Negroid

“ Their most compelling if sometimes unconscious ambition is to be as near white as possible, and their greatest expenditure of energy is concentrated on eradicating any trait or characteristic commonly known as negroid. ”

“ But not all so-called Negroes are true Negroes. As for the eastern highland regions of the two Niles, and thence southward from the Abyssinians and the Shillooks at Khartoum to the Bari of Gondokoro and the Waganda of Uganda—the Niam-Niam of Monbuttoo, the Manyuema of the Lualaba, and the Makololo on the Zambesi—the ruling and paramount native tribes are Negroid, but455 not Negro, unless our ordinary conception of the Negro is a good deal revised. ”

“ As to capability for improvement these peoples—the Negroid races at least and probably the Negroes—are as apt and civilizable as any Caucasian or Mongolian people have originally been, if we consider how their geographical and climatic isolation has hitherto cut them off from the rest of the world and the world from them. ”

“ The same train of events led to a blending of the negro and the white races along the shores of the Red Sea; but any one who recognizes the distinction of races at all—and I am aware that certain eccentric anthropologists do not—will not, on that account, claim that the white race is negroid. With just as little reason, it 66seems to me, has it been argued that the native Americans as a race are Mongoloid. ”

“ Indians of America and the Mongols. Negroid peoples may be said to be intermediate, but usually incline to hairlessness. The wavy-haired populations hold also an intermediate position, but somewhat incline to hairiness. ”

“ The Fanti language has been associated by A. B. Ellis with the Ashanti speech as the principal descendant of an original language, possibly the Tshi (pronounced Tchwi) , which is generally considered as the parent of Ashanti, Fanti, Akim, Akwapim and modern Tshi.
The average Fanti is of a dull brown colour, of medium height, with negroid features. Some of the women, when young, are quite pretty. The women use various perfumes, one of the most usual being prepared from the excrement of snakes. ”

“ But there is no denying that the American negro bears the marks of his bondage, in his indolence, his untruthfulness, his dishonesty, his animalism. But these are all vices of the slaves, not of the men; of the condition, not of the race. The possibilities of the negro nature are to be estimated by its highest actual attainments in the most favored individuals. Two of the noblest races of history have come from an ancestry less promising than our Southern freedmen—the Israelites and our own ancestors. ”

“ But it is not only in Africa that the Negro has exhibited the absence of the essential qualities of a progressive race. It is everywhere. Since the dawn of history, the Negro has been in one place or another, in Egypt, in Rome, in other European countries, brought in contact with civilization, yet he has failed to receive the vitalizing current under which other races have risen in greater or less degree. ”

“ The motive is not a desire to elevate the negro, but to humiliate and degrade those of mixed blood; not a desire to bring the negro up, but to cast the mulatto and the quadroon down by forcing him below an arbitrary and hated color line. Men of mixed blood in this country apply the name "negro" to themselves, not because it is a correct ethnological description, but to seem especially devoted to the black side of their parentage. ”

“ The medieval European world, developing under the favorable physical conditions of the north temperate zone, knew the black man chiefly as a legend or occasional curiosity, but still as a fellow man—an Othello or a Prester John or an Antar.
The modern world, in contrast, knows the Negro chiefly as a bond slave in the West Indies and America. ”

“ The South's assumption was that the negro was intrinsically an inferior and must be kept subordinate to the [Pg 356] white man. The North, in its management of political reconstruction, had practically assumed that the negro was the equal of the white man and was so to be treated. There was a third view of the matter,—that the negro was at an inferior stage of manhood, and the necessary task was to develop him. He is a man, but an imperfect man,—make him a whole man. ”

“ Let us turn aside for a moment to consider the general conditions of the negroes and their relation to the white people. We have to-day about the same relative proportion of blacks to whites in the whole country as we had in 1860—about 12 per cent.—; and we have nearly the same in the South, about 40 per cent. What is to become of the negro for the next fifty years? No man would dare suggest an answer looking farther ahead than that: God only knows. Some say he will amalgamate with the whites. ”

“ What to do with this class is a problem that perplexes the better element of Negroes, more, possibly, than it does the whites; since their shortcomings are generally credited to the whole Negro race, which is wrong as a fact and unjust in theory.
“This vicious element in the race is a constant subject of discussion in Negro churches and in private conversation. It is a mistake to say that crime is not condemned by the better class of Negroes. ”

“ But the Negro is not beyond the influences of civilization and Christianization. Hundreds of thousands have perished in the cruel swamps of Africa; hundreds of thousands have been devoured by wild beasts of the forests; hundreds of thousands have perished before the steady and murderous columns of stronger tribes; hundreds of thousands have perished from fever, small-pox, and cutaneous diseases; hundreds of thousands have been sold into slavery ”

“ Now, what we ask for the negro is that he be judged by his best and not by his worst. Of course, the best is always in the minority, but that is the way we are judged. If these same men were to go into the South and go into the negroes’ homes, they would find there very often excellent comfort. Some one has asked whether the negro has any of this race prejudice in him. ”

“ Could they really place confidence in the philanthropic professions of those who treat the negro as an outcast, and force on him a life of wretchedness instead of striving to raise him in the social scale? If a negro had the intellect of a Newton—if he were clothed in purple and fine linen, and if he came fresh from an Oriental bath, and fragrant as "Araby's spices," a Northerner would prefer sitting down with a pole-cat—he would rather pluck a living coal from the fire than grasp the hand of the worthiest negro that ever stepped. ”

“ What are the racial endowments of these risen negroes whom we are urged by lofty example to invite into our drawing-rooms upon terms of broadest equality—for upon other terms would be a mockery—as eligible associates, companions, suitors, husbands for our sisters and daughters?—for a sensible father or brother does not admit white men to his home on any other basis. Of what essential racial elements and sources is the negro, risen and unrisen alike? ”

