Notice_the_nose’s Reviews > The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society > Status Update

Other Baseline Essays argue in a similar vein that Africa was the birthplace of science, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and art, and that Europe stole its civ- ilization from Africa and then engaged in "malicious misrepresentation of African society and people ... to support the enormous profitability of slavery."

"Black superiority in the areas of mental development, neurological functioning, and psychomotor development," opines Amos Wilson, "[are] ... all related to the possession of a high level of melanin."

Whites must strive for supremacy, according to the black psychiatrist Frances Cress, to make up for their racial inferiority, caused by their "genetic inability to produce the skin pigments of melanin which are responsible for all skin coloration."

According to Professor Asa Hilliard, a black psychologist at Georgia State University, black students have cultural characteristics that whites lack: "high levels of energy, impulsive interrupting, and loud talking."

Charles Willie of Harvard finds several distinct "intelligences" of which the "communication and calculation" valued by whites constitute only two. Other kinds of "intelligence" are singing and dancing, in both of which blacks excel.

"There are scientific studies that show, at early ages, the difference between Caucasian infants and African infants," says Clare Jacobs, a teacher in Washington, D.C. "Our African children are very expressive. Every thought we have has an emotional dimension to it, and Western education has historically subordinated the feelings."

"The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed," Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1943, "is that Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race and ancestry. A good American is one who is loyal to this country and to our creed of liberty and democracy."

The Melting-Pot played before rapt audiences across the country. Jane Addams of HullHouse in Chicago observed that Zangwill had performed "a great service to America by reminding us of the high hopes of the founders of the Republic."

And they became Americans in a more technical sense because citizenship, at least for white America, was defined not in the European stvle byjus sanguinis—law of blood—but by an adaptation ofjus soli—law of the soil, i.e., of location. To become citizens, newcomers had only to swear to support and defend die Constitution and die laws of die land.