if a race as low in the social scale as the Negro is in his native land could inherit by a half-century of juxtaposition all those group ideals which were only acquired by the Caucasian in several thousand years of evolution with all the advantages of climate in his favor.

Leaving out of the question the anthropometric tests which cor