population and the country’s most important racial minorities--the
Indian, the Jew, the Oriental, and the Negro--the self-congratulatory
feelings of the majority have always found a partial or complete
counterpart everywhere except among the slaves and the children of
the slaves. The long delay in the inception of All-Africanism in
America, and the groping uncertainty which still characterizes its
manifestations, are due in large part to the cultural youthfulness of
the American Negro. Biologically, the black race was matured in Africa;
culturally it had made considerable advances there, before the days of
the slave-trade. The process of enslavement could not strip away the
physical characteristics of the race, but in all that has to do with
cultural life and social inheritance, the Negro was re-born naked in
the new world.
When one compares the condition of the Negro with that of the other
three racial minorities at the moment of contact with the miscellaneous
white population, the Indian seems closer to the Jew and the Oriental
than to the slave. In a general way, the condition of the Indian
tribes resembled that of the Negroes in Africa, but the Indians were
left in possession of most of the elements of savage culture and were
never entirely deprived of the means of maintaining themselves in this
stage of development. Needless to say, the Jews and the Orientals were
in still better case than the Indians, for their imported cultural
equipment was far more elaborate and substantial, and their economic
position much better.
The four racial minorities thus varied widely in the degree of their
self-sufficiency, and likewise, inversely, in the degree of their need
for absorption into the current of American life. Quite obviously the
Negro was least independent and most in need of assimilation. However,
the necessity of the alien group has not been the only factor of
importance in this matter of assimilation. Each of the minorities has
been from the beginning subjected to the prejudice of the majority, and
that group which first lost all life of its own through contact with
the whites has been singled out for the maximum amount of persecution.
The standard explanation or excuse for race-prejudice is the theory
of the inequality of racial stocks. However, for all their eagerness
to bolster up a foregone conclusion, the race-patriots have not been
able to prove by any sort of evidence, historical, biological, or
psychological, that racial differences are not simply indications
of unlikeness, rather than of inherent superiority or inferiority.
The anthropologists are pretty well agreed that physical differences
divide mankind into three major groups, European (including the Jews),
Mongoloid (including the American Indians), and Negroid; but science
has set no definite limit to the respective potentialities of these
groups. In other words, it has remained for race-prejudice to assume an
unproved inferiority, and to devise all possible measures for making
the life of the objectionable races exactly what it would be, in the
absence of interference, if the assumed inferiority were real.
To accept the term “race-prejudice” as accurately descriptive of the
feelings to which it is usually applied, is to assume that these
feelings originate in race-differences, if not in the inequality
of races. This, however, is still to be proved. Race-differences
are a factor of the situation wherever two races are in contact,
but it is a matter of common knowledge that the members of two
or more racial groups sometimes intermingle on terms of greatest
friendliness. To attribute “race-prejudice” to race-difference, and
to leave race-friendliness entirely unexplained, is to blind oneself
deliberately to the existence of variable causes which alone can
account for the variable results that appear in the presence of racial
constants. Racial inequality of intelligence, if it actually exists,
is simply one of a number of ever-present race-differences, and in all
these differences taken together one can find no adequate explanation
of the variable phenomenon commonly called “race-prejudice,” but so
designated here only for the sake of convenience.
Any serious attempt to get at the non-racial causes of “race-prejudice”
in America would necessarily involve the comparison, point by point,
of economic, social, political, and intellectual conditions in various
localities in the United States with corresponding local conditions
in other countries where the races here in conflict are more nearly
at peace. In the present state of knowledge, the racial theory of
race-prejudice is demonstrably inadequate, while the non-racial theory
is an hypothesis which can neither be proved nor disproved. Such being
the case, the haphazard speculations which follow are not offered as
a proof of this hypothesis, or as an explanation of the existence of
race-prejudice in America, but simply as a stimulus to inquiry.
Beginning with these speculations, it may be said that the goods and
opportunities of the material life, unlike those of the intellectual
life, are frequently incapable of division without loss to the original
possessor. On this account, competition is likely to be particularly
keen and vindictive where material interests are given the foremost
place. It is also perhaps safe to say that the long preoccupation of
the American majority with the development of its material inheritance
has brought to the majority a heavy heritage of materialism. One may
hazard the statement that the prejudice of America’s native white
majority against the Negroes, the Indians, the Jews and the Asiatics,
is now and has always been in some sense attributable and proportional
to the majority’s fear of some action on the part of the minority
which might injure the material interests of the majority, while the
only race-differences which have had any real importance are those
superficial ones which serve to make the members of the minorities
recognizable at sight. At any rate, an examination of some of the facts
that come most easily to hand shows an interesting coincidence between
the prejudice of the majority and the power of the minority.
