Yellow race

“ The American Indians approach closely to the Yellow Race belonging to Asia, in their hair, which is generally black, rough, and coarse, in the scarceness of their beard, and in their complexion, which varies from yellow to a red copper colour. Among one portion of them the very prominent nose and large open eyes recall to mind the White Race. Their forehead is extremely retreating, but no other race have the back part of the head more developed, or broader eye-sockets. ”

“ The nations of the southern branch of the Red Race have affinity to those of the Yellow Race. Their complexion, which is often yellowish or olive, is never so red as that of the northern Indians; their head is usually of less length and their nose not so prominent, while they frequently have oblique eyes. ”

“ This brain is too absorbed in details to confront the vast problems of the free reason, or to dwell in mysteries insoluble by the practical understanding. This distinction of the Yellow Race from the Aryan and the Shemite is the more wonderful, when we consider what it has accomplished in spite of its inferior contemplative power. ”

“ Rhodes is not a Chauvinist. He was conducting a serious examination into a supremely important question, and he would take nothing for granted. There are various races of mankind—the Yellow, the Black, the Brown, and the White. If the test be numerical, the Yellow race comes first. But if the test be the area of the world and the power to control its destinies, the primacy of the White race is indisputable. The Yellow race is massed thick on one half of a single continent: the White exclusively occupies Europe, practically occupies the Americas, is colonising Australia, and is dominating Asia. ”

“ Far from this, whole races are spread over vast regions as though they grew there, and the peculiar type of the race seems more or less connected with the climate it lives in. Especially it is seen that the mass of black races belong to the equatorial regions in Africa and the Eastern Archipelago, the yellow race to Central and Southern Asia, the white race to temperate Asia and Europe. Some guess may even be made from the map which district was the primitive centre where each of these races took shape, and whence it spread far and wide. ”

“ The principal characteristics which distinguish the individuals and the families belonging to the Yellow race, are, high cheekbones, a lozenge-shaped head, a small flat nose, a flat countenance, narrow obliquely-set eyes, straight coarse black hair, a scanty beard, and a complexion of a greenish hue. ”

“ Unfortunately for scientists, however, these criteria of race are most exasperatingly intermingled. Color does not agree with texture of hair, for many of the dark races have straight hair; nor does color agree with the breadth of the head, for the yellow Tartar has a broader head than the German; nor, again, has the science of language as yet succeeded in clearing up the relative authority of these various and contradictory criteria. The final word of science, so far, is that we have at least two, perhaps three, great families of human beings–the whites and Negroes, possibly the yellow race. ”

“ The peoples belonging to the Black, Red, and Brown races are still either savages or barbarians, as were the men of prehistoric times. The Chinese and Japanese are the only representatives of the Yellow race that have been able to form civilized states. ”

“ Should these white, yellow, or black men, to whom we must add, as we shall see later on, those who are brown and red, all of whom differ one from another in the colour of their skin, in height, in their physiognomy, and in their outward appearance, be grouped into different species, or are we to regard them merely as varieties of species—that is to say, races? ”

“ The early and original evolutionary peoples of color have only two representative races persisting in the world, the yellow man and the black man; and even these two races are much admixed with the extinct colored peoples. While the so-called white race is predominantly descended from the ancient blue man, it is admixed more or less with all other races much as is the red man of the Americas. ”

“ The forms which have been assumed by the historical movement are varied, but all have contributed to the spread of man over the habitable globe. The yellow, white and red races have become adapted to every zone; the black race, whether in Africa, Australia or Melanesia, is confined chiefly to the Tropics. A like conservatism as to habitat tends to characterize all sub-races, peoples, and tribes of the human family. ”

“ It must be borne in mind that there exists but a single character common to these American races, that is the colour of the skin, the ground of which is yellow. This appears to conflict with the current opinion that the Americans [Pg 517] are a red race, and yet it is the statement of a fact. None of the tribes of the New World have a red-coloured skin, unless they are painted, which often is the case. ”

“ We find that among individuals of one particular race, whatever its so-called, and somewhat arbitrary, colour might be, there exist noticeable variations in shade. Red Indians have yellow or brown skins almost as frequently as a genuine red; the “white” races of Europe often have so dark a “complexion” that they are in reality brown; and the skin of a negro at times has a distinctly reddish or brownish hue. ”

“ In the European, the colour of the iris is so strongly marked as to render at once perceptible whether the person has black, blue, or grey eyes. Nothing similar in the case of the Negro, where all parts of the eye are blended in the same hue. Add to this that the white of the eye is always suffused with yellow in the Negro, and you will understand how this organ, which contributes so powerfully to give life to the countenance of the White, is invariably dull and expressionless in the Black Race.
Nature adapts the Negro to the torrid countries he inhabits. ”

“ The fact of most tremendous import is that the white race in trying to settle its own quarrels has called in black, brown and yellow to do its fighting for it, with the result that black, brown and yellow will learn thereby how to fight for themselves, even against those whom they were called in to assist. ”

“ The remnants of the victorious green men were subsequently absorbed by the indigo race, the last of the colored peoples to develop and emigrate from the original Sangik center of race dispersion.
5. The blue man. The blue men were a great people. They early invented the spear and subsequently worked out the rudiments of many of the arts of modern civilization. The blue man had the brain power of the red man associated with the soul and sentiment of the yellow man. The Adamic descendants preferred them to all of the later persisting colored races. ”

