Exoticism

“ Many would doubtless ask, whether such a barbarous custom could be eradicated from these people? and whether their thoughts and tastes, being turned to agriculture and religion, could be made to abandon the dark and random channel in which they are drudging, and made to flow in the light and life of civilization? ”

“ In race-prejudice we see the same tendency to exalt the self and the group at the expense of outsiders. The alien group is belittled by attaching contempt to its peculiarities and habits—its color, speech, dress, and all the signs of its personality. ”

“ From the inferior value set on human life by the races of the East, we accuse them of barbarity: forgetting, that, owing to the absence of all analogy between our origin, races, and education, we are incompetent to appreciate their feelings, and the motives of their conduct, and have consequently no right to condemn them. If we abstain from taking our neighbour's life, we set also a proportionate value on our own: a native of the East displays, it is true, less veneration for his own species. ”

“ Backward and forward along peninsular Europe, men communicated to one another their emotional and objective experiences. The result has been a culture amazing only in its diversity,—amazing because, with contact and interchange of racial experiences, the coursing and recoursing of the same blood, stirred and dissolved, it is amazing that such diversity should persist. ”

“ When we see identical and most strange customs, such as particular modes of mutilation of the body, showing themselves among races the most diverse in character and remote geographically, we can not help coming to the conclusion that these customs have either been communicated in some hitherto unexplained manner, or are the outcome of some common element of humanity, in either of which cases they tell nothing of the special relations or affinities of the races which practice them. ”

“ The infectious air of civilization penetrated to the remotest corner of their solitudes. Their ignorant and credulous nature, unable to cope with the intellect of a superior race, absorbed only its vices, yielding up its own simplicity and nobleness for the white man's diseases and death. ”

“ It is a claim which these races have in common with all who are in want. We merely ask the question: Can you find needs more real, degradations more deep, and therefore claims more pressing, than these we need only not shut our eyes to see, for which we need not cross the ocean, nor even our own continent—the needs of the three despised, oppressed, and largely neglected races in these United States? ”

“ To find in this Negro problem nothing but the lust which brought him to our shores, or the instrumentality of the wealth which he has been the means of accumulating, or the object of a sentimental pietism which would colonize him, or a nuisance for progressive abatement, is to attempt to solve the puzzle of a bewildering maze without the exercise of wisdom, or to have exit from a labyrinth without a clew. ”

“ Recent studies of the conflict of races and nationalities, generally considered as exclusively economic or political in nature, bring out the significance of disgusts and fears based fundamentally upon characteristic racial odors, marked variations in skin color and in physiognomy as well as upon differences in food habits, personal conduct, folkways, mores, and culture. ”

“ Now the physical motive supposes a difference of species among men, and an inferiority of that species in Negroes: whereas the political consideration, on the other hand, infers an universal sameness in human nature; that is to say, in fact, that Englishmen are Negroes, and Negroes are Englishmen, to all natural intents and purposes. ”

“ It is by this character that we classify civilized and even semi-civilized races; by this slowly developed fibre, this slow accumulation of inherent quality in the evolution of the human being from lower to higher, that continues to exist notwithstanding the powerful influence of governments and religions. We are understood when we speak of the French, the Italian, the Pole, the Spanish, the English, the German, the Arab race, the Japanese, and so on. ”

“ Although in certain instances savage tribes or races show obvious signs of having degenerated to some extent from conditions of a higher culturedom, this cannot be regarded as the general rule, and we must always bear in mind the seemingly paradoxical truth that degradation in the culture of the lower races is often, if not usually, the direct result of contact with peoples in a far higher state of civilization. ”

“ Nature intended him for a savage state; every instinct, every impulse of his soul inclines him to it. The white race might fall into a barbarous state, and afterwards, subjected to the influence of civilization, be reclaimed and prosper. ”

“ The range of complexion among mankind, beginning with the tint of the fair-whites of Northern Europe and the dark-whites of Southern Europe, passes to the brownish-yellow of the Malays, and the full-brown of American tribes, the deep-brown of Australians, and the black-brown of Negros. ”

“ Bound by the encircling consciousness of the occupation, the sense of wrong done these natives who had neither asked for our civilization nor invited us to squabble over their "bones," I felt that but for the presence of the white man this would have been the loveliest land in the world. For here one becomes aware of nature as something altogether different from nature anywhere else. ”

“ The Caucassian of today is now believed by men of science to be only a bleached negro. To be sure, it has taken thousands of years, and the ice-fields and cave dwellings of the North to do the bleaching. But man came originally from the Orient, the very womb of the earth from which only creatures of color come forth. ”

“ Between these two extremes is an almost innumerable variety of mixed races, each having its own peculiar designation, indicating the precise proportion of European, Indian, and negro blood in their veins, each marked with its own peculiar physical, intellectual, and moral characteristics; and each finding its chief boast in the nearness of its relation to the white race, and looking down with contempt upon those a shade darker than its own. ”

“ Regardless of the fact that we were the first possessors of the regions they now inhabit, regardless equally of the fact that we abandoned that region from the loftiest motives; regardless also of the self-evident fact that we excel them as far in mental ability as they excel us in stature, they look upon us as a degraded race, and make a mockery of all our finer feelings. ”

“ Do you know how many different races of men there are that you can tell apart by their looks?—Chinamen, Negroes, White men, Tartars, Eskimo, Indians, Malays, Arabs, and I don’t know how many more, all alike in being human, and yet all different. ”