Before the Civil War, the structure of Southern society was bottomed
on slavery, and the fear of any humanization of the Negro which would
make him appear worthy of emancipation was strong enough to arouse any
degree of prejudice, and any amount of repression. The prejudice of
the Southern white populace as a whole reached its maximum intensity
when emancipation threatened to place the blacks in permanent
political and economic control of certain portions of the South.
Even to-day, fear of the political power of the Negroes, and perhaps
also the over-emphasized fear of black “outrages,” still acts upon
the white population as a unifying force; but in spite of this fact,
class-interests have become plainly visible. When Black Republicanism
had once been driven to cover, the masters set about rebuilding their
privileges upon the foundation of Negro labour which is still their
chief support. Only a few Negroes have been able to compete directly
for a share in these privileges, and accordingly most of the fears
of the well-to-do people of the South are anticipatory rather than
immediate.
With the “poor whites,” the case is altogether different. Here there
is no question of keeping the Negro in his place, for ever since the
Emancipation the place of the Negro has been very much that of the poor
white himself, at least in so far as economic status is concerned. In
the view of the white labourer, the Negro rises too high the moment
he becomes a competitor for a job, and every Negro is potentially
just that. Accordingly, the prejudice of the poorer whites is bitter
and indiscriminate, and is certainly not tending to decrease with the
cityward drift of the Negro population.
With the appearance of Negro workers in large numbers in Northern
industrial centres, race-prejudice has begun to manifest itself
strongly among the white workers. The Northern masters have, however,
shown little tendency to reproduce the sentiments of their Southern
peers, for in the North there is no fear of political dominance by the
blacks, and a supply of cheap labour is as much appreciated as it is
south of the Line.
In spite of the fact that the proportion of Negroes in the total
population of the United States has declined steadily from 15.7
per cent. in 1850 to 9.9 per cent. in 1920, the attitude of both
Northerners and Southerners is somewhat coloured by the fear that
the blacks will eventually overrun the country. If prejudice had no
other basis than this, there would perhaps be no great difficulty in
effecting its cure. As a matter of course, immigration accounts in
part for the increasing predominance of the white population; but this
hardly disposes of the fact that throughout the South, during the
years 1890–1910, the percentage of native whites of native parentage
advanced in both urban and rural communities. Discussion of comparative
birth-rates also gives rise to numerous alarums and excursions, but the
figures scarcely justify the fears expressed. Statistics show that,
in spite of the best efforts of the people who attempt to hold the
black man down, and then fear him all the more because he breeds too
generously, the improvement in the material condition of the Negro is
operating inevitably to check the process of multiplication.
If the case of the Negro is complicated in the extreme, that of the
Indian is comparatively simple. Here race-prejudice has always followed
the frontier. As long as the Indian interfered with the exploitation
of the country, the pioneers feared him, and disliked him cordially.
Their feelings worked themselves out in all manner of personal cruelty,
as well as in a process of wholesale expropriation, but as soon as the
tribes had been cooped up on reservations, the white man’s dislike
for the Indian began to cool off perceptibly. From the beginning, the
Indian interfered with expansion, not as an economic competitor, but as
a military enemy; when the dread of him as a fighter disappeared, there
was no new fear to take its place. During the years 1910 to 1920 the
Indian population actually decreased 8.6 per cent.
If the Indian has neither shared the privileges nor paid the price
of a generous participation in American life, the Jew has certainly
done both. In every important field of activity, the members of this
minority have proved themselves quite able to compete with the native
majority, and accordingly the prejudice against them is not confined
to any one social class, but is concentrated rather in those regions
where the presence of Jews in considerable numbers predicates their
competitive contact with individuals of all classes. Although as a
member of one branch of the European racial family, the Jew is by
no means so definitely distinguished by physical characteristics as
are the members of the other minorities here under discussion, it
is nevertheless true that when the Jew has been identified by his
appearance, or has chosen to identify himself, the anti-Semite takes on
most of the airs of superiority which characterize the manifestations
of prejudice towards the other minorities. Nevertheless, the ordinary
run of anti-Semitic talk contains frequent admissions of jealousy
and fear, and it is safe to say that one must look chiefly to such
emotions, as intensified by the rapid increase of the Jewish population
from 1,500,000 in 1906 to 3,300,000 in 1918, rather than to the
heritage of European prejudice, for an explanation of the growth of
anti-Semitism in America. The inclusion of anti-Semitism with the
other types of race-prejudice here under discussion follows naturally
enough from the fact that the Jew is thought of as primarily a Jew,
whatever the country of his origin may have been, while the Slav,
for instance, is popularly regarded as a Russian, a Pole, a Serb--a
_national_ rather than a _racial_ alien.
