CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED. . .

Race or Ethnic Group: Anthropological Discourse on African Americans Color. . . is a political reality.
-- James Baldwin

Race is a construct that defines human groups as being different from other groups by virtue of innate and immutable physical characteristics (van den Berghe 1967:9). Biological features are believed to be intrinsically linked to intellectual, moral, physical capacities of a group. Such idea allows a classification and assessment of people primarily based on their skin complexion and the texture of their hair.

These assumptions are based on a taxonomy of human diversity initially proposed by Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist who relied on travelers' reports to develop an idea of race (Barzun 1965:35; Jordan 1977; Franklin 1989;132-133). In 1758, he published Systema Naturae. This scheme divided homo sapiens into five subspecies. They are ferus -- chimpanzee (four foote, mute, hairy); Afer -African (black, phelgmatic, indulgent, monstrous); Americanus -- Indian (red, cholic, erect); Europaeus -- white (white, ruddy, muscular); Asiaticus -- Asians (yellow, melancholic, inflexible); (Barton 1987:4; Gould 1981 :35). He argued that Africans are ruled by caprice and that African women are without shame because their breasts lactate profusely (Gould 1981 :35). This first formal categorization of human beings was founded on a hypothesis that anatomy determines character and Africans and blacks are inferior species.

Until 1920s, it was assumed by many social scientists that African Americans were a racial group that was less intelligent than whites. During the early years of anthropology, there was an ongoing conflict between the nineteenth century cultural evolutionists and Franz Boas concerning the mental and racial capacities of African Americans.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cultural evolutionists sought to prove the inferiority of African Americans through the scientism of craniometry. Samuel George Morton, along with Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon compared and measured the cranial cavities of blacks and whites (Williams 1989:63). Morton, a founder of the American school of anthropology concluded after measuring 253 skulls that Egyptians, Negroes and American Indians had the smallest cranial capacities when ranked against Caucasians, Mongolians, and Malays (Gould 1981 :55). Caucasians were consistently measured to have the largest cranial capacity. Franz Boas was concerned about the pervasive racist assumptions posited by many of the nineteenth century anthropologists. Rather than focusing on cultural relativity of African Americans, he was drawn into quagmire of anthropomorphic research on African Americans (Hyatt 1985:273; Szwed 1972:156; Cerroni-Long 1987:441; Williams 1989:63).

Unfortunately, Boas' reinforced an idea that African Americans were an inferior race. He wrote, "There is no doubt in my mind that there is a very definite association between the biological make up of the individual and the physiology and psychological functioning of his body" (Boas 1940:8-9). He also concluded that "the Negro brain is less extremely human than that of the white" (Boas [1928]1962:40). He posited that there was no proof of the inferiority of the Negro type, "except that it seemed barely possible that perhaps the race would not produce quite so many men of highest genius as other races." Szwed (1972:157) suggests that Boas' statistical data led him to infer that the Negro culture "simply 'overlapped' White American culture." Boas ([1938] 1963:240) justified his assumptions as follows:

The traits of American Negroes are adequately explained on the basis of his history and social status. The tearing away from the African soil and the consequent complete loss of all standards of life, which were replaced by the dependency of slavery and by all that it entailed, followed by a period of disorganization and by severe economic struggle against heavy odds, are sufficient to explain the inferiority of the status of the race, without falling back upon the theory of hereditary inferiority.

Cerroni-Long (1987:441) suggests that Boas' research led him and his students to propose that African Americans should be amalgamated and not considered a distinct cultural group because they had loss their racial heritage during slavery. In a Yale Review article, "The Problems of the American Negro," Boas (1921 :392-396) said that "it would seem that man being what he is, the Negro problem will not disappear in America until the Negro blood has been so diluted that it will no longer be recognized, just as anti- Semitism will not disappear until the last vestige of the Jew as Jew has disappeared."

Newbell Niles Puckett ([1925] 1969) and Zora Neale Hurston during the 1920s, researched African American folklore. Their studies support the idea of African Americans as a cultural entity. Puckett ([1925] 1969:2) documented the folk beliefs of the Southern Negro. He proposed that European or American culture influenced some aspects of the Negro life but African American folk-knowledge represents many elements of their African past. However, he suggested that Negroes were innately undisciplined, sexually immoral, and had a sense of humor ( Puckett 1969:8). Hurston (1981) is a folklorist, who is known more as a novelist. She recorded the distinctiveness of African culture in the folklore of Haitians and African Americans in Florida and Louisiana. She particularly highlighted community life in Eatonville, an African American town in Florida. Folktales, proverbs, sermons, and life of these townspeople are accounted in Moses: Man of the Mountain ( Hurston [1939] 1984), and Their Eyes Were Watchina God ( Hurston [1937] 1978).

