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Scientific Study of Non-Violence
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be “inferior,' 'requiring protection,' 'a lower form of evolution,' 'a burden to be borne altruistically. All this pious concern and condescension masked the financial advantage that came from exploitation. Segregation developed as a device for preventing sympathy and sentiments of equality.
Later studies, however, have completely exploded the myth of superior and inferior races. At the time of the First World War, over a million recruits in the American Army including many Negroes, were given psychological tests. The results showed in the first place that Negroes from the south (where educational and economic handicaps were greater) obtained scores which, on the average, where definitely inferior to those of Negroes from the north (where such handicaps, though they existed, were much less severe). Even more strikingly, the Negroes from some of the northern states turned out to be superior to the whites from some of the southern states.' This was true in the case of both types of intelligence tests used, one depending on language, the other a performance or non-language test.
In another study, it has been found that no connection exists between the biological constitution of the peoples and the level of their past or present culture, nor is there any hereditary or other biological reason for supposing that, just because white civilization is leading in the development of the present highly technical age, some races have less aptitude for learning technological skills. There is no reason, for example, why an African, because he is a Negro, can not learn to drive a tractor or be a soil chemist, or do any other task originated by a white.
Of course, children of a highly technical civilization have an enormous advantage over those who live in simple, isolated cultures. At an early age they learn the logic that two and two make four, they unconsciously learn the principle of cause and effect, they tinker with machines to see how they work. A Negro child born in the jungle of the Congo is brought up in a world with a different image of nature and its forces. If he is to adopt Western culture, he has to learn not anly how a machine works, but also to interpret natural phenomena
1Otto Kilineberg, (1951) Race and Psychology, pp. 10-17, 24, 2(1952) What is Race? pp. 60-63.
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