The fear that underpins supremacy: Why systems of control collapse from within

“ Fear should be overcome not only in action, but in feeling; and not only in conscious feeling, but in the unconscious as well. The purely external victory over fear, which satisfies the aristocratic code, leaves the impulse operative underground, and produces evil twisted reactions which are not recognized as the offspring of terror. I am not thinking of “shell-shock”, in which the connection with fear is obvious. I am thinking rather of the whole system of oppression and cruelty by which dominant castes seek to retain their ascendancy. ”

“ IN the daily lives of most men and women, fear plays a greater part than hope: they are more filled with the thought of the possessions that others may take from them, than of the joy that they might create in their own lives and in the lives with which they come in contact. ”

“ The brooding sense of insecurity; the secret sudden pang, stabbing him in the midst of his wildest joys; the desperate effort never to think, and the resolute refusal ever to speak of death; tell their tale, and show that the slaves of Satan are always liable to the fear of death. O, if this be your case, it is high p. 49time to look to yourselves! If you cannot bear the thought of death; if the great and solemn hereafter is haunted by images that scare and threaten you; if you “put far away the evil day;” be sure there is something radically wrong. ”

“ Such are the wicked, and being conscious within themselves of numberless bad things, often they start out of their sleep, their thoughts are full of tumult, their eyes full of perturbation; everything is fraught for them with misgivings, everything alarms them, their soul is replete with grievous expectation and cowardly apprehension, contracted with impotent fear and trembling. Nothing can be more effeminate than such a soul, nothing more inane. ”

“ After several months of work, the negro as a rule leaves the mine with the wages he has saved up. He returns to his tribe, buying a wife with his money, and lives again his traditional life. Cf. also in the same book the most lively description of the methods used in South Africa to solve the ‘labour-problem’. Here we are told that the negroes are compelled to work in the mines and plantations of Kimberley, Witwatersrand, Natal, Matabeleland, by stripping them of all land and cattle, i.e. ”

“ If the control of the Negroes in slavery times, with all the advantages to such end embodied in the institution of slavery, had often been one of anxiety to the South, how fearful must have been the conditions now that they were not only free from such control but enfranchised and taught by their new friends to be self-assertive, even if not sometimes encouraged in acts of violence against the Southern white people? ”

“ But all along the line it is the same thing—a paralyzing impression upon the centers of life which can produce, through the agency of the nervous system, a vast variety of morbid symptoms in every tissue of the body.
We have very seldom reflected upon the fact that fear runs like a baleful thread through the whole web of our life from beginning to end. We are born into the atmosphere of fear and dread, and the mother who bore us had lived in the same atmosphere for weeks and months before we were born. ”

“ When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.
We learn, at the last, to look to our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. ”

“ I see abundance of hope in that direction for the prevention of any federation of the natives such as used to be tried in the early days of the American Colonies. There the cause was want of communication, with an enormous area covered by Indians and only a few scattered settlements of whites, but in South Africa you have nothing of that kind. The natives will all be wanted. There are certain things that they alone can do, such as working in the open air in the summer. The white men are the makers of money, and the natives must naturally be the hewers of wood and drawers of water. ”

“ To be sure, they who write the papers do not always read them, or some able editors would know better than to denounce Milner for saying that there is no room in South Africa for a white proletariat. If Milner did say so, his infamy, as usual, is that of facing the facts. There is no room simply because the proletariat is there already, and is black. Africa is neither Europe nor quite Asia, but between the two. The population of South Africa, to the extent of some seven-eighths, consists of natives, mainly of negroid race, enjoying full physical vigour. ”

“ In my first chapter I showed that the rising tide of color to-day finds itself confronted by dikes erected by the white race during the centuries of its expansion. The reader will also remember that white expansion has taken two forms: settlement and political control. These two phases differ profoundly in character. Areas of settlement like North America have become integral portions of the white world. On the other hand, regions of political control like India are merely white dependencies, highly valuable perhaps, yet in the last analysis held by title of the sword. ”

“ The facts of Frere's supersession and recall are notorious: the story is too recent to need telling at length. We know now that, apart from the actual discovery of the Witwatersrand gold-mines, all that he foresaw and foretold has been realised in the events which culminated, twenty years later, in the great South African War. The military power which at that time (1877-80) stood in the way of South African unity under the British flag was the Zulu people. The whole adult male population of the tribe had been trained for war, and organised by Ketshwayo into a fighting machine. ”