“ When it is considered what humanity, what resources of mental and moral power, the traits of the blonde race betoken, – its accession to empire marks a new and finer epoch, wherein the old mineral force shall be subjugated at last by humanity, and shall plough in its furrow henceforward. ”

“ Indeed, to study the nature of a 'big native swell' is to study the character of a consummate Oriental epicure, immersed in a ceaseless round of pleasures, and hedged in by a body of unconscionable fellows, distinguished only for their flattery and servility. ”

“ On the other hand, how many habits and ideas that are senseless and perfectly unexplainable by the light of our present modes of life and thought can be explained by similar customs and prejudices existing among these distant tribes. ”

“ It seems, indeed, a strange phenomenon that in such different races, so far removed in locality, customs so singular—to our ideas so revolting and unnatural, and certainly so painful and inconvenient—should either have been perpetuated for an enormous lapse of time, if the supposition of a common origin be entertained, or else have developed themselves independently. ”

“ The essay ends with a significant paragraph, showing how we occidentals, who have exterminated feebler races by merely over-living them, may be at last exterminated ourselves by races capable of under-living us, more self-denying, more fertile, and less expensive for nature to support. ”

“ We shall raise up on these shores a race of men, a stock of mannood, and a growth of manners, which shall confuse and mystify all the past chronicles of time pertaining to our race. We shall falsify all the lying utterances of the speculative ethnographies and the pseudo-philosophies which have spawned from the press of modern days against us. ”

“ The stern logic of events, which goes directly to the point, disdaining all concern for the color or features of men, has determined the interests of the country as identical with and inseparable from those of the negro. ”

“ The attitude of mind here exemplified is not the specific characteristic of any Asiatic or European race, but the accidental result of a certainly abnormal evolution, during a transition period of development. ”

“ We then smile half in contempt and half in pity at his customs, which we call "barbarous;" but when we see around us customs equally injurious, equally outrageous against nature, we do not consider that they in any way derogate from our lofty position as the intellectual salt of the earth. ”

“ Yet in civilised countries an occasional group of pure racial stock may be discovered in isolated localities, as though they had found refuge, so to speak, from the vortex of civilisation which is engulfing the races. Throughout the history of humanity we may watch this absorption of racial and morphological characteristics, and the formation of more and more intimate intermixtures, leading to the final disappearance of the original types of race. ”

“ No contributions from a new and dubious foreign element had yet come to cheapen our taste, to disturb our nervous systems, or to throw upon the negro, the Hawaiian, or the Argentine the onus of a crass passion that one was more desirous of expressing than of acknowledging. ”

“ Still, every race has its culminating or concurrent ideal of beauty, Development of racial and national ideals.which is affected, again, by the conditions of life in the different regions of the race's establishment. Each nation, like a rose-tree, draws from the soil and air its strength, and wealth, and material sustenance ”

“ There comes a time when one set of customs, wherever it may be found, grows to seem to you about as provincial as another; and then I suppose it may be said of you that you have become a cosmopolite. You have formed the habit of comparing, of looking for points of difference and of resemblance, for present and absent advantages, for the virtues that go with certain defects, and the defects that go with certain virtues. ”

“ The diversities and repulsions of race which have been ordained, no doubt, for some wise purpose, are intended, perhaps, only for this state of existence. Another life may present a new order of things in which no such distinctions exist. ”

“ Now one of the readiest means for diagnosing the mental and moral consciousness of a race is supplied by its attitude towards an alien and higher culture, and it is in the phase of its intellectual and artistic activity, most promptly and permanently affected by the new influence, that we can best discern its essential nature. ”

“ Now, in regard to differences in character between the dark races and the white races, you have only to consider the languorous air of the tropics and sub-tropics, the abundance of food, the small need for fuel, clothing and shelter—in general, everything in the environment which tends to make man indolent and to give him plenty of time for introspection, philosophy, theology, and the occult. ”

“ It may perhaps be reasonable to imagine as latest-formed the white race of the temperate region, least able to bear extreme heat or live without the appliances of culture, but gifted with the powers of knowing and ruling which give them sway over the world. ”

“ When I look at this globe, containing eight or nine hundred millions of inhabitants, and see that they differ in color from the frozen to the temperate and torrid zones, and that every thing is variegated, I am astonished that any man should be so prejudiced against his fellow-man ”

“ We can show that the same races have ever been distinguished by the same characteristics—some superior morally, some physically, some intellectually—some exhibiting maritime tastes, others agricultural, others pastoral. Every race has its own modes of thinking; every race has its own civilization, in which it cannot educate another. ”

“ In dealing with them as a race, a people, therefore, I do as I would with my own race, I take what to me seem to be racial characteristics, or in other words, the things that are manifested in the lives of the best men and women, and which seem to represent their habitual aims, ambitions, and desires. ”

“ Nevertheless, in our calmer moments we must acknowledge that human beings are divided into races; that in this country the two most extreme types of the world's races have met, and the resulting problem as to the future relations of these types is not only of intense and living interest to us, but forms an epoch in the history of mankind. ”

“ If any one be so prejudiced as to doubt this, let him turn to "Asiatic Researches," and learn that the dark races have made some of the most invaluable contributions to science, literature, civil-engineering, art, and architecture that the world has yet known. ”

“ I know a general prejudice has gone forth, that the French are all mere outside, without any deep reflection or emotion. This may be true of many. No doubt that the strength of that outward life, that acuteness of the mere perceptive organization, and that tendency to social exhilaration, which prevail, will incline to such a fault in many cases. ”