It is impossible to separate the population of the world accurately by
race, since that is no scientific criterion by which to divide races. If
we divide the world, however, roughly into African Negroes and Negroids,
European whites, and Asiatic and American brown and yellow peoples, we
have approximately 150,000,000 Negroes, 500,000,000 whites, and
900,000,000 yellow and brown peoples. Of the 150,000,000 Negroes,
121,000,000 live in Africa, 27,000,000[110] in the new world, and
2,000,000 in Asia.
What is to be the future relation of the Negro race to the rest of the
world? The visitor from Altruria might see here no peculiar problem. He
would expect the Negro race to develop along the lines of other human
races. In Africa his economic and political development would restore and
eventually outrun the ancient glories of Egypt, Ethiopia, and Yoruba;
overseas the West Indies would become a new and nobler Africa, built in
the very pathway of the new highway of commerce between East and West--the
real sea route to India; while in the United States a large part of its
citizenship (showing for perhaps centuries their dark descent, but
nevertheless equal sharers of and contributors to the civilization of the
West) would be the descendants of the wretched victims of the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth century slave trade.
This natural assumption of a stranger finds, however, lodging in the minds
of few present-day thinkers. On the contrary, such an outcome is usually
dismissed summarily. Most persons have accepted that tacit but clear
modern philosophy which assigns to the white race alone the hegemony of
the world and assumes that other races, and particularly the Negro race,
will either be content to serve the interests of the whites or die out
before their all-conquering march. This philosophy is the child of the
African slave trade and of the expansion of Europe during the nineteenth
century.
The Negro slave trade was the first step in modern world commerce,
followed by the modern theory of colonial expansion. Slaves as an article
of commerce were shipped as long as the traffic paid. When the Americas
had enough black laborers for their immediate demand, the moral action of
the eighteenth century had a chance to make its faint voice heard.
The moral repugnance was powerfully reënforced by the revolt of the slaves
in the West Indies and South America, and by the fact that North America
early began to regard itself as the seat of advanced ideas in politics,
religion, and humanity.
Finally European capital began to find better investments than slave
shipping and flew to them. These better investments were the fruit of the
new industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, with its factory
system; they were also in part the result of the cheapened price of gold
and silver, brought about by slavery and the slave trade to the new world.
Commodities other than gold, and commodities capable of manufacture and
exploitation in Europe out of materials furnishable by America, became
enhanced in value; the bottom fell out of the commercial slave trade and
its suppression became possible.
The middle of the nineteenth century saw the beginning of the rise of the
modern working class. By means of political power the laborers slowly but
surely began to demand a larger share in the profiting industry. In the
United States their demand bade fair to be halted by the competition of
slave labor. The labor vote, therefore, first confined slavery to limits
in which it could not live, and when the slave power sought to exceed
these territorial limits, it was suddenly and unintentionally abolished.
As the emancipation of millions of dark workers took place in the West
Indies, North and South America, and parts of Africa at this time, it was
natural to assume that the uplift of this working class lay along the same
paths with that of European and American whites. This was the _first_
suggested solution of the Negro problem. Consequently these Negroes
received partial enfranchisement, the beginnings of education, and some of
the elementary rights of wage earners and property holders, while the
independence of Liberia and Hayti was recognized. However, long before
they were strong enough to assert the rights thus granted or to gather
intelligence enough for proper group leadership, the new colonialism of
the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries began to dawn. The new
colonial theory transferred the reign of commercial privilege and
extraordinary profit from the exploitation of the European working class
to the exploitation of backward races under the political domination of
Europe. For the purpose of carrying out this idea the European and white
American working class was practically invited to share in this new
exploitation, and particularly were flattered by popular appeals to their
inherent superiority to "Dagoes," "Chinks," "Japs," and "Niggers."