“ If, sir, any man will point out to me a path down which the white people of the South divided may walk in peace and honor, I will take that path though I took it alone—for at the end, and nowhere else, I fear, is to be found the full prosperity of my section and the full restoration of this Union. But, sir, if the negro had not been enfranchised, the South would have been divided and the Republic united. His enfranchisement—against which I enter no protest—holds the South united and compact. What solution, then, can we offer for the problem? ”

“ The very worst thing that could happen to the South is to have her white vote divided into factions, and each faction bidding for the negro who holds the balance of power. What is this negro vote? In every southern State it is considerable, and I fear it is increasing. It is alien, being separated by racial differences that are deep and permanent. It is ignorant—easily deluded or betrayed. It is impulsive—lashed by a word into violence. It is purchasable, having the incentive of poverty and cupidity, and the restraint of neither pride nor conviction. ”

“ Scott frankly. “There are a lot of white people in the South who know disfranchisement is wrong. We know that we can’t keep the ballot from the Negro always. But,” he ended with a shrug of his shoulders and a thrust-ing-out of his hands, palms upward, in a gesture of perplexity and despair Kenneth was learning to know so well that he was associating it instinctively with the Southern white man, “we’d stir up more trouble than we could cope with.” ”

“ The negro vote can never control in the South, and it would be well if partisans in the North would understand this. I have seen the white people of a State set about by black hosts until their fate seemed sealed. But, sir, some brave man, banding them together, would rise, as Elisha rose in beleaguered Samaria, and touching their eyes with faith, bid them look abroad to see the very air “filled with the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof.” If there is any human force that cannot be withstood, it is the power of the banded intelligence and responsibility of a free community. ”

“ The Insurrection may have caused an increase in the lynching of Negroes by the fact that it begat a kind of fear and distrust of the blacks everywhere, caused them to be more carefully looked after, and more severely dealt with when refractory or guilty of crime. ”

“ The men who, from afar off, view this subject through the cold eye of speculation or see it distorted through partisan glasses, insist that, directly or indirectly, the negro race shall be in control of the affairs of the South. We have no fears of this; already we are attaching to us the best elements of that race, and as we proceed our alliance will broaden; external pressure but irritates and impedes. Those who would put the negro race in supremacy would work against infallible decree, for the white race can never submit to its domination, because the white race is the superior race. ”

“ From the point of view of psychology and [66] physiology, fear and rage are closely analogous emotions: the man who feels rage is not possessed of the highest kind of courage. The cruelty invariably displayed in suppressing negro insurrections, communist rebellions, and other threats to aristocracy, is an offshoot of cowardice, and deserves the same contempt as is bestowed upon the more obvious forms of that vice. I believe that it is possible so to educate ordinary men and women that they shall be able to live without fear. ”

“ Weakness produces fear, and fear produces weakness. Here is a fatal revolution in the functions of the organism. Of what use are the arbitrary and imaginary distinctions philosophers have made in the functions of the mind, when they cannot be separated from those of the body? There are in life fatal cliffs, currents which we cannot stem, and which carry us to inevitable destruction.
Weakness increases excitability, excitability foments lasciviousness, and lasciviousness in its turn begets weakness. ”

“ So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. ”

“ They are the artificial censorships, the limitations of social contact, the comparatively meager time available in each day for paying attention to public affairs, the distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world, and finally the fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men's lives. ”

“ God, there isn’t anything—anything I can do? Bob is right! Something [73] must be done, but what is it? I reckon these white folks must be blind—or else they figure on leaving whatever solution there may be to their children, hoping the storm doesn’t break while they are liv. ing. No! That isn’t it. They think because they’ve been able to get away with it thus far, they’ll always be able to get away with it. Oh, God, I’m helpless! I’m helpless!”
Kenneth had begun to comprehend the delicate position a Negro always occupies in places like Central City—in fact, throughout the South. ”

“ With all its rich natural resources, with its fertile soil and its wonderful climate, the South is farther behind in civilization than any other part of the United States—or the world, for that matter. Aren’t they ever going to see how they’re hurting themselves by trying to keep the Negro down?”
“That’s just it,” replied the judge. “A man starts out practising cheating in a petty way, and before he knows it he’s crooked all the way through. He starts being mean part of the time, and soon he’s mean all over. Or he tries being kind and decent, and he turns out to be pretty decent. ”

“ To live in continual dread, continual cringing, continual fear of anything, be it loss of love, loss of money, loss of position or situation, is to take the readiest means to lose what we fear we shall. ”