It is significant that none of these outside critics puts the slightest faith in the Atlanta Compromise. They see quite clearly that the two races cannot live together and yet apart. Their solution is the obvious one of free intermixture, and they cannot understand why the South should be so inveterately opposed to it. Why make such a fuss, they say, over such a simple matter?
And then comes a long array of arguments to minimize, in general, the significance of race, and, in particular, the gap between the white race and the black. Racial purity is a vain imagination; there is no such thing, at any rate among European peoples; and if it existed it would only be a limitation and a misfortune to the people afflicted with it. Most of all is the Anglo-Saxon race ridiculed as a historic fallacy. The South, which boasts itself almost the last stronghold of pure Anglo-Saxondom,[[61]] is told that the pure Anglo-Saxon is a myth and a superstition. As to the negro, we are assured that we were all negroes once, or something very much to that effect. At any rate, it is asserted that the Mediterranean races, with whom Western civilization originated, were in great part of negro origin. Skull-measurement and brain-weight are called in to prove—whatever the particular disputant wants to prove. Special qualities are claimed for the negro—such as a rich imagination, an innate courtesy, and a strong musical faculty; and it is argued that these are the very things of which the (so-called) Anglo-Saxon race stands most in need. Great play is made with the quasi-scientific modern Rousseauism which avers that our barbarian ancestors were better men than we, and thence argues that there is little or no real gap between the savage of to-day and the civilized man. Weismannism is pressed into the service to show that, as the aptitudes and tendencies that we sum up in the word civilization are acquired and therefore (it is argued) untransmissible, the white child can have profited nothing by its ancestors’ centuries of upward struggle from barbarism, while the black child cannot be in any way handicapped by his descent through untold ages of savagery. We are even assured that civilization has sprung from and must be maintained by “the commingling of all with all, the general ‘panmixture,’ the universal ‘half-breed.’”[[62]]
Fortunately it is quite unnecessary that I should plunge into the mazes of ethnological controversy. It is sufficient for my present purpose to note that controversy, and very lively controversy, exists. The practical equality of the two races is so far from being a point on which all authorities are agreed, that it may rather be called a paradox which charms a certain order of mind by reason of its very audacity. So, too, with the opinion that, whether the African race be or be not inferior, it possesses qualities that the European stock needs, and ought to accept with gratitude. Whether true or false, this is, at present at any rate, a quite undemonstrated speculation. Even Sir Sydney Olivier, who maintains in general that a man of mixed race is “potentially a more competent vehicle of humanity,” advances no proof of the benefits of the particular mixture in question which can for a moment be expected to carry conviction to the Southern white man. The South, then, is urged by the amalgamation theorists to embark upon, or submit to, what is at best a great experiment. It is to quell its higher instincts (for so it regards them, rightly or wrongly) and commit what it feels in the marrow of its bones to be a degrading race-abnegation, in deference to a half-scientific, half-humanitarian opinion, held by certain theorists outside its own boundaries, to the effect that, after all, there is no great difference between black and white, and that the complexion of the future will certainly be a uniform yellow. Can any one blame the South for answering: “No, thank you! If you in England or in New England are tired of being white men, and sigh for the blessings of an African blend, we can send you several million negroes, of both sexes, who will no doubt be happy, on suitable terms, to intermarry with your sons and daughters. For our part, we are content with our complexion as it is. We see no reason to believe that the African slave trade was the means adopted by a beneficent Providence for the ultimate improvement of our Anglo-Saxon stock; nor, on the other hand, can we accept it as a just punishment for the sins of our fathers that our race, as a race, should be merged and obliterated in indiscriminate hybridism.”
I do not pretend, of course, that the fixed antipathy of the South to the very idea of amalgamation is a purely rational one. Who is so foolish as to look for pure reason in aught that concerns the obscure fundamentals of life? What I am trying to show is that, whatever irrational elements may mingle with it, the Southern sentiment has a solid and sufficient nucleus of reason. The advantages of fusion, as between such antipodal races as the white European and the black African, are, to say the least of it, unproved; and a race may be forgiven, surely, which declines to try on its own body, so to speak, so problematic and so irremediable an experiment. For, once made, this experiment cannot be unmade. The South must choose between definitely renouncing its position as a “white man’s land” or struggling to maintain it. What wonder if it feels that it has no choice in the matter?
The Races not Equal.