“ Crossings of the Negro with individuals of the Yellow or Red Races, with Asiatic Indians or American red-skins, beget offspring of varied shades of colour, bearing different designations according to the countries. These men of colour are seen in many islands of Polynesia. Possessing neither the intelligence of whites nor the submissiveness of blacks, despised by the former and hated by the latter, they constitute an equivocal caste, with no settled position, and less disposed to labour than revolt. ”

“ In the early days of racial development there is a slight tendency for the red, the yellow, and the blue men to interbreed; there is a similar tendency for the orange, green, and indigo races to intermingle. ”

“ Nearly all African explorers and travellers have been much amazed at the diversity of color and stature among the tribes they met. This [pg 47] diversity in physical and mental character owes its existence to the diversity and perversity of African climate.
The Negro, who is but a fraction of the countless indigenous races of Africa, has been carried down to his low estate by the invincible forces of nature. Along the ancient volcanic tracts are to be found the Libyan race, with a tawny complexion, features quite Caucasian, and long black hair. ”

“ There, too, the Black man and the Red, whose destinies seemed to separate them wide as the world’s hemispheres, have been brought together to try whether the African is more enduring than the indigenous American on his own soil; to try for us, also, as could no otherwise be tried, questions of amalgamation and hybridity, of development and perpetuity of varieties, of a dominant, a savage, and a servile race. ”

“ We discovered that there were two different and distinctly differing races living in this region in harmony with each other, one being clearly of Indo-African origin, possessing exceedingly fine features, aquiline noses, slender necks, small heads, with a grand and proud carriage; an old, old race, possessing splendid traditions and ruled by inflexible customs, which would admit of no deviation. Though the majority have a nutty brown complexion, some even of a rich dark brown, the purest of their kind resemble old ivory in color and their skins have a beautiful soft feel, as of finest satin. ”

“ In the races called Yellow, three varieties of colour can likewise be distinguished: 4th, yellowish-white, a sickly hue the colour of wheat, as, for example, among certain Chinese; 5th, olive-yellow, the colour of new portmanteau leather, as among the majority of South American Indians, Polynesians, and Indonesians; 6th, dark yellow-brown, dark olive, or the colour of dead leaves, as among certain Americans, Malays, etc. In the dark-skinned races, four shades at least must be distinguished: 7th, red, copper-coloured, as, for example, among the Bejas, Niam-Niam, Fulbé ”

“ No one of tropical experience and an open mind believes 434that the white race, pure and unadulterated, can maintain its high standing for generations in equatorial regions without frequent reinforcements either by training in, or immigration from, the temperate zones. Can some such standard be maintained by mixing it with those to whom the tropics are a natural habitat? Is it better to “wash out the black” through many generations of lowering the whites, to breed a new type, a kind of human mule, to fit the climate and conditions, or to keep the two races strictly, even forcibly, separated? ”

“ The early migrations must have been necessarily confined to portions of the old world peopled by the Red Race—by a race, not only of red skins, black hair and eyes, and high cheek bones, who would reproduce these fixed characteristics, ad infinitum, but whose whole mental as well as physiological development assimilates it, as a distinct unity of the species. ”

“ They had formerly lived in the Montana and Dakota country but had been driven into seclusion by the powerful Blackfoot nation. The several branches of Shoshones residing in Yellowstone environs were Bannocks, Snakes, Tukuarikas, and Flatheads. The Crows came from other Indian sources. All of these Indians possessed certain racial characteristics of the red race. In view of various conflicting ideas, a few observations about the people as a whole are expedient.
Indians are human beings possessing the sensibilities and emotions of white men. ”

“ The Racial Heredity of the Negro.—It is generally agreed by anthropologists and biologists that mankind constitutes but a single species, developed from a single pre-human anthropoid stock. The various races of mankind have had, therefore, a common origin, but having developed in different geographical areas they each present certain peculiar racial traits adapting each to the environment in which it was developed. Now, the negro race is that part of mankind which was developed in the tropics. ”

“ It is true the climate of South America being hot enough to give the natives a brown tint, we ought not to be astonished that the Negroes retain their colour in that part of the world. Indeed, to make a proper experiment of the change of colour in the human species, some individuals of this black race should be transported from Senegal to Denmark, where the people have generally fair skins, golden locks, and blue eyes ”

“ The various races had made war upon one another for ages, and the three higher types had easily bested the green savages of the water places of the world, but now that the receding seas necessitated constant abandonment of their fortified cities and forced upon them a more or less nomadic life in which they became separated into smaller communities they soon fell prey to the fierce hordes of green men. The result was a partial amalgamation of the blacks, whites and yellows, the result of which is shown in the present splendid race of red men. ”

“ This is found to accord with color, and to give five sub-species or races, the White or European, the Black 350or African, the Yellow or Mongolian (Asiatic) , the Brown or Malayan (Oceanic) , and the Red or American Races.
No ethnologist nowadays will seek to establish fixed and absolute lines between these. They shade into one another in all their peculiarities, and no one has traits entirely unknown in the others. Yet, in the mass, the characteristics of each are prominent, permanent and unmistakable ”

“ Look at the hundreds of advertised hair-dyes, used for the purpose of changing Nature! See men with their gray beards dyed black; women with those beautiful [Pg 388] black locks, which but yesterday were as white as the driven snow! Not only this, but even those with light or red whiskers run to the dye-kettle, steal a color which Nature has refused them, and an hour after curse the negro for a complexion that is not stolen. If black is so hateful, why do not gentlemen have their boots whitewashed? If the slaves of the South had been white, the same prejudice would have existed against them. ”