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liv Introduction
ideas, and of necessity, they determine the scientific treatment of a specific
social problem. In few instances is it possible to check them by present-day
scientific tools. It is still less possible to check one’s ideas about the larger
society within the frame of a specialized investigation. In the main, they
remain unchecked, as they are derived by common sense intuition and every-
day reflection. They are generalized inductions from a vast mass of
unassorted, scientifically uncontrolled personal experience. Few of them are
obtained from books dealing with the larger society. But since they
determine the study, they should be accounted for as far as possible. This
is usually difficult, as these ideas—in the degree they conform to the cul-
tural milieu—do not stand out clearly in the consciousness of an Investigator.
No doubt most social scientists honestly believe they have no such pre-
conceptions. Their prevalence becomes obvious, however, when time has
passed and the milieu has changed. Then we see how the scientists in the
past period unconsciously worked under certain preconceptions, which we
now find erroneous or not adequate for the present situation. These general
ideas can also become explicit when one becomes acquainted with a dif-
ferent civilization and views one’s own society through the prism of such
an alien milieu.
The present writer has been looking not only at the Negro people but
at all America from the outside. In fact, it has been his chief and sometimes
overwhelming difficulty in this work that he had to start from the beginning
and try to understand not only the Negro problem but the entire American
culture in which it is encompassed. Comparatively little in American
civilization is natural to him. He is constantly reminded of the preconcep-
tions he utilizes to understand the larger American society. The difference
is not that he has preconceptions and his American colleagues do not. The
difference is that, being an outsider, he is compelled, to be more conscious
of them, and has had to try to reach them by deliberate intellectual efforts.
In this situation he is tempted to turn a deficiency into a virtue. At any
rate, he is under the pressure to state to himself what he thinks about this
somewhat strange culture. He can then attempt an experiment in more
rigorous social science methods in the interests of objectivity by laying
open even this type of preconception. He is thereby attempting rationally
to assist his critics. Not only in the next few chapters but everywhere in the
book I express general views on the larger American society j
many general
statements about the Negro and race relations belong to the same type of
judgment.
Some readers may disagree with many of my preconceptions of America.
All will probably disagree with some. Just because in this experiment the
preconceptions are not hidden but are openly set out, the reader is offered
a guide to the specific mistakes which, in pursuing the study, might have
been committed on account of false preconceptions about the larger Ameri-
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