However Hurston's work took place during the early part of this century, when African Americans were very wedded to the concept of race. Therefore, she was criticized for not addressing the race problem and profiling southern black life as too pastoral (Washington 1979:16). For example, Sterling Brown, a Howard University educator and writer suggested that she rendered African American life as easy going, and carefree in a land 'shadowed by squalor, poverty, disease, violence, enforced by ignorance and exploitation' (Washington 1979:16 ).

She challenged her critics to reconsider their assumptions about race. In response, Hurston (1984:327) wrote:

Why should i be proud to be a Negro? Why should anyone be proud to be white? Or yellow? Or red? After all, the word "race" is a loose classification of physical characteristics. It tells you nothing about the insides of people It (race) is a deadly explosive on the tongues of men.

Alice Walker (1979:5) says Hurston rescued and recreated a world which she labored to portray African Americans as whole.

Hurston is not the only anthropologist who attempted to shift the discourse from race and encountered powerful resistances. In the preface of The Myth of the Negro Past, Herskovits (1958:xxviii) writes:

This book when first published, discussed and documented a position that at the time was less than congenial to the considerable number of intellectuals who accommodated their thinking to the position of an important and established group of social scientists. . . a position which was challenged by its conclusions.

Herskovits (1958) argued that African Americans are a cultural group and have indeed maintained many elements of their African ancestry. He disclosed: The myth of the Negro past is one of the principle supports of race prejudice in this country.... It rationalizes discrimination, in everyday contact between Negroes and whites, influences the shaping of policy where Negroes are concerned, and affects the trends of research by scholars whose theoretical approach methods, and systems of thought presented to students are in harmony with it (Herskovits 1958:1).

Herskovits (1958:1) concluded that Africans brought to the Americans were not totally stripped of their cultural heritages. Through documents, ethnographic data and observations, he explored cultures of Africans in Ghana, Guinea, Haiti, Surinam, and Dahomey to trace the cultural origins of Africans here in the United States (Jackson 1985:238). He showed that various elements of the African world view had been maintained. His research demonstrated the influence of African cultures in the role of elders in managing extra-legal issues, cooperations, and extended family structures. He suggested more overt African behavior include braided hair styles, funeral services, rice planting, mortal and pestle and motor habits (Herskovits 1958:221). He proposed that these characteristics indicate that Africans in the Diaspora are not mere imitations of white Americans. He also concluded that depending upon the acculturative influences, Africans in the United States reinterpret their African world view to meet their New World circumstances (Herskovits 1958:297). Herskovits confronted the assumption that African Americans are a race without an African cultural heritage. E. Franklin Frazier, (1967) in The Negro Family in the United States, countered Herskovits' (1958) suppositions. He described African heritage among African Americans as "scraps of memories which form an insignificant part of the growing body of traditions in Negro families." He reasoned:

Probably never before has a people been so nearly completely stripped of its social heritage as the Negroes who were brought to America. Other conquered races (italics added) have continued to worship their household gods within the intimate circle of kinsmen. But slavery destroyed household gods.... Through force of circumstances, they had to acquire a new language, adopt new habits of labor and take over, how every imperfectly, the folkways of the American environment (Frazier 1967:15).

He believed that African American culture evolved independently of Africa (Holloway 19990:ix). He inferred that African Americans lost their preliterate culture in which they were nurtured, created a folk culture, and gradually took on a more sophisticated American culture (Frazier 1967:359). "The Negro has found within the white man's culture a purpose in life" (Frazier 1967:367).

Not only was the idea of Africanisms existing among African Americans opposed by Frazier (1967), it was also challenged by his mentor, Robert Park, who was an eminent sociologist at the University of Chicago. Park (1950:267) advanced that there is every reason to believe that when the Negro landed in the United States, "he (sic) left behind almost everything but his dark complexion and his tropical temperament" (Italics added). For example, Park (1950:273) in Race and Culture, described "shouting" among African Americans living on the Sea Island as merely an expression of group emotions rather than an African cultural trait. He also explained that blues and spirituals were born of the plantation culture. Park (1959:269) claimed that African Americans brought from Africa so few traditions which they were able to transmit that it made them a unique race (italics added). He concluded that Negroes copied, adopted, and placed their stamps on European values (Wacker 1983:46).

