"Where two distinct species are located side by side, history and biology teach that but one of two things can happen; either one race drives the other out, as the Americans exterminated the Indians and as the negroes are now replacing the whites in various parts of the South; or else they amalgamate and form a population of race bastards in which the lower type ultimately predominates. This is a disagreeable alternative with which to confront sentimentalists, but nature is only concerned with results and neither makes nor takes excuses. The chief failing of the day with some of our well meaning philanthropists is their absolute refusal to face inevitable facts, if such facts appear cruel. . . . If the purity of the two races is to be maintained, they cannot continue to live side by side, and this is a problem from which there can be no escape." (Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race). CHAPTER XIII SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEMS OF CIVILIZATION WHEN IN CONTACT WITH COLORED RACES: AMALGAMATION OR SEPARATIONREPATRIATION A NECESSITY Let us repeat that the "color problem" is not a problem of color, but of mentality. The difference between the white man, who has produced all civilizations, and the negro, who has no cultural possessions save those which he has received from the white man, is not a color difference merely. Pigmentation affects the skin only, while civilized culture is the product of the mind's mastery over things material and spiritual. It so happens that white skin accompanies the culturally capable, while black skin accompanies the culturally deficient. If the negro had proved himself the master of things and the Caucasian had proved himself dependent upon the negro's progress, we should readily concede superiority to the negro. But as the history of civilization shows the white man to be the master of things and the colored races merely the beneficiaries of the white man's progress, we cannot deny superiority to the white man. Such con clusion is not a sentimental arrogation of the white man. He who would construct a race sociology will seek the facts of race history from which to induce generalizations. The sentimentalist will ignore the facts. The just man will see, in the white man's agelong dominion over things, undeniable implication of the white man's custodianship of creative genius; the negrophilist will ignore the white race as the sole cultural factor in progressive civilization and glibly descant upon the attainments of mankind. The negrophilist will attribute to the human race those achievements that have been attained by a particular sub-species of humanity. The negrophilist has not the vision of the scientist, and cannot have, for he is color blind. White sentimentalists and the negroid writers of America will trace to the institution of slavery the American negro's cultural incapacity. Unmindful of the truth known to ethnology-that the cultural status of the American negro has antecedents in Africa-they ignore the fact "that in his own country the centuries have rolled away, finding him always in the same condition of dense ignorance and unalleviated savagery," and that "the Caucasian race has been for centuries, in one or another capacity, the superior guiding or controlling force in human history, and its records contain the epitome of human achievement. During the same period, on the contrary, the negro has occupied in every re lation of life a subordinate position, whether as a savage awaiting the touch of civilization, or as a servile people, existing under the control and direction of the more highly civilized race."1 Slavery, in America, left the negro in an infinitely better condition than it found him, but "The institution of slavery has loomed so large in our horizon that it has completely overshadowed that which went before it in African history. At every mention of negro inefficiency, improvidence or immorality, it sufficed to recall slavery and the characteristic was explained." Slavery not only left the American negro more advanced culturally than the African members of his race, but did this, notwithstanding the fact that the American slaves were recruited from the "sweepings of the Sudanese plateau" (Keane), where the inferior tribes "had been crowded to the impassable barrier of the ocean" (Brinton). Slavery found the negro an animist and left him a Christian. Slavery found him a cannibal and provided him with the meat of domestic animals. It found him a naked savage and left him clothed and civilized. The apologists of the negro ignore the fact that the negro's lying, stealing, and immorality as exemplified in America is less intense than in his African home. 1The Negro Problem: Abraham Lincoln's Solution, by William P. Pickett, pp. 8 and 30. 2Tillinghast, The Negro in Africa and in America, p. 5. |