‘There is a much better hypothesis to explain the peculiarities of the American temperament. It is the fact
that the states are pervaded by the Negro, that most striking and suggestive figure. Some states are
particularly black, a fact that may astonish the naive European, who thinks of America as a white nation.
It is not wholly white, if you please, but piebald. It cannot be helped, it just is so.
What is more contagious than to live side by side with a rather primitive people? Go to Africa and see
what happens. When it is so obvious that you stumble over it, you call it going black. But when it is not
so obvious it is explained as 'the sun'... It is much easier for us Europeans to be a trifle immoral, or at
least a bit, because we do not have to maintain the moral standard against the heavy downward pull of
primitive life. The inferior man has a tremendous pull because he fascinates the inferior layers of our
psyche, which has liv-ed through untold ages of similar conditions ... He reminds us not so much of our
conscious as our unconscious mind - not only of childhood but of prehistory, which would take us back
not more than about twelve hundred years so far as the Germanic races are concern-ed