My argument has been that race prejudice is the fetish of the man of short views; and that it is a short-sighted and suicidal creed, with no healthy future for the community that entertains it (p. 173).
I have very real diffidence in contesting the deliberate judgment of a man like Sir Sydney Olivier on a question which he has deeply studied; but I cannot believe with him that the problem is simply one of Southern unwisdom. On the contrary, I believe that, however unwise in much of her talk and her action, the South is in the main animated by a just and far-feeling, if not far-seeing, instinct. That there has been an infinitude of tragic unwisdom in the matter, not in the South alone, no one nowadays denies. But I believe that the problem, far from being unreal, is so real and so dishearteningly difficult that nothing but an almost superhuman wisdom, energy, and courage will ever effectually deal with it.
Let me try to give my reasons for this belief.
White Man’s Land or Brown Man’s Land?
No one, I suppose—not even Mr. Wells—would deny that the importation of the African into America was an egregious blunder as well as a monstrous crime. Without him the South would perhaps have developed more slowly during the eighteenth century; but she would have escaped the arrest of development which sums up her history during the nineteenth century. She would have escaped the war by which she strove, with misguided heroism, to perpetuate that arrest of development. She would have escaped the “horrors” of that Reconstruction period which still haunts her memory like a nightmare. She would have escaped the prostration and impoverishment from which she is only now beginning—though very rapidly—to recover. The negro has assuredly been her calamity in the past. To say, as negro writers often do, that he has created her wealth, is to ignore the appalling price she has paid for him. Much more truly may he be said to have created her poverty.[[52]]
This, however, is certainly not the negro’s fault. He did not thrust himself upon the South: he was no willing immigrant. Historic recriminations, therefore, are perfectly idle—as idle as the attempts of Southern writers to shift responsibility for the slave trade to the shoulders of the New England States. I cast a glance back at history merely to remind the reader that the presence of the negro in America is not the result of a natural movement, an inevitable expansion, a migration springing from economic necessity or from deep impulses of folk-psychology. It is, on the contrary, the outcome of what may almost be called a disastrous accident—of inhuman cupidity in the slave-dealers and economic short-sightedness in the slave-owners.
The upshot, as we find it to-day, is that in a magnificent country, well outside the torrid zone, and eminently suited to be the home of a white race, one person in every three is coloured, and one person in every four is physically indistinguishable from an African savage. It would be the extravagance of paradox to maintain that this is a positively desirable condition, preferable to that of a country which presents a normal uniformity of complexion. England, for instance, would certainly not be a more desirable place of residence if one-fourth of her population were transmuted into the semblance of Dahomeyans, even supposing that the metamorphosis involved no moral or intellectual change for the worse. A monochrome civilization is on the face of it preferable to such a piebald civilization as at present exists in the Southern States.
Here at once, then, we have a difference between the South and the West Indies, which Sir Sydney Olivier seems strangely to overlook. The West Indies are not climatically fitted to be a “white man’s land”; or, if it was ever possible that they should become one, the chance was lost at the very outset of their history. They are once for all black men’s lands, with a sprinkling of whites governing and exploiting them. It would be much more reasonable for the black to chafe under the dominance of the white, than for the white to resent the presence of the black. But the case in the Southern States is absolutely different. They were explored, settled, organized by white men; by white men their liberties were vindicated. They are fitted by their climate and resources to be not only a white man’s land, but one of the greatest white men’s lands in the world. The black man came there only as a (terribly ill-chosen) tool for their development. When the tool ceases to be a tool and claims a third part of the heritage, the “peripeteia” is no doubt dramatic and exceedingly moral, but none the less exasperating to a generation which, after all, was personally innocent of the original crime-blunder. No one enjoys playing the scapegoat in a moral apologue; and the Southern white man would be more than human if he accepted the part with perfect equanimity. At any rate, the West Indian white man has no right to assume an air of superior virtue until the conditions of his case are even remotely analogous. The negro in the West Indies is the essence and foundation of life: in the United States he is a regrettable accident.
Four Possibilities: I. Extinction.
It is time now that we should look more closely into the conditions of this piebald community which a violent interference with the normal course of race-distribution has established in the Southern States.