This tendency was strengthened by the fact that the new colonial expansion
centered in Africa. Thus in 1875 something less than one-tenth of Africa
was under nominal European control, but the Franco-Prussian War and the
exploration of the Congo led to new and fateful things. Germany desired
economic expansion and, being shut out from America by the Monroe
Doctrine, turned to Africa. France, humiliated in war, dreamed of an
African empire from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Italy became ambitious
for Tripoli and Abyssinia. Great Britain began to take new interest in her
African realm, but found herself largely checkmated by the jealousy of all
Europe. Portugal sought to make good her ancient claim to the larger part
of the whole southern peninsula. It was Leopold of Belgium who started to
make the exploration and civilization of Africa an international movement.
This project failed, and the Congo Free State became in time simply a
Belgian colony. While the project was under discussion, the international
scramble for Africa began. As a result the Berlin Conference and
subsequent wars and treaties gave Great Britain control of 2,101,411
square miles of African territory, in addition to Egypt and the Egyptian
Sudan with 1,600,000 square miles. This includes South Africa,
Bechuanaland and Rhodesia, East Africa, Uganda and Zanzibar, Nigeria, and
British West Africa. The French hold 4,106,950 square miles, including
nearly all North Africa (except Tripoli) west of the Niger valley and
Libyan Desert, and touching the Atlantic at four points. To this is added
the Island of Madagascar. The Germans have 910,150 square miles,
principally in Southeast and South-west Africa and the Kamerun. The
Portuguese retain 787,500 square miles in Southeast and Southwest Africa.
The Belgians have 900,000 square miles, while Liberia (43,000 square
miles) and Abyssinia (350,000 square miles) are independent. The Italians
have about 600,000 square miles and the Spanish less than 100,000 square
miles.
This partition of Africa brought revision of the ideas of Negro uplift.
Why was it necessary, the European investors argued, to push a continent
of black workers along the paths of social uplift by education,
trades-unionism, property holding, and the electoral franchise when the
workers desired no change, and the rate of European profit would suffer?
There quickly arose then the _second_ suggestion for settling the Negro
problem. It called for the virtual enslavement of natives in certain
industries, as rubber and ivory collecting in the Belgian Congo, cocoa
raising in Portuguese Angola, and diamond mining in South Africa. This new
slavery or "forced" labor was stoutly defended as a necessary foundation
for implanting modern industry in a barbarous land; but its likeness to
slavery was too clear and it has been modified, but not wholly abolished.
The _third_ attempted solution of the Negro sought the result of the
_second_ by less direct methods. Negroes in Africa, the West Indies, and
America were to be forced to work by land monopoly, taxation, and little
or no education. In this way a docile industrial class working for low
wages, and not intelligent enough to unite in labor unions, was to be
developed. The peonage systems in parts of the United States and the labor
systems of many of the African colonies of Great Britain and Germany
illustrate this phase of solution.[111] It is also illustrated in many of
the West Indian islands where we have a predominant Negro population, and
this population freed from slavery and partially enfranchised. Land and
capital, however, have for the most part been so managed and monopolized
that the black peasantry have been reduced to straits to earn a living in
one of the richest parts of the world. The problem is now going to be
intensified when the world's commerce begins to sweep through the Panama
Canal.
All these solutions and methods, however, run directly counter to modern
philanthropy, and have to be carried on with a certain concealment and
half-hypocrisy which is not only distasteful in itself, but always liable
to be discovered and exposed by some liberal or religious movement of the
masses of men and suddenly overthrown. These solutions are, therefore,
gradually merging into a _fourth_ solution, which is to-day very popular.
