What Shall Be the Industrial Relation of the Races?
So much for the political relationships of the races. How about the industrial relationships?
The same test of inherent worth must here also apply, and the question will not be settled until it does apply. A carpenter must be asked, not “What colour are you?” but “How cunningly and efficiently can you build a house?” Of all absurdities, the judgment of the skill of a surgeon by the kink of his hair will certainly one day be looked upon as the most absurd. The same observation applies broadly to the attempt to confine a whole people, regardless of their capabilities, to menial occupations because they are dark-coloured. No, the place of the Negro is the place he can fill most efficiently and the longer we attempt to draw artificial lines the longer we shall delay the solution of the race problem. On the other hand, the Negro must not clamour for places he cannot yet fill.
“The trouble with the Negro,” says Booker T. Washington, “is that he is all the time trying to get recognition, whereas what he should do is to get something to recognise.”
Negroes as a class are to-day far inferior in education, intelligence, and efficiency to the white people as a class. Here and there an able Negro will develop superior abilities; but the mass of Negroes for years to come must find their activities mostly in physical and more or less menial labour. Like any race, they must first prove themselves in these simple lines of work before they can expect larger opportunities.
There must always be men like Dr. DuBois who agitate for rights; their service is an important one, but at the present time it would seem that the thing most needed was the teaching of such men as Dr. Washington, emphasising duties and responsibilities, urging the Negro to prepare himself for his rights.
Social Contact
We come now, having considered the political and industrial relationships of the races, to the most difficult and perplexing of all the phases of the Negro question—that of social contact. Political and industrial relationships are more or less outward, but social contact turns upon the delicate and deep questions of home life, personal inclinations, and of privileges rather than rights. It is always in the relationships of oldest developments, like those that cling around the home, that human nature is slowest to change. Indeed, much of the complexity of the Negro problem has arisen from a confusion in people’s minds between rights and privileges.
Everyone recalls the excitement caused—it became almost a national issue—when President Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to luncheon at the White House. Well, that feeling is deep in the South, as deep almost as human nature. Many Northern people who go South to live come to share it; indeed, it is the gravest question in ethics to decide at what point natural instincts should be curbed.
Social contact is a privilege, not a right; it is not a subject for legislation or for any other sort of force. “Social questions,” as Colonel Watterson of Kentucky says, “create their own laws and settle themselves. They cannot be forced.” All such relationships will work themselves out gradually, naturally, quietly, in the long course of the years: and the less they are talked about the better.