The belief that African Americans did not have any real ancestral ties with Africa and that their values were inferior to white Americans would figure prominently in the Carnegie Corporation's commissioned study by Karl Gunnar Myrdal ([1944:11] 1962), a Swedish economist. With the assistance of various scholars, he examined racial beliefs, migration patterns, plantation economy, housing conditions, politics, and the black church, among other subjects. In a two volume classic study, An American Dilemma, Myrdai (1962:113-127) concluded that Negroes had a culture but it was characteristically American and that Negroes were not proud of those things in their lives that differentiated them from white Americans.

He considered the Negro a social problem because of the ever raging conflict between the ideas preserved in the American Creed and the beliefs which Negroes and Caucasians held (Myrdal 1962:928-929). "These contentions are mediated by local interests; economic, social, and sexual jealousies; . . . and all sort of miscellaneous wants, impulses, and habits" concluded Myrdal (1962:928- 929). However, he wrote, "We assume that it is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into American culture, and to acquire the traits held in esteem by the dominant white Americans" (Myrdal 1962:928-929). In other words, he suggested that African American culture is inconsequential. Also, he inferred, if African Americans want to integrate into the mainstream, it would be best if they detached themselves from the culture that differentiates them from white Americans. Like Boas, he advised African Americans to change their identity.

Herskovits' (1958) theory concerning African Americans would lie dormant for almost forty years primarily because many black activists during the 1930s and 1940s demanded the integration of blacks into the American society (Williams 1989:178). Many prominent African Americans were a political force to be reckoned. E. Franklin Frazier, Ralph Bunche, and other Howard University professors adopted a strong assimilationist stance (Jackson 1985:243). Jackson (1985:249) states that even during the Myrdal study, Roy Wilkins stressed assimilation, a NAACP position. He anticipated that the study would help guide the United States government's treatment of the Negro (Jackson 1985:249). Hence, the majority of the research subsequently held white American values as the standard by which to judge African American culture. This paradigm ushered in a pejorative tradition in the study of African Americans. Culture is frequently substituted for race but the ideas mirror the assertion of nineteenth century cultural evolutionists.

Not only were African Americans able to influence the outcome of research concerning their culture, the Carnegie and the Rosenwald foundations refused for several years to fund future research concerning African Americans. Jackson (1985:264) writes that "one of the effects of the Myrdal Project was to dry up foundation money for studies of black communities, culture, and social structure for the next twenty years." The Carnegie Corporation and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, two major funding bodies denied money to many researchers interested in studying African Americans and to Du Bois, who wished to publish an encyclopedia on Negroes (Jackson 1985:263). After the war, Herskovits, directed his studies towards Africa because funds were not available for domestic research. In an interview with Williams (1989:263), St. Clair Drake, an anthropologist, called the Myrdal project, "the study to end all studies.... It was the end of an epoch."

"The decade of the 1960s marked a rediscovery of the Negro American by scholars" (Rainwater 1970:1). The post Myrdal era lasted from the late 1940s to the 1960s (Rainwater 1970:3; Jackson 1989:263). When the protest movements among African Americans surged, the government asked social scientists for assistance. Many sociologists and a few anthropologists responded.

A significant number of studies, during this period, argued that African Americans were a culturally deprived. In other words, some scholars contended that African Americans were a race. Researchers who advanced the pejorative view of African American culture operationally defined their theses by comparing the morals and values of African Americans with those of middleclass white Americans. Unfortunately, these sociologists adopted an anthropological concept of culture without the benefit of ethnographic data and misused it (Cerroni-Long 1987:445). For example, Nathan Glazer's and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's (1963:50) Beyond the Melting Pot exemplifies this approach. Describing the Negro family, they argued that the illegitimacy rate "among Negroes is about (italics added) fourteen to fifteen times that among whites." They resolved that part of the reason for this problem is as follows:

When the Negro father is incapable of contributing to support (as Negro fathers often do), when fathers and mothers refuse to accept responsibility for and resent their children, as Negro parents, overwhelmed by difficulties so often do, and when the family situation, instead of being clear-cut and with defined roles and responsibilities, is left vague and ambiguous (as it so often is in Negro families) '(Glazer and Moynihan 1963:50).

