Part 26 (1/2)

CHAPTER XIV

THE COLOR LINE

”A young white woman, a graduate of a great university of the far North, where Negroes are seldom seen, resented it most indignantly when she was threatened with social ostracism in a city farther South with a large Negro population because she insisted upon receiving upon terms of social equality a Negro man who had been her cla.s.smate.[128]”

The incident seems trivial. But the phenomenon back of it, the ”color line,” is so far-reaching that it deserves careful examination.

As the incident suggests, the color line is not a universal phenomenon.

The Germans appear to have little aversion to receiving Negroes--_in Germany_--on terms of equality. These same Germans, when brought face to face with the question in their colonies, or in the southern United States, quickly change their att.i.tude. Similarly a Negro in Great Britain labors under much less disadvantage than he does among the British inhabitants of Australia or South Africa.

The color line therefore exists only as the result of race experience.

This fact alone is sufficient to suggest that one should not dismiss it lightly as the outgrowth of bigotry. Is is not perhaps a social adaptation with survival value?

The purpose of this chapter is to a.n.a.lyze society's ”unconscious reasoning” which has led to the establishment of a color line--to the denial of social equality--wherever the white[129] and black races have long been in contact during recent history; and to see whether this discrimination appears to be justified by eugenics.

J. M. Mecklin[130] summarizes society's logic as follows:

”When society permits the free social intercourse of two young persons of similar training and interests, it tacitly gives its consent to the possible legitimate results of such relations, namely, marriage. But marriage is not a matter that concerns the contracting parties alone; it is social in its origin and from society come its sanctions. It is society's legitimatised method for the perpetuation of the race in the larger and inclusive sense of a continuous racial type which shall be the bearer of a continuous and progressive civilization. There are, however, within the community, two racial groups of such widely divergent physical and psychic characteristics that the blending of the two destroys the purity of the type of both and introduces confusion--the result of the blend is a mongrel. The preservation of the unbroken, self-conscious existence of the white or dominant ethnic group is synonymous with the preservation of all that has meaning and inspiration in its past and hope for its future. It forbids by law, therefore, or by the equally effective social taboo, anything that would tend to contaminate the purity of its stock or jeopardize the integrity of its social heritage.”

It is needless to say that the ”social mind” does not consciously go through any such process of reasoning, before it draws a color line. The social mind rarely even attempts to justify its conclusions. It merely holds a general att.i.tude of superiority, which in many cases appears to be nothing more than a feeling that another race is _different_.

In what way different?

The difference between the white race and the black (or any other race) might consist of two elements: (1) differences in heredity--biological differences; (2) differences in traditions, environment, customs--social differences, in short. A critical inquirer would want to know which kind of difference was greater, for he would at once see that the second kind might be removed by education and other social forces, while the first kind would be substantially permanent.

It is not difficult to find persons of prominence who will a.s.sert that all the differences between white and Negro are differences of a social nature, that the differences of a physical nature are negligible, and that if the Negro is ”given a chance” the significant differences will disappear. This att.i.tude permeates the public school system of northern states. A recent report on the condition of Negro pupils in the New York City public schools professes to give ”few, perhaps no, recommendations that would not apply to the children of other races. Where the application is more true in regard to colored children, it seems largely to be because of this lack of equal justice in the cases of their parents. Race weakness appears but this could easily be balanced by the same or similar weakness in other races. Given an education carefully adapted to his needs and a fair chance for employment, the normal child of any race will succeed, unless the burden of wrong home conditions lies too heavily upon him.”[131]

As the writer does not define what she means by ”succeed,” one is obliged to guess at what she means: Her anthropology is apparently similar to that of Franz Boas of Columbia University, who has said that, ”No proof can be given of any material inferiority of the Negro race;--without doubt the bulk of the individuals composing the race are equal in mental apt.i.tude to the bulk of our own people.”

If such a statement is wholly true, the color line can hardly be justified, but must be regarded, as it is now the case sometimes, as merely the expression of prejudice and ignorance. If the only differences between white and black, which can not be removed by education, are of no real significance,--a chocolate hue of skin, a certain kinkiness of hair, and so on,--then logically the white race should remove the handicaps which lack of education and bad environment have placed on the Negro, and receive him on terms of perfect equality, in business, in politics, and in marriage.

The proposition needs only to be stated in this frank form, to arouse an instinctive protest on the part of most Americans. Yet it has been urged in an almost equally frank form by many writers, from the days of the abolitionists to the present, and it seems to be the logical consequence of the position adopted by such anthropologists as Professor Boas, and by the educators and others who proclaim that there are no significant differences between the Negro and the white, except such as are due to social conditions and which, therefore, can be removed.

But what are these social differences, which it is the custom to dismiss in such a light-hearted way? Are they not based on fundamental incompatibilities of racial temperament, which in turn are based on differences in heredity? Modern sociologists for the main part have no illusions as to the ease with which these differences in racial tradition and custom can be removed.

The social heritage of the Negro has been described at great length and often with little regard for fact, by hundreds of writers. Only a glance can be given the subject here, but it may profitably be asked what the Negro did when he was left to himself in Africa.

”The most striking feature of the African Negro is the low forms of social organization, the lack of industrial and political cooperation, and consequently the almost entire absence of social and national self-consciousness. This rather than intellectual inferiority explains the lack of social sympathy, the presence of such barbarous inst.i.tutions as cannibalism and slavery, the low position of woman, inefficiency in the industrial and mechanical arts, the low type of group morals, rudimentary art-sense, lack of race-pride and self-a.s.sertiveness, and in intellectual and religious life largely synonymous with fetis.h.i.+sm and sorcery.”[132]

An elementary knowledge of the history of Africa, or the more recent and much-quoted example of Haiti, is sufficient to prove that the Negro's own social heritage is at a level far below that of the whites among whom he is living in the United States. No matter how much one may admire some of the Negro's individual traits, one must admit that his development of group traits is primitive, and suggests a mental development which is also primitive.

If the number of original contributions which it has made to the world's civilization is any fair criterion of the relative value of a race, then the Negro race must be placed very near zero on the scale.[133]

The following historical considerations suggest that in comparison with some other races the Negro race is germinally lacking in the higher developments of intelligence:

1. That the Negro race in Africa has never, by its own initiative, risen much above barbarism, although it has been exposed to a considerable range of environments and has had abundant time in which to bring to expression any inherited traits it may possess.

2. That when transplanted to a new environment--say, Haiti--and left to its own resources, the Negro race has shown the same inability to rise; it has there, indeed, lost most of what it had acquired from the superior civilization of the French.

3. That when placed side by side with the white race, the Negro race again fails to come up to their standard, or indeed to come anywhere near it. It is often alleged that this third test is an unfair one; that the social heritage of slavery must be eliminated before the Negro can be expected to show his true worth. But contrast his career in and after slavery with that of the Mamelukes of Egypt, who were slaves, but slaves of good stock. They quickly rose to be the real rulers of the country.