Even among those Negroes who are most emphatic in defence of the race there is, deep down, the pathetic desire to be like the dominant white man. It is not unreasonable, nor unnatural, for all outward opportunity of development lies open to the white man. To be coloured is to be handicapped in the race for those things in life which men call desirable. I remember discussing the race question one evening with a group of intelligent coloured men. They had made a strong case for the Negro spirit, and the need of the race to stand for itself, but one of them said in a passing remark (what the investigator overhears is often of greater significance than what he hears), speaking of a mulatto friend of his:
“His hair is better than mine.”
He meant straighter, more like that of the white man.
The same evening, another Negro, referring to a light-complexioned coloured man, said:
“Thank God, he is passing now for white.”
At Philadelphia a dark Negro made this comment on one of the coloured churches where mulattoes are in the ascendancy:
“You can’t have a good time when you go there unless you have straight hair.”
This remark indicated not only the ideal held by the speaker, but showed the line drawn by the light-coloured man against his darker brother.
In the same way it is almost a universal desire of Negroes to “marry whiter;” that is, a dark man will, if possible, marry a mulatto woman, the lighter the better. The ideal is whiteness: for whiteness stands for opportunity, power, progress.
Give a coloured man or woman white blood, educate him until he has glimpses of the greater possibilities of life and then lock him forever within the bars of colour, and you have all the elements of tragedy. Dr. DuBois in his remarkable book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” has expressed more vividly than any other writer the essential significance of this tragedy. I read the book before I went South and I thought it certainly overdrawn, the expression of a highly cultivated and exceptional Mulatto, but after meeting many Negroes I have been surprised to find how truly it voices a wide experience.