The work of these authors is not an examination of African Americans' concept of their families. Instead it is an imposition of Glazer's and Moynihan's values on African Americans. Hence, they concluded, that "The Negro is only an American, and nothing else and has no values and culture to guard and protect" (Glazer and Moynihan 1963:53.)

Kenneth B. Clark (1965:70) also affirmed a deficit model of culture. In Dark Ghetto, a report to President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, Clark (1965:xiii & 70) argued that a matriarchy exists among African American living in the ghetto. He perceived that "sexual hierarchy . . . played a crucial role in the structure and pathology of the Negro family." He attributed the African American male's inability to psychologically support his normal desire for dominance (italics added) to the hierarchial role of women and slavery (Clark 1965:70). Hence, the woman's strength, he argued, tends "to perpetuate the weaker role of the Negro male" (Clark 1965:70). These types of comparative "cultural studies" deny the legitimacy and relativity of African American culture.

The Black Consciousness and "soul" movements generated a belief that African Americans represent a subculture shaped by ghetto life (Blauner 1970:131). Lee Rainwater (1970:7) writes that the research of the Sixties viewed lower class Negro subculture as acquiring limited functional autonomy from conventional culture.

Elliot Liebow's (1967) Tally's Corner is an example of a study that represents African Americans as a subculture. Liebow (1967), as part of a government study on child rearing practices of African Americans in the District of Columbia, researched street corner life of a group of African American men. Hyland Lewis (1967:xlii) characterized them as "losers." He argued that the street corner is a place of solace for the African American male who has been excluded in society. The values and goals of this culture reflect a subculture trying to conceal its failure in the larger society concluded Lewis ( 1967:xlli).

A small group of scholars have begun to pose counter arguments to race informed studies. Their research is based on Herskovits' (1958) theoretical framework. These studies have focused significantly on the presence of Africanisms in the African Diaspora. Although, few of these studies specifically address Africans living in the United States. For example, in 1967, at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, a symposium was held on "Negroes in the New World." Studies concerning African Americans were conspicuously missing (Whitten and Szwed 1970:49). This conference generated a volume that primarily analyzed African cultures in the Caribbean and Central and South America.

However, the proceedings from the symposium reveal that some scholars fostered the concept of African Americans as a cultural group. Blauner's (1970) asserted that African Americans are an ethnic group. Kochman (1970) and Stack (1974) addressed 'rapping in the ghetto' and survival strategies among fictive kin in the black community, respectively. Kochman (1970) concluded that rap was instrumental to African American life but he did not place rap in the context of the political and economic system.

During the same period, other research on black urban life emerged. Lee Rainwater (1970:10) wrote The Black Experience, an analysis of a black ghetto. Ulz Hannerz (1970) a Swedish anthropologist who studied a neighborhood in Washington, D. C. discussed the significance of the concept of "soul." He concluded that "soul" developed in response to structural inequalities and it is a statement of alternative ideas to the social system.

In "Black Culture: Lower Class Result or Ethnic Creation'" Blauner (1970) posited that African Americans are a distinctive culture group whose many cultural practices can be traced back to Africa. Blauner (1970:139) proposed that Africans did not come to this country as Negroes. He reasoned that their ethnicity is largely shaped out of their continuous struggle to surmount racial exclusion and denigration that are fostered by sociopolitical conditions in the United States (Blauner 1970:145). He concluded, "Afro-American culture is. . .ethnic" and its core is an African American political history (Blauner 1970:145).

Blauner's (1970:145) thesis is supported by Lawrence Levine (1977) who wrote Black Culture and Black Consciousness. Levine (1977:xi) argued that upon the hard rock of racial, social, and economic exploitation and injustice black Americans forged and nurtured a culture; they formed and maintained kinship networks, made love, raise and socialized children, built a religion, and created a rich expressive culture in which they articulated their feelings and d ream s.

He analyzed folktales, proverbs, jokes, verbal games and narrative oral poems to document a history of Afro-American folk thought (Levine 1977:xiii). He indicated that the sacred universe created by enslaved Africans provided a serious alternative to the societal system created by slaveholders (Levine 1977:54). Hence, he concluded the religiosity, the sacred songs and texts were political means of addressing their enslavement. He showed how these folk practices emerged from the social structure.

