Typical of the doctrinaire Liberals who shrink from the very notion of race are the scientists who make up the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. In their disdainful view, race is no more than a “myth.” In particular, the Group denounces the “myths which have grown up about the Negro.” These “myths,” it is said, serve merely to rationalize and to justify the white man’s disparaging attitudes, because he cannot clearly recognize or understand the real source of his prejudice. We should realize, says the Group, that such “myth formation” psychologically seeks to protect individual and group security; and if we realize that, we can better understand why the “myths of prejudice” are so resistive to logic: The powerful need for safety, which “the myth” is created to insure, explains why it is clung to despite facts and logic to the contrary. Moreover, the damaging consequences of “racial myths” are misconstrued as evidence to support them.
Ashley Montagu has suggested, in _Human Heredity_, that the very word _race_ be struck from the English language. There is, he says, “sound sense in the argument that the long-standing abuse of the meaning of a word constitutes the best reason for its total exclusion from common usage.” Unsound words make for unsound ideas, and the unsound ideas tend to result in unsound action: “The word ‘race’ is a horrid example.” To Dr. Montagu, race is a notion, a myth, a fallacy, an error. In the sense that the term suggests distinguishing characteristics on the part of a particular people, “the word is beyond rescue and it had better be dropped altogether.” He suggests that the term “ethnic group” be employed instead, and the most he will concede is that “slight differences may exist between some ethnic groups in the frequencies of certain genes underlying mental capacity.” This is possible, says Dr. Montagu, “but in spite of all attempts, no one has, in fact, ever demonstrated that they do.”
Otto Klineberg, who cannot bring himself to write the words _race_ or _racial_ without putting them in quotation marks, says the same thing: “In all probability, inherent intellectual differences between Negroes and whites do not exist.” Other writers--Kenneth Clark and Ruth Benedict, for example--are impatient with such academic impedimenta as “probabilities.” More in anger than in sorrow, they denounce the bigoted Southerner, who dares to suggest that in terms of his capacity to adjust fully to Western values, the Negro may be innately inferior. The very idea! And any recourse by the Southerner to history, as Miss Benedict puts it, is mere “special pleading.” All good historians know of the greatness of Negro achievements. To doubt this truth is to substitute for historical processes “an unashamed racial megalomania.” This is a “travesty of fact.”