Like the Jew, the Oriental has come into the United States as a
“foreigner,” as well as a member of an alien race. The absence of this
special disqualification has not particularly benefitted the Negro
and the Indian, but its presence in the case of the Japanese has been
of considerable service to the agitators. The prevalent dislike and
fear of the new Japan as a world-power has naturally coloured the
attitude of the American majority toward the Japanese settlers in this
country; but this in itself hardly explains why the Californians, who
were burning Chinamen out of house and home in the ’seventies, are now
centring their prejudice upon the Japanese agriculturist. The fact is
that since the passage of the Exclusion Laws the Chinese population
of the United States has fallen off more than 40 per cent., and the
importance of Chinese competition has decreased accordingly, while on
the other hand the number of Japanese increased 53.9 per cent. between
1910 and 1920, and the new competitors are showing themselves more
than a match for the white farmers. With a frankness that neither
Negrophobia nor anti-Semitism has made us familiar with, many of the
Californians have rested their case against the Japanese on an economic
foundation, and have confessed that they are unable to compete with
the Japanese on even terms. As a matter of course, there is the usual
flow of talk about the inferiority of the alien race, but the fear of
competition, here so frankly admitted, would be enough in itself to
account for this new outbreak of “race-prejudice.”
When one considers thus the course that prejudice has taken in the
case of the Negro, the Indian, the Jew, and the Oriental, it begins
to appear that this sentiment may wax and wane and change about
astonishingly in the presence of racial factors that remain always
the same. Such being the case, one is led to wonder what the attitude
of the native majority would be, if the minorities were recognizable
simply as groups, but _not_ as _racial_ groups. In other words, what
would be the result if the racial factor were reduced simply to
recognizability? The question has a more than speculative interest.
* * * * *
If the causes of race-prejudice lie quite beyond the reach of any
simple explanation, the manifestation of this prejudice on the part of
the American majority are perhaps capable of an analysis which will
render the whole situation somewhat more comprehensible. By and large,
and with all due allowance for exceptions, it may be said that, in its
more familiar manifestations, race-prejudice takes a direction exactly
opposite to that taken by prejudice against the ordinary immigrant
of European stock; in the former case, a conscious effort is made to
magnify the differences between the majority and the minority, while
in the latter, a vast amount of energy is expended in the obliteration
of these differences. Thus race-prejudice aspires to preserve and even
to increase that degree of unlikeness which is its excuse for being,
while alien-prejudice works itself out of a job, by “Americanizing”
the immigrant and making him over into an unrecognizable member of
the majority. On one hand, enforced diversity remains as a source of
friction, while on the other, enforced uniformity is demanded as the
price of peace.
Although no purpose can be served by cataloguing here all the means
employed in the South to keep the black man in his place, a few
examples may be cited, in order to show the scope of these measures
of repression. In the economic field, there is a pronounced tendency
to restrict Negro workers to the humblest occupations, and in the
agricultural areas the system of peonage or debt-slavery is widely
employed for the purpose of attaching Negro families to the soil.
Residence-districts are regularly segregated, Jim Crow regulations
are everywhere in force, and inter-racial marriages are prohibited
by law in all the States of the South. The administration of justice
is in the hands of white judges and white juries, and the Negro’s
chances in such company are notoriously small. In nearly one-fourth of
the counties of the South, the population is half, or more than half
black, but the denial of the ballot excludes the Negroes from local,
State, and national political activities. In religious organizations,
segregation is the invariable rule. Theatres and even public libraries
are regularly closed to the Negro, and in every State in the South
segregation in schools is prescribed by law. Some idea of the
significance of the latter provision may be drawn from O. G. Ferguson’s
study of white and Negro schools in Virginia. In this comparatively
progressive State, the general rating of the white schools is 40.8, as
against 22.3 for the coloured schools, the latter figure being seven
points lower than the lowest general rating for any State in the Union.
Such are some of the legal, extra-legal, and illegal manifestations of
that prejudice which finds its supreme expression in the activities of
the lynching-mob and the Ku Klux Klan. There is still a considerable
annual output of lynchings in this country (in 1920 the victims
numbered sixty-five, of whom fifty were Negroes done to death in
the South), but the casualty-list for the South and for the country
as a whole has decreased steadily and markedly since 1889, and the
proportion of Negro victims who were accused of rape or attacks on
women has also decreased, from 31.8 per cent. in 1889–1893 to 19.8 per
cent. in 1914–1918.
On the other hand, the Ku Klux Klan has now re-commenced its
ghost-walking activities under the command of an “Imperial Wizard” who
claims that he has already enlisted 100,000 followers in the fight to
maintain the “God-ordained” pre-eminence of the Anglo-Saxon race in
America. Other statements from the lips of the Wizard seem to indicate
that his organization is not only anti-African, but anti-Semitic,
anti-Catholic, and anti-Bolshevik as well. Indeed, the bearers of the
fiery cross seem bent upon organizing an all-American hate society, and
the expansion of the Klan in the North is already under way.
