Race problem

“ Now these conditions, as a matter of experience, arise only where a race of very high development is brought into contact with a race of very low development, and only where the race of low development is at the same time tenacious of life and capable of resisting the poisons of civilization. In other words, the race problem, as here defined, is a purely Afro-European or Afro-American problem.
Where civilization has met civilization, as in India, China, Japan, there has never been any question of local intermixture in such proportions as to give rise to the conditions indicated. ”

“ Ask the average man, ask even the average editor or professor anywhere, what the race problem is, the heart of it; why, in this land with its millions of foreigners of all nationalities, THE race problem of problems should be caused by ten million Negroes, not foreigners but native to the soil through several generations ”

“ Not a few hold the view that the education and advancement of the Negro tends to create the race problem, and do not hesitate to say that if the Negroes could only be kept as laborers in the cotton and rice and sugar fields, in the furnaces and mines of the South, aspiring to nothing higher and not antagonizing the whites in political matters, there would be no race problem. ”

“ But while the problems growing out of European immigration have of recent years troubled us most, they do not constitute our greatest race problem. Always in the background of our consciousness, like a volcano quiescent but very much alive, looms our gigantic negro problem—the problem which for the sins of our slave-importing and slave-holding forefathers we inherit, and from which, according to our characteristic way of "meeting" great quiescent problems, we are always endeavouring to hide. ”

“ The race problem means (in its only convenient definition) the problem of adjustment between two very dissimilar populations, locally intermingled in such proportions that the one feels its racial identity potentially threatened, while the other knows itself in constant danger of economic exploitation. ”

“ These circumstances have caused one of the most intricate problems, the race problem. They have placed the American Negro in a category by himself. They have brought about the peculiar situation of a nation within a nation.
The teaching of Negro history would contribute much to the solution of this complicated race problem. The solution of any problem depends upon an adequate understanding [Pg 124] of it. The most illuminating approach to the race problem is the historical approach. The white man of this country must be supplied with the real facts pertaining to the Negro. ”

“ Had it been possible to take his assurances literally, one must have concluded that the race problem must quickly solve itself by the extinction of the negro. And he frankly 62looked forward to that consummation. “Our vagrancy laws are going to be a bitter pill for them. You see”—here he sketched a diagram to assist my understanding—“a nigger can’t come here to the front-door of my house and ring the bell; but he can go round to the back door”—a line represented his tortuous course—“and I tell you he does. Every household supports at least four or five niggers. ”

“ Walk the streets of Washington for a single day, and you will realize that the colour-problem is not, as some English and Northern American writers assume, a chimera sprung from nothing but the inhuman prejudice of the Southern white. It is not a simple matter which a little patience and good-temper will presently arrange. It is a real, a terrible difficulty, not to be overcome by happy-go-lucky humanitarianism.
It may be a great pity that Nature implanted race-instincts deep in our breasts—Nature has done so many thoughtless things in her day. ”

“ No, the place of the Negro is the place he can fill most efficiently and the longer we attempt to draw artificial lines the longer we shall delay the solution of the race problem. On the other hand, the Negro must not clamour for places he cannot yet fill. ”

“ The denial of rights guaranteed the Negro by the Constitution and the refusal to grant him the ordinary privileges of a freeman have created what is called the “Negro Problem”—the most prominent, the gravest and the most important question in American affairs. Ten millions of people with African blood in their veins—“an undifferentiated part of the Nation”—are made the objects of the meanest discrimination and the most unjust treatment by a so-called superior race seven times their number. ”

“ It is a passage from “Race Questions and Prejudices,” by a distinguished psychologist, Professor Royce of Harvard (International Journal of Ethics, April, 1906) :
Scientifically viewed, these problems of ours turn out to be not so much problems caused by anything which is essential to the existence or to the nature of the races of men themselves. Our so-called race problems are merely the problems caused by our antipathies.... Such antipathies will always play their part in human history. ”

“ But in Southern communities, where the Negro is not outnumbered by many thousands of white people, the race problem, essentially, and in its most acute form, is something distinct from his laziness or ignorance, or brutality, or criminality, or all-round intellectual and moral inferiority to the white man. ”

“ By the census of 1890 there were 1,000,000 colored people in the country who were half, or more than half, white, and logically there must be, as in fact there are, so many who share the white blood in some degree, as to justify the assertion that the race problem in the United States concerns the welfare and the status of a mixed race. ”

“ This leads us to the most sinister phase of the race problem. As I have shown, we have the two elements of conflict: instinctive race repulsion and competitive jealousy. What is easier for the race in power, the white race in this country (the yellow race in Asia) than to play upon race instinct in order to serve selfish ends? ”

“ How should we think such a problem through, not simply as Negroes, but as men and women of a new century, helping to build a new world? And first of all, here is no simple question of race antagonism. ”

“ The truth is, it seems to me, that no race problem, properly so called, arises until two races are found occupying the same territory in such an approach to equal numbers as to make it a serious question which colour shall ultimately predominate. A handful of white administrators, as in India, or of white traders, as in China and Japan, may give rise, no doubt, to important and difficult questions, but they are not specifically questions of race. No one doubts that India belongs to the Indians ”

“ Another field of applied sociologic thought is represented by the terms, race problems, immigration, and naturalization. These concepts are all outgrowths of the population concept which has been treated in an earlier chapter. The human race with its common origin has subdivided and wandered into all the inhabitable parts of the globe. Climate, geography, and social environment have operated to make the race subdivisions distinct and discriminatory. Race pride and prejudice have438 raised impassable race barriers.
In the United States the leading race problem involves the Negroes. ”

“ To the average American the most striking feature is this ‘appeal,’ aside from its attack upon Booker Washington, is its confession, virtually in so many words, that the theory of racial social equality is losing ground ‘everywhere in the United States.’ Thoughtful students of the American race problem long ago noted the steady spread of race instinct, or prejudice, into sections other than the South ”

“ Nobody can work out any of the Caucasian problems as [Pg 69] though they stood by themselves; what now draws together most closely the elements of the white race is a sense of a race issue. The white man cannot build new schoolhouses or improve his cotton seed or open a coal mine without remembering that there is a negro race and a negro problem. ”

“ On this subject of what is called abroad the prejudice of color, the North has been censured, even by many of our best friends. But it is impossible for Europe, where the African race are not, and never have been, either as slaves or freemen, to solve for us this most difficult problem of the social equality of the white and black races. ”

“ The adding to our territories of large areas populated by dark races, some of them already liberally dowered with Negro blood, will enhance the relative importance of the non-Caucasian elements of the population, and largely increase the flow of dark blood toward the white race, until the time shall come when distinctions of color shall lose their importance, which will be but the prelude to a complete racial fusion.
The formation of this future American race is not a pressing problem. ”

“ The Negro race has already doubled three times in the United States since the beginning of the last century, and, unless conditions change, it is possible that before the end of the century there may be between sixty and eighty millions of Negroes in this country; a situation which will tax all, and more than all, of the wisdom and constancy of the white race. ”

“ Over the better feelings of the white race, dominating them