the white majority have placed the emphasis on geographic rather than
social segregation. Here the demand of the whites has been for land
rather than for labour, and by consequence servility has never been
regarded as a prime virtue of Indian character.
If the early white settlers had so desired, they of course could
have enslaved a considerable portion of the Indian population, just
as the Spaniards did, in regions farther to the southward. However,
the Americans chose to drive the Indians inland, and to replace them
in certain regions with African tribesmen who in their native state
had been perhaps as war-like as the Indians themselves. Thus in the
natural course of events the African warrior was lost in the slave,
while the Indian chief continued to be the military opponent rather
than the economic servant of exploitation, and eventually gained
romantic interest by virtue of this fact. The nature of this operation
of debasement on one hand, and ennoblement on the other, is plainly
revealed in American literature. The latter phase of the work is
carried forward to-day with great enthusiasm by the Camp Fire Girls and
the Boy Scouts, whose devotion to the romantic ideal of Indian life is
nowhere paralleled by a similar interest in African tribal lore.
If the Indian has been glorified by remote admirers, he has also
been cordially disliked by some of his nearest neighbours, and indeed
the treatment he has received at the hands of the Government seems to
reflect the latter attitude rather than the former. In theory, most of
the Indian reservations are still regarded as subject principalities,
and the Indians confined within their boundaries are almost entirely
cut off from the economic, social, and political life of the
neighbouring white communities. Many of the tribes still receive yearly
governmental grants of food, clothing, arms, and ammunition, but these
allowances only serve to maintain them in a condition of dependence,
without providing any means of exit from it. In justice it should be
said, however, that the Government has declared an intention to make
the Indian self-supporting, and accordingly it restricts the grants,
in principle, to the old and the destitute. Several States have shown
their complete sympathy with the system of segregation by enacting laws
prohibiting the inter-marriage of Indians and whites.
On the other hand, the mental and moral Americanization of the red
man has been undertaken by Protestant and Catholic missions, and more
recently by Government schools. The agencies of the latter sort are
especially systematic in their work of depriving the Indian of most of
the qualities for which he has been glorified in romance, as well as
those for which he has been disliked by his neighbours. Many a Western
town enjoys several times each year the spectacle of Indian school-boys
in blue uniforms and Indian school-girls in pigtails and pinafores,
marching in military formation through its streets. As long as these
marchers are destined for a return to the reservation, the townsmen
can afford to look upon them with mild curiosity. The time for a new
adjustment of inter-racial relations will not come until the procession
turns towards the white man’s job on the farm and in the factory--if it
ever does turn that way.
Attention has already been called to the fact that the Jewish immigrant
normally marches from the dock directly to the arena of economic
competition. Accordingly his progress is not likely to be at any time
the object of mere curiosity. On the other hand, the manifestations
of prejudice against the Jew have been less aggressive and much less
systematic than those repressive activities which affect the other
minorities. Where anti-Semitism is present in America, it seems to
express itself almost entirely in social discrimination, in the
narrow sense. On the other hand, economic, political, and educational
opportunities are opened to the Jews with a certain amount of
reluctance. A major exception to this rule of discrimination must be
made in the case of those socialists, syndicalists and trade-unionists
who have diligently sought the support of the Jewish workers.
The Chinaman has also some friends now among the people who once
regarded him as the blackest of villains. Indeed, the Californian’s
attitude toward the Orientals has in it an element of unconscious irony
which somewhat illuminates the character of the race-problem. The
average Easterner will perhaps be surprised to learn that in Western
eyes the Chinaman is an inferior, of course, but nevertheless an honest
man, noted for square dealing and the prompt payment of his debts,
while the Jap is a tricky person whom one should never trust on any
account.
In California the baiting of the Japanese is now almost as much a part
of political electioneering as is the abuse of the Negro in the South.
The Native Sons of the Golden West and the American Legion have gone on
record in determined opposition to any expansion of Japanese interests
in California, while the Japanese Exclusion League is particularly
active in trouble-making propaganda. Economic discrimination has taken
statutory form in the Alien Land Laws of 1913 and 1920; discriminatory
legislation of the same general type has been proposed in Texas and
Oregon; a bill providing for educational segregation has been presented
for a second time at Sacramento; Congress has been urged to replace
the “gentlemen’s agreement” with an absolute prohibition of Japanese
immigration; and there is even a demand for a constitutional amendment
which will deny citizenship to the American-born children of aliens who
are themselves ineligible for naturalization. The method of legislation
is perhaps preferable to the method of force and violence, but if the
previous history of race-prejudice means anything, it means that force
will be resorted to if legislation fails. At bottom, the spirit of
the California Land Laws is more than a little like that of a Georgia
lynching; in the one case as in the other, the dominant race attempts
to maintain its position, not by a man-to-man contest, with fair
chances all around, but by depositing itself bodily and _en masse_ on
top of the subject people and crushing them.