In the last two decades, a small but significant group of researchers have continued to argue that distinct patterns of African American culture exists. Africanisms in American Culture, an edited volume by Joseph Holloway (1990) explores the cultural survivals found in historical, linguistic, religious, and artistic perspectives of African American life. For example, Jessie Gaston Mulira (1990:34- 68) documents the historical presence of Voodoo religion in New Orleans and explains how a desire to make money and governmental suppression against the practice of voodoo led to the prominence of hoodoo, a magical aspect of voodoo. Robert Hall (1990:98-118) shows how African Americans in Florida during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries retained various African religious practices. Spirit possession, naming, funeral rites found in Florida during this time were also found among continental Africans. Patricia Jones-Jackson (1987) provides a comprehensive view of Sea Island culture, linguistic patterns and folklore in When Roots Die. She records the evidences of Africanisms in present Sea Island culture. Also, she illustrates how the commercialization of the Island by outsiders displaces islanders and disrupts the continuity of their lives.

However, not all anthropologists link African American culture and ethnicity to Africa. For example, Staiano (1987:27-33) theorizes in "Ethnicity as Process: The Creation of An Afro-American Identity," that ethnicity among African Americans is a dynamic process that reflects their cultural adaptation to race. While acknowledging the significant role that race plays in shaping African American world view, she denies the presence of Africanisms. She advocates that African American culture evolved independently of any African influence. Staiano does not support her arguments with ethnographic data. In The Birth of African American Culture. Mintz and Price (1992:18) contend that any research suggesting African retentions among African Americans "involves risky oversimplications." These authors insinuate that it is difficult to conceive of African Americans as creating a culture connected to Africa because "culture is closely tied to the institutional forms which articulates it" (Mintz and Price 1992:14). Therefore, they consider African Americans to be a New World phenomenon.

Anthropologists (Willis 1972; Szwed; 1972; Blauner 1970; Drake 1978; Walker 1978; Cerroni-Long 1987) offer diverse reasons for the lack of data concerning African American culture and the persistent force of a racial paradigm. The causes given may be traced to the social structure.

Williams S. Willis (1972:122) charges that the lack of anthropological investigation into African American culture is related to the purpose which anthropology was organized. He recommends that anthropology was initially developed to further the goals of European imperialism. Therefore, it became to a "considerable extent . . . the social science that studies dominated colored people -- and their ancestors -- living outside of the boundaries of modern white societies" (italics added) (Willis 1972:123). Consequently, the constructs of race and evolutionism were integrated into the discipline and used to foster an attitude of intellectual superiority of European people and Western expansion (Willis 1972:125- 129; Cerroni-Long 1987:439).

The dominance of race during the Boas' era, Willis (1972:139) hypothesizes, was not primarily motivated by the plight of colored people. He suggests that Boas used "scientific anti-racism" to attack anti-Semitism and to gain intellectual control over anthropology (Willis 1972:139). Willis (1972:139) reasons that Boas used anthropometric measurements to refute racism against Jews and rid the profession of the influence of its earliest theoreticians. Hyatt (1985:283) suggests that after Boas was dismissed from the Smithsonian Institution as an Honorary Philologist and lost his seat on the National Research Council, he was convinced that "Americans would not tolerate anyone who failed to fit totally into their traditional way of life." Therefore, Boas concluded that color differences had to disappear before African Americans would be accepted (Hyatt 1985:283).

Cerroni-Long (1987:441) disagrees with Willis (1972). She contends that Boas and his students were emotionally committed to the acculturation of African Americans. She proposes that Boas was a fighter for civil rights along with W. E. B. Du Bois. Therefore, his activism led him to advance the anthropometric studies of Africans (Cerroni-Long 1987:441). Cerroni-Long (1987:441) explains that "to consider blacks as a separate cultural group was made difficult for the Boasians by their definition of culture as an integrated whole rooted in a well defined physical setting." African Americans were considered impure, acculturated, ex- slaves and "poor subjects for cultural anthropology originally bent on reconstructing the ethnographic past of isolated societies" (Szwed 1972:155; Cerroni-Long:1987:441). Szwed (1972:155) posits that African Americans were geographically too close and their status was too low status for professional prestige in American society.