This solution says: Negroes differ from whites in their inherent genius
and stage of development. Their development must not, therefore, be sought
along European lines, but along their own native lines. Consequently the
effort is made to-day in British Nigeria, in the French Congo and Sudan,
in Uganda and Rhodesia to leave so far as possible the outward structure
of native life intact; the king or chief reigns, the popular assemblies
meet and act, the native courts adjudicate, and native social and family
life and religion prevail. All this, however, is subject to the veto and
command of a European magistracy supported by a native army with European
officers. The advantage of this method is that on its face it carries no
clue to its real working. Indeed it can always point to certain undoubted
advantages: the abolition of the slave trade, the suppression of war and
feud, the encouragement of peaceful industry. On the other hand, back of
practically all these experiments stands the economic motive--the
determination to use the organization, the land, and the people, not for
their own benefit, but for the benefit of white Europe. For this reason
education is seldom encouraged, modern religious ideas are carefully
limited, sound political development is sternly frowned upon, and industry
is degraded and changed to the demands of European markets. The most
ruthless class of white mercantile exploiters is allowed large liberty, if
not a free hand, and protected by a concerted attempt to deify white men
as such in the eyes of the native and in their own imagination.[112]
White missionary societies are spending perhaps as much as five million
dollars a year in Africa and accomplishing much good, but at the same time
white merchants are sending at least twenty million dollars' worth of
European liquor into Africa each year, and the debauchery of the almost
unrestricted rum traffic goes far to neutralize missionary effort.
[Illustration: Distribution of Negro Blood, Ancient and Modern]
Under this last mentioned solution of the Negro problems we may put the
attempts at the segregation of Negroes and mulattoes in the United States
and to some extent in the West Indies. Ostensibly this is "separation" of
the races in society, civil rights, etc. In practice it is the
subordination of colored people of all grades under white tutelage, and
their separation as far as possible from contact with civilization in
dwelling place, in education, and in public life.
On the other hand the economic significance of the Negro to-day is
tremendous. Black Africa to-day exports annually nearly two hundred
million dollars' worth of goods, and its economic development has scarcely
begun. The black West Indies export nearly one hundred million dollars'
worth of goods; to this must be added the labor value of Negroes in South
Africa, Egypt, the West Indies, North, Central, and South America, where
the result is blended in the common output of many races. The economic
foundation of the Negro problem can easily be seen to be a matter of many
hundreds of millions to-day, and ready to rise to the billions tomorrow.
Such figures and facts give some slight idea of the economic meaning of
the Negro to-day as a worker and industrial factor. "Tropical Africa and
its peoples are being brought more irrevocably every year into the vortex
of the economic influences that sway the western world."[113]
What do Negroes themselves think of these their problems and the attitude
of the world toward them? First and most significant, they are thinking.
There is as yet no great single centralizing of thought or unification of
opinion, but there are centers which are growing larger and larger and
touching edges. The most significant centers of this new thinking are,
perhaps naturally, outside Africa and in America: in the United States and
in the West Indies; this is followed by South Africa and West Africa and
then, more vaguely, by South America, with faint beginnings in East
Central Africa, Nigeria, and the Sudan.
The Pan-African movement when it comes will not, however, be merely a
narrow racial propaganda. Already the more far-seeing Negroes sense the
coming unities: a unity of the working classes everywhere, a unity of the
colored races, a new unity of men. The proposed economic solution of the
Negro problem in Africa and America has turned the thoughts of Negroes
toward a realization of the fact that the modern white laborer of Europe
and America has the key to the serfdom of black folk, in his support of
militarism and colonial expansion. He is beginning to say to these
workingmen that, so long as black laborers are slaves, white laborers
cannot be free. Already there are signs in South Africa and the United
States of the beginning of understanding between the two classes.
In a conscious sense of unity among colored races there is to-day only a
growing interest. There is slowly arising not only a curiously strong
brotherhood of Negro blood throughout the world, but the common cause of
the darker races against the intolerable assumptions and insults of
Europeans has already found expression. Most men in this world are
colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men. The future
world will, in all reasonable probability, be what colored men make it. In
order for this colored world to come into its heritage, must the earth
again be drenched in the blood of fighting, snarling human beasts, or will
Reason and Good Will prevail? That such may be true, the character of the
Negro race is the best and greatest hope; for in its normal condition it
is at once the strongest and gentlest of the races of men: "Semper novi
quid ex Africa!"