If in the realm of individual conduct this sort of behaviour works
injury to the oppressor, as well as to the oppressed, it is not
otherwise where masses of men are concerned. Stephen Graham, in his
recent book, “The Soul of John Brown,” says that “in America to-day,
and especially in the South, there is a hereditary taint left by
slavery, and it is to be observed in the descendants of the masters
as much as in the descendants of the slaves. It would be a mistake to
think of this American problem as exclusively a Negro problem.” Indeed,
it is true that in every case the race-problem is the problem of the
majority as well as of the minority, for the former can no more escape
the reaction of prejudice than the latter can escape its direct effects.
To-day the white South is still under the influence of a system of
life and thought that is far more enduring than the one institution
which gave it most complete expression. The Emancipation abolished
slavery, but it did not rid the master of the idea that it is his
right to live by the labour of the slave. The black man is not yet
relieved of the duty of supporting a certain proportion of the white
population in leisure; nor does it appear that the leisured Southerner
of to-day makes a better use of his time than his ancestors did before
him. Indeed, an historian who judged the peoples chiefly by their
contribution to science and the arts would still be obliged to condemn
the white South, not for enslaving the Negro, but for dissipating in
the practices of a barren gentility the leisure that Negro labour
created, and still creates, so abundantly. It is notorious also that in
the South the airs of gentility have been more widely broadcast among
the white population than the leisure necessary for their practice,
with the result that much honest work which could not be imposed upon
the black man has been passed on to posterity, and still remains
undone.
Any one who seeks to discover the cause of the mental lethargy that
has converted the leisure of the South so largely into mere laziness
must take some account of a factor that is always present where
race-prejudice exists. The race which pretends to superiority may not
always succeed in superimposing itself economically upon the inferior
group; and yet the pride and self-satisfaction of the members of the
“superior” race will pretty surely make for indolence and the deadening
of the creative spirit. This will almost inevitably be true where the
superiority of the one race is acknowledged by the other, and where no
contest of wits is necessary for the maintenance of the _status quo_.
This is the condition that has always obtained, and still obtains in
most of the old slave territory. In Dixie it is a career simply to go
through life inside of a white skin. However ignorant and worthless
the white man may be, it is still his privilege to proclaim on any
street corner that he is in all respects a finer creature than any
one of several million human beings whom he classes all together as
“good-for-nothin’ niggers.” If the mere statement of this fact is not
enough to bring warm applause from all the blacks in the neighbourhood,
the white man is often more than willing to use fire and sword to
demonstrate a superiority which he seldom stoops to prove in any
other fashion. Naturally this feeling of God-given primacy tends to
make its possessors indolent, immune to new ideas of every sort, and
quite willing to apply “the short way with the nigger” to any one who
threatens the established order of the universe.
It would be foolish indeed to suppose that the general intolerance,
bigotry, and backwardness which grow out of race-prejudice have
affected the South alone. The North and the West have their prejudices
too, their consciousness of a full-blooded American superiority that
does not have to be proved, their lazy-mindedness, their righteous
anger, their own short way with what is new and strange. No sane man
will attribute the origin of all these evils to race-prejudice alone,
but no honest man will deny that the practice of discrimination against
the racial minorities has helped to infect the whole life and thought
of the country with a cocky and stupefying provincialism.
Perhaps the most interesting phase of the whole racial situation in
America is the attitude which the minorities themselves have maintained
in the presence of a dominant prejudice which has constantly emphasized
and magnified the differences between the minorities and majority, and
has even maintained the spirit of condescension, and the principle of
segregation in such assimilative activities as education and Christian
mission work. One would naturally expect that such an attitude on
the part of the majority would stimulate a counter race-prejudice in
each of the minorities, which would render them also intent upon the
maintenance of differentiation.
Although such a counter prejudice has existed from the beginning among
the Indians, the Jews, and the Asiatics, it is only now beginning to
take form among the Negroes. The conditions of the contact between the
black minority and the white majority have thus been substantially
different from those which existed in the other cases, and the results
of this contact seem to justify the statement that, so long as it
remains _one-sided_, the strongest race-prejudice cannot prevent the
cultural and even the biological assimilation of one race to another.