However, the Klansmen might have succeeded in carrying the war into the
enemy’s country even without adding new prejudices to their platform.
There has always been some feeling against the Negro in the North, and
the war-time migration of the blacks to Northern industrial centres
certainly has not resulted in any diminution of existing prejudice.
The National Urban League estimates that the recent exodus from
Dixie has produced a net increase of a quarter of a million in the
coloured population of twelve cities above the Line. This movement has
brought black and white workers into competition in many industries
where Negroes have hitherto been entirely unknown, and frequently the
relations between the two groups have been anything but friendly. Since
about half the “internationals” affiliated with the American Federation
of Labour still refuse to accept Negro members, the unions themselves
are in no small part to blame for the use that employers have made of
Negro workers as strike-breakers.
In twelve Northern and Western States there are laws on the
statute-books prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks. Jim
Crow regulations are not in force north of Maryland, but in most of
the cities there has been a continuous effort to maintain residential
segregation, and the practice of discrimination in hotels and
restaurants is the rule rather than the exception. Lynchings are
infrequent, but the great riots of Washington and Chicago were not
exactly indicative of good feeling between the races. One situation
which revealed a remarkable similarity of temper between the North
and the South was that which arose in the army during the war. It is
notorious that Northerners in uniform fell in easily with the Southern
spirit, and gave all possible assistance in an energetic Jim-Crowing of
the Negroes of Michigan and the Negroes of Mississippi, from the first
day of their service right through to the last.
The treatment of the Negro in literature and on the stage also reveals
an unconscious but all the more important unanimity of opinion. It is
true the North has produced no Thomas Dixons, but it is also true that
the gentle and unassuming Uncle Tom of Northern song and story is none
other than the Uncle Remus whom the South loves so much. In Boston, as
in Baton Rouge, the Negro who is best liked is the loyal, humble, and
not too able mammie or uncle of the good old days before the war. If
an exception be made in the case of Eugene O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones,”
it may be said that American literature has not yet cast a strong,
upstanding black man for any other rôle than that of beast and villain.
And yet all these forms of discrimination and repression are not fully
expressive of the attitude of the white population. The people of the
South are fully sensible of the necessity of keeping the Negro in his
place; still they do not keep him from attending school. Educational
facilities, of a sort, are provided, however reluctantly, and in half
the States of the South school attendance is even made compulsory by
laws (which may or may not be enforced). The schooling is not of a kind
that will fit the Negroes for the permanent and contented occupancy of
a servile position. Generally speaking, the coloured children do not
receive a vocational education that will keep them in their place, but
an old-style three-R training that prepares for nothing but unrest.
If unrest leads to urbanization, the half-hearted education of the
Negro perhaps serves the interests of the new industrialists; but
these industrial employers are so few in number that their influence
cannot outweigh that of the planters who lose their peons, and the
poor whites who find the Negro with one grain of knowledge a somewhat
more dangerous competitor than the Negro with none. Hence there is
every reason to believe that if the white South had rationalized
this situation, the Negro would be as ruthlessly excluded from the
school as he now is from the ballot-box. In fact, the education of the
Negro seems quite inconsistent with race-prejudice as it is generally
preached and practised in the South.
In the North there is no discrimination in the schools, and black
children and white are put through the same mill. In the industrial
field, prejudice cannot effectually close to the Negroes all those
openings which are created by general economic conditions, and in
politics the Northern Negro also finds some outlet for his energies.
While it would be quite impossible to show that the existence of these
miscellaneous educational, industrial, and political opportunities
is due to any general desire upon the part of the members of the
white majority to minimize the differences between themselves and the
Negroes, it is certainly true that this desire exists in a limited
section of the white population. At the present time, white friends of
the Negro are actively engaged in efforts to eliminate certain legal
and illegal forms of discrimination and persecution, and are giving
financial support to much of the religious work and most of the
private educational institutions among the blacks. The Inter-racial
Committee of the War Work Council of the Y.M.C.A. has listed
thirty-three social and economic agencies, and twenty-three religious
agencies, in which members of both races are working co-operatively.
It must be admitted, however, that many, if not most, of the white
participants in work of this sort are affected by race-prejudice to the
extent that they desire simply to ameliorate the lowly condition of the
Negro, without altogether doing away with a certain wholesome degree
of racial segregation. For the complete elimination of the flavour
of condescension, one must usually seek out those extreme socialist
and syndicalist agitators who preach political or non-political
class-organization, as a substitute for the familiar national and
racial groupings.