“ So far from being equal to us, the polished inhabitants of Europe, as some ignorant people suppose, they are immeasurably below the Africans themselves,
"The typical Negro is the true savage of Africa; and I must paint the deformed anatomy of his mind, as I have already done that of his body.
"The typical Negroes dwell in petty tribes, where all are equal except the women, who are slaves; where property is common, and where, consequently, there is no property at all; where one may recognize the Utopia of philosophers, and observe the saddest and basest spectacles which humanity can afford. ”

“ The American Negroes are the aristocrats of the Negro world. It may be a paradox to assume that a proletariat can become an aristocracy, but an aristocracy is the best a race can produce in culture and manners. No doubt African Negrodom is made up of a great number of races, but all seem to have one common interest and to yield more homage to the name of Africa itself than to any constituent part, kingdom, or state or pasture. The American Negro is beginning to lead Africa as he is leading the Indies. ”

“ Many changes considered well nigh impossible one hundred years ago have taken place in almost all phases of the so-called Negro problem. One of the most noticeable instances to me is the absence of slurs at individual Negroes and at the race as a whole in your newspapers. Such headlines as ‘Another Coon Caught,’ ‘The Burly Black Brute Foiled,’ ‘A Ham Colored Nigger in the Hen House’ and ‘This Coon Wants to be 22 Called Mister,’ are, to me, conspicuous by their absence. ”

“ It was forgetfulness of God, idolatry! "Righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin is a reproach to any people."
The Negro tribes of Africa are as widely separated by mental, moral, physical, and social qualities as the Irish, Huns, Copts, and Druids are. Their location on the Dark Continent, their surroundings, and the amount of light that has come to them from the outside world, are the thermometer of their civilization. It is as manifestly improper to call all Africans Negroes as to call, Americans Indians. ”

“ Everywhere at the South, except in cities where, for obvious reasons, sexual
commerce between whites and blacks is not followed by the same social penalties, the negro
is unmistakably breeding back to the original African physiognomy, and, unless this process
of retroversion is checked, the event must be most disastrous to the average intelligence of
the black race. ”

“ Laying aside all prejudice in favor of or against race, looking at the negro as politically and socially related to the American people generally, and measuring the forces arrayed against him, I do not see how he can survive and flourish in this country as a distinct and separate race, nor do I see how he can be removed from the country either by annihilation or expatriation. ”

“ But in our examination of African tribes we shall not confine ourselves to that class of people known as Negroes, but call attention to other tribes as well. And while, in this country, all persons with a visible admixture of Negro blood in them are considered Negroes, it is technically incorrect. For the real Negro was not the sole subject sold into slavery: very many of the noblest types of mankind in Africa have, through the uncertainties of war, found their way to the horrors of the middle passage, and finally to the rice and cotton fields of the Carolinas and Virginias. ”

“ My heart burns with indignant feeling when I see that the poor foolish negro is seduced from his master, and brought to our Northern cities, or smuggled into Canada, where he is alike despised and deserted, and left to famish, or exist in a place so small and filthy that our cows could not survive a winter in them. I have obtained a statistical pamphlet, printed by highly respectable gentlemen in Philadelphia, that reveals the hopeless desolation, and the agonizing sufferings, of the miserable, degraded classes of negroes in that city. ”

“ Rankin, a highly intelligent traveller, who reports accurately and without prejudice the results of his personal observation, has recently given a similar testimony in regard to some of the numerous tribes of northern Negro-land, who frequent the English colony of Sierra Leone. In the skull of the more improved and civilized nations among the woolly-haired blacks of Africa, there is comparatively slight deviation from the form which may be looked upon as the common type of the human head. ”

“ But the worst thing, perhaps, about this colonization nonsense is, that it tends to throw over the Negro a mantle of despair. It leads him to doubt the possibility of his progress as an American citizen. It also encourages popular prejudice with the hope that by persecution or by persuasion, the Negro can finally be dislodged and driven from his natural home, while in the nature of the case he must stay here and will stay here, if for no other reason than because he cannot well get away. ”

“ The Negro Problem.—Not a few persons look upon the negro problem as the most serious social [330] question in America. Whatever its relative merits, as compared with other problems, it is sufficiently serious to call for careful study and an attempt at solution. The negro race in America numbers approximately ten millions, twice as many as at the close of the Civil War. The negro was thrust upon America by the cupidity of the foreign slave-trader, and perpetuated by the difficulty of getting along without him. ”

“ His blood infected with the poison of his low habitation, his body shrivelled by disease, his intellect veiled in pagan superstitions, the noblest yearnings of his soul strangled at birth by the savage passions of a nature abandoned to sensuality,—the poor Negro of Africa deserves more our pity than our contempt. ”

“ Phillis Wheatley has been mentioned already. So, in the midst of darkness and oppression, the Negro race in America, without the use of the Christian church, schoolhouse, or printing-press, produced a poetess, an astronomer, a mathematician, and a physician, who, had they been white, would have received monuments and grateful memorials at the hands of their countrymen. But even their color cannot rob them of the immortality their genius earned. ”

“ Whenever the incentive to imitate the dominant race is removed the Negro or, for that matter, the Indian, reverts shortly to his ancestral grade of culture. In other words, it is the individual and not the race that is affected by religion, education and example. Negroes have demonstrated throughout recorded time that they are a stationary species and that they do not possess the potentiality of progress or initiative from within. Progress from self-impulse must not be confounded with mimicry or with progress imposed from without by social pressure or by the slaver’s lash. ”