In other words, prejudice defeats itself, in a measure, just so long
as one of the parties accepts an inferior position; in fact, it
becomes fully effective only when the despised group denies its own
inferiority, and throws the reproach back upon those with whom it
originated. Thus the new racial self-consciousness of a small section
of the Negro population gives the prejudiced whites a full measure of
the differentiation they desire, coupled with an absolute denial of the
inferiority which is supposed to justify segregation.
It has already been pointed out that the enslavement of the Negroes
deprived them of practically everything to which racial pride might
attach itself, and left them with no foundation of their own on which
to build. Thus they could make no advances of any sort except in so
far as they were permitted to assimilate the culture of the white man.
In the natural course of events, the adoption of the English language
came first, and then shortly the Negro was granted such a share in the
white man’s heaven as he has never yet received of the white man’s
earth. As the only available means of self-expression, religion took a
tremendous hold upon the slaves, and from that day to this, the black
South has wailed its heart out in appeals to the white man’s God for
deliverance from the white man’s burden. The Negro “spirituals” are not
the songs of African tribesmen, the chants of free warriors. Indeed,
the white man may claim full credit for the sadness that darkens the
Negro’s music, and put such words as these into the mouth of the Lord:
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egyp’ lan’
Tell ole Pharaoh
Le’ ma people go!
Israel was in Egyp’ lan’
Oppres’ so hard dey could not stan’,
Le’ ma people go!
When casual observers say that the black man is naturally more
religious than the white, they lose sight of the fact that the number
of church-members per thousand individuals in the Negro population is
about the same as the average for the United States as a whole; and
they forget also the more important fact that the Negro has never had
all he wanted of anything except religion--and in segregated churches
at that. It is more true of the black men than of Engel’s proletarians,
that they have been put off for a very long time with checks on the
bank of Heaven.
Emancipation and the Fourteenth Amendment seemed to open the path to
an earthly paradise; but this vision was soon eclipsed by a second
Civil War that resulted in a substantial victory for the white South.
Economic repression could not be made entirely effective, however, and
in the fifty-three years from 1866 to 1919 the number of American Negro
homeowners increased from 12,000 to 600,000 and the number of Negroes
operating farms from 20,000 to 1,000,000. In 1910 the Negro population
still remained 72.6 per cent. rural, but the cityward movement of the
blacks during the years 1890 to 1910 was more rapid than that of the
whites. Education has directly facilitated economic progress, and has
resulted in an increase of literacy among the Negroes from ten per
cent. in 1866 to eighty per cent. in 1919. During the period 1900 to
1910, the _rate_ of increase of literacy among the blacks was much more
rapid than that among the whites. Thus from the day he was cut off from
his own inheritance, the American Negro has reached out eagerly for an
alien substitute, until to-day, in practically everything that has to
do with culture, he is not black but white--and artificially retarded.
Since America has deprived the Negro of the opportunity to grow up as
an African, and at the same time has denied him the right to grow up
as a white man, it is not surprising that a few daring spirits among
the Negroes have been driven at last to the conclusion that there is no
hope for their race except in an exodus from the white man’s culture
and the white man’s continent. The war did a great deal to prepare
the way for this new movement; the Negroes of America heard much
talk of democracy not meant for their ears; their list of wrongs was
lengthened, but at the same time their economic power increased; and
many of them learned for the first time what it meant to fight back.
Some of them armed themselves, and began to talk of taking two lives
for one when the lynching-mob came. Then trouble broke in Chicago and
Washington--and the casualties were not all of one sort. Out of this
welter of unrest and rebellion new voices arose, some of them calling
upon the Negro workers to join forces with their white brothers;
some fierce and vengeful, as bitterly denunciatory of socialism and
syndicalism as of everything else that had felt the touch of the white
man’s hand; some intoxicated, ecstatic with a new religion, preaching
the glory of the black race and the hope of the black exodus.
With much travail, there finally came forth, as an embodiment of the
extreme of race-consciousness, an organization called the Universal
Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. This clan
lays claim to a million members in the United States, the West Indies,
South America and South Africa, and announces as its final object the
establishment of a black empire in Africa. Connected with the U.N.I.A.
are the Black Star Line, capitalized at $10,000,000, and the Negro
Factories Corporation, capitalized at $2,000,000. Just what these
astonishing figures mean in actual cash it is impossible to say, but
this much is certain: the Black Star Line already owns three of the
many vessels which--say the prophets of the movement--will some day ply
among the Negro lands of the world.
To cap the climax, the U.N.I.A. held in New York City during the month
of August, 1920, “the first International Negro Convention,” which drew
up a Negro Declaration of Independence, adopted a national flag and
a national anthem, and elected “a Provisional President of Africa, a
leader for the American Negroes, and two leaders for the Negroes of the
West Indies, Central and South America.”