I have stated the case at the very lowest in saying that the advantages of fusion are unproved. Though it is not essential to my position, I must confess that my personal belief goes much further, and that the disadvantages of fusion are, to my thinking, proved beyond all reasonable doubt. I have not hitherto emphasized the essential and innate inferiority of the negro race, because my argument did not demand it. But the fact of this inferiority seems to me as evident as it is inevitable. However fallacious may be the boundaries between this and that European race, the boundary between the European and the African is real, and not to be argued away. The European is the fruit of untold generations of upward struggle, the African of untold generations of immobility. At the very dawn of history, the ancestors of the white American had advanced to a point beyond that which the ancestors of the Afro-American had attained when they were shipped across the Atlantic from fifty to two hundred years ago. That the negro race has some very amiable qualities is not denied. It is not denied that civilization has brought with it certain disadvantages and corruptions, and that the white savage is in some ways a more deplorable phenomenon than the black savage. Nor is it denied that the negro, in virtue of his strong imitative instinct, has, in many cases, shown a remarkable power of taking on a certain measure of civilization. But all this does not practically lessen the huge historic gap between the two races. Even if we admit the innate power of the negro to overtake the white man in intellectual grasp and moral stability, we must in reason allow him a few centuries to make up his millenniums of arrearage. Whatever it may become in the course of ten or fifteen generations, the negro race here and now is inferior to the white race, not only because of its “previous condition of servitude,” but, ultimately and fundamentally, because of its recent condition of savagery. Therefore, the white race, in accepting amalgamation, would be derogating from its birthright and climbing down the scale of humanity.
Our theorists are, on the whole, too much inclined to confound instinct with prejudice. It is absurd to class as pure prejudice the white man’s preference for the colour and facial contour of his race. This is no place for an analysis of our sense of beauty; but to maintain offhand that it is an unmeaning product of sheer habit, with no biological justification, is simply to shirk the problem and postpone analysis to dogma. Does any one really believe that the genius of Cæsar and Napoleon, of Milton and Goethe, had nothing to do with their facial angle, and could have found an equally convenient habitation behind thick lips and under woolly skulls? The negro himself (as distinct from the mulatto rhetorician) takes his stand on no such paradox. Whoever may doubt the superiority of the white race, it is not he; and it is a racial, not merely a social or economic superiority to which he does instinctive homage. It does not enter his head to champion his own racial ideal, to set up an African Venus in rivalry to the Hellenic, and claim a new Judgment of Paris between them. If wishing could change the Ethiopian’s skin there would be never a negro in America.[[63]] The black race, out of its poverty, spends thousands of dollars annually on “anti-kink” lotions, vainly supposed to straighten the African wool.[[64]] The brown belle tones her complexion with pearl powder; and many a black mother takes pride in the brown skin of her offspring, though it proclaims their illegitimacy. There can be no reasonable doubt that amalgamation, in the negro’s eyes, means an enormous gain to his race. It means ennoblement, transfiguration. It is quite natural that he should not too curiously inquire whether the gain to him would involve a corresponding loss to the white man. That is the white man’s business, not his. The one thing his instinct tells him is that, if he can break down the white man’s resistance and make the Southern States a brown or yellow man’s land, he will have achieved a splendid racial triumph.
The Case for the Mulatto.
It is urged, as we have already seen, that the black man’s gain would not be the white man’s loss, but that the black race would bring to the white certain qualities of which it stands sorely in need, the result of the mixture being a more competent “vehicle of all the qualities and powers that we imply by humanity.” Has experience justified this speculation? We have ample experience to go upon—in South America, in the West Indies, in the Southern States themselves. The mulatto exists and has existed for generations, not in hundreds or thousands, but in millions; in what respect has he proved himself superior to the pure Spaniard, or Portuguese, or Anglo-Saxon? Does South American history bear testimony to his political competence? Have his achievements in science, in art, in literature, in music, been superior to those of the un-Africanized peoples? Or, waiving the question of superiority, has he even, in these domains, produced meritorious work in any fair proportion to his numbers? I do not say that it is impossible to make a sort of case for him, by the ransacking of records and the employment of a very indefinite standard of values. But I do most emphatically say that no conspicuous and undeniable advantage has resulted from the blending of bloods, such as can or ought to counteract the instinctive repugnance of the South.
In a work entitled “Twentieth Century Negro Literature,”[[65]] published in 1901, Mr. Edward E. Cooper, a mulatto journalist, quotes Byron’s lines:—