changeable. Outside of Germany, few anthropologists or
sociologists would defend such arguments today. In George
Washington's time, there was no adequate scientific basis for
the discussion of race. Now it is recognized that the problem
presented is social rather than biological. Both the heredity
and the reaction to a given environment of each member of
a class or group must be studied. Yet the same old question is
put in the same old way. We ask: What are the characteristics
that differentiate Jews from Anglo-Saxons, whites from Blacks?
But the right question is this: Are Jews and Anglo-Saxons,
whites and Blacks, Asiatics and Englishmen so fundament-
ally different, because of the stocks from which they spring,
that they and their children cannot adapt themselves to a new
social environment?

To many it may seem that the second question hardly re-
quires scientific study. Is it not obvious that the "Negro"
behaves differently from the "North European" and the
"North European" in turn differently from the "Italian"?
Even if we assent, it does not follow that there is something
in his bodily organization that inevitably makes every Negro
or every Italian think and conduct himself in ways that char-
acterize all Negroes and all Italians. So we must test our im-
pressions. Are they valid? Do they hold good for every mem-
ber of a given alien group? Is a way of life, a way of thinking
inherited like kinky hair and a black skin, and is it therefore
something inevitable? When we ask such questions we touch
the core of the problem of "race."

Modern biology has long insisted that we are what our
parents and grandparents have made us, that heredity counts
for more than social opportunity, that the members of groups
which have been segregated for long periods have intermar-
ried and thus developed common hereditary ways of life. Not
only is it impossible for the Ethiopian to change his skin,
but he cannot change his outlook, his mode of thinking or
behavior, because these too are hereditary. Thus runs the
biological argument.

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