The best testimony of the nature of this new movement is to be found
in an astonishing pamphlet called the “Universal Negro Catechism,” and
issued “by authority of the High Executive Council of the Universal
Negro Improvement Association.” In this catechism one discovers such
items as the following, under the head of “Religious Knowledge”:
Q. Did God make any group or race of men superior to another?
A. No; He created all races equal, and of one blood, to dwell
on all the face of the earth.
* * * * *
Q. What is the colour of God?
A. A spirit has neither colour, nor other natural parts, nor
qualities.
* * * * *
Q. If ... you had to think or speak of the colour of God, how
would you describe it?
A. As black; since we are created in His image and likeness.
* * * * *
Q. What did Jesus Christ teach as the essential principle of
true religion?
A. The universal brotherhood of man growing out of the
universal Fatherhood of God.
* * * * *
Q. Who is responsible for the colour of the Ethiopians?
A. The Creator; and what He has done cannot be changed. Read
Jeremiah 13:23.
* * * * *
Q. What prediction made in the 68th Psalm and the 31st Verse is
now being fulfilled?
A. “Princes shall come out of Egypt, Ethiopia shall soon
stretch out her hands unto God.”
* * * * *
Q. What does this verse prove?
A. That Negroes will set up their own government in Africa with
rulers of their own race.
* * * * *
Q. Will Negroes ever be given equal opportunity and treatment
in countries ruled by white men?
A. No; they will enjoy the full rights of manhood and liberty
only when they establish their own nation and government in
Africa.
Perhaps enough has already been said to make it clear that there exists
in America no distinctive black culture which could spontaneously give
rise to such a movement as this. Culturally the black man is American;
biologically he is African. It is solely and entirely the prejudice of
the American majority that has forced this group of Negroes to attempt
to reconstruct a cultural and sentimental connection that was destroyed
long ago. The task which faces the leaders of the new movement is one
of almost insurmountable difficulty, for in spite of every sort of
persecution, the general life and thought of America are still far more
easily accessible to the Negro than is anything distinctively his own.
The cultural shipwreck of the Negro on the American shore has thus
placed him more completely at the mercy of the majority than the other
minorities have ever been. In the case of the Indians, the Jews, and
the Orientals, the race-name has not stood simply for an incomplete
Americanism, but for a positive cultural quality which has persisted in
the face of all misfortune. These races were provisioned, so to speak,
for a long siege, while the Negro had no choice but to eat out of the
white man’s hand, or starve.
The reservation-system has reduced many of the Indian tribes to a
state of economic dependence, but it has also helped to preserve
their cultural autonomy. In most cases the isolated communities on
the reservations are distinctly Indian communities. The non-material
inheritance of the past has come down to the present generation in a
fairly complete form, with the result that the Indian of to-day may
usually take his choice between Indian culture and white. Under these
conditions the labours of missionaries and educators have not been
phenomenally successful, as is witnessed by the fact that the number
of Protestant Christians per thousand Indians is still only about
one-seventh as large as that for the Negroes, while the percentage
of illiterates is much larger among the Indians. However, school
attendance is increasing at a more rapid rate than among the whites,
and the prospect is that the Government schools will eventually deprive
the country of all that is attractive in Indian life.
Toward the close of the 19th century, the Indian’s resentment of
the white man’s overbearing actions found expression in a religious
movement which originated in Nevada and spread eastward till it
numbered among its adherents nearly all the natives between the Rocky
Mountains and the Missouri River. This messianic faith bore the name
of a ceremonial connected with it, the Ghost Dance, and was based upon
a divine revelation which promised the complete restoration of the
Indian’s inheritance. Such doctrines have, of course, been preached
in many forms and in many lands, but it is no great compliment to the
amiability of American civilization that the gospel of deliverance has
found so many followers among the Negroes, the Indians, and the Jews
who dwell within the borders of the country.
It does not seem likely that the Zionist version of this gospel will
produce any general exodus of the last-named minority from this
country, for in spite of prejudice, the Jews have been able to make a
large place for themselves in the United States. Since the movements
of the Jews have not been systematically restricted, as those of the
Negroes and the Indians have been, the great concentration of the
Jewish population in the cities of the East would seem to be due in
large measure to the choice of the Jews themselves. At the present time
they dominate the clothing industry, the management of the theatre,
and the production of motion-pictures. Approximately one-tenth of
the trade-unionists in the United States are Jews, and the adherence
of a considerable number of Jews to the doctrines of socialism and
syndicalism has unquestionably been one of the causes of prejudice
against the race.