The image and idea of African Americans not meeting the criteria of culture, left much of the research about them in the hands of sociologists (Williams 1989; Cerroni-Long 1987:444-445). Sociology is considered to be a profession designed to study contemporary problems in the United States. Therefore, sociologists have been called upon to find solutions to the "Negro Problem" (Williams 1989:5). Overwhelmingly, theories of racial determination have undergirded sociological examinations of African Americans (Williams 1989). Sociologists have relied upon the caste-like arrangements of race and assimilation. Therefore, theses defining African Americans as a culturally deprived, underclass and endangered species continue to be generated in the existing literature.

Jackson (1985:263), Willis (1972), and Drake (1987) suggest that the pervasive theoretical misinterpretation of African American culture and the lack of recognition of African American ethnic identity are influenced by the lack of African American anthropologists. In "Reflection on Anthropology and the Black Experience," Drake (1978:86-94) remembers that the first doctorate degrees in anthropology were awarded to eleven African Americans between 1930 and 1945. He recalls that increased number of African Americans did not enter the field until late the 1960s and early 1970s (Drake 1978:100). Frank discussions between African and white American anthropologists have encouraged anthropologists to reconsider their concept of African American culture (Drake 1987:100). Blauner (1970) says that African American anthropologists are able to interpret the emic perspectives of their communities.

Regardless of the major factors shaping the dominant influence of race in the social science discourse concerning African Americans, it is necessary to understand race in a political context. Race is a myth and a superstitious belief (Montagu 1964a; Brazun 1965). Ashley Montagu (1964a:23) argues in Man's Most Danaerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, that race is adopted as an expedient fiction. There is no scientific evidence that humans can be divided according to physical characteristics (Montagu 1964a:24). Montagu (1964a:127) suggests that race is really a caste system that is reified as genetically derived.

Banton (1987:50) argues that these racial thoughts flourished in the United States as Europeans in America sought to break their relationship with England. The need to create a sense of national unity and the declaration of independence supported the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority and the inferiority of Africans in America and their enslavement (Barton 1987:49; Forbes 1990:8).

Researchers argue that the concept of race exists to support the subordination of African Americans. Van den Berghe (1967:17) writes in Race and Racism that "there is no question that the desire to rationalize the exploitation of non-European peoples fostered the elaboration of a complex ideology of paternalism and racism." Wilson (1973) who examines racially generated power relationships assumes that differential power is a marked feature of racial group classification in complex societies. In the United States, the concept of race was used to empower merchants to sell Africans as commodities (Baker 1983:24-40). Other researchers (Baker 1983:25; Brass 1985; Rothschild 1982; van den Berghe 1967; Forbes 1990:5 ) confirm also that in racially dominated societies, race exists to justify and sustain economic exploitation and maximize profits. During slavery and Jim Crow segregation in the United States from the 1800s until the 1920s, there was a pervasive and explicit assumption in the social science literature that Africans were inferior and a different species (Stocking 1981 :39). Therefore theories of craniometry, eugenics, and polygenesis were advanced (van den Berghe 1967:2; Stocking 1982:101). The research supported societal beliefs and laws. For example, Paul Broca who studied human hybridity argued that the races were physically different. Therefore, he concluded that the offspring of a Negro man and a Caucasian woman would be sterile (Stocking 1982:48). However, Broca contended that the reverse was true if a Negro woman mated with a Caucasian male (Stocking 1982:48). This research was conducted during a period when various states prohibited intermarriage between Negroes and whites and many African American males were Iynched for almost any relationship with white women. Today, dominant theories foster an idea of a black underclass and black males as endangered species. Such concepts support societal assumptions that the marginal status of African Americans is divorced from the social structure. Such theses are supported by the National Institute of Health's proposal to determine if criminality and violence among African American males are innate.

Jack Forbes (1990) in "The Manipulation of Race, Caste and Identity" concisely explains why social scientists fail to significantly study African American identity.

When we turn to the study of African American historical revelations and identities we are, inevitably, thrust into a complex arena where racism, colonialism, and ethnocide stand as extremely significant themes. The tensions created by almost five centuries of exploitation and unequal privilege render the subject a very sensitive one. We are not dealing with systems of denigration which came to an end ages ago but, instead, with a continuing reality (Forbes 1990:9).