The present movement toward integration has more powerful forces
behind it than the Reconstruction crusade. Among the more visible
formative influences are the new international role of the United
States, the increasing demand that our domestic conduct conform
to the exigencies of our foreign policy and a subtle transformation of
the American ideology in the direction of postulating equality rather
than liberty as the basic national goal.

As for the Negro himself, the curtailment of European immigra-
tion has touched off a revolution in his economic, political and cul-
tural status. This and other forces have generated a vast, continuing
internal migration impelling the Negro both northward and cityward.
Today, the typical American Negro is not a Southern cotton chopper,
but a proletarian of the metropolis.

In contemporary America, the areas of disagreement concerning
the Negro are broad; regional ideologies continue to be irreconcilable.
If there is any area of national consensus, the value premise enunci-
ated by President Eisenhower in his 1959 State of the Union Message
perhaps defines it:

"The Government of a free people has no purpose more noble than
to work for the maximum realization of equality of opportunity under
law. . . . One of the fundamental concepts of our constitutional system
is that it guarantees to every individual, regardless of race, religion of
national origin, the equal protection of the laws." Or, as George
Mason put the matter almost two centuries earlier in the Virginia
Declaration of Rights, all men "are by nature equally free and in-
dependent."

Equality of opportunity and equality of ability, however, are two
very different things. The question of whether ethnic groups are
equal in innate mental ability is not a moral, but a factual, issue. This
subject of ethnopsychology is so pivotal that the second part of the
book is devoted to an examination of the available evidence. The
concept of race is considered, not in terms of blood and soil mystique,
but in relation to those evolutionary processes which shape and fix
variations in species. The work of Dr. J. C. Carothers and Dr. Mar-
celle Geber, both while on United Nations projects in Africa, has made
it possible for us to speak of the differences between African and Cau-
casoid ethnopsychology in much more meaningful terms than would
have been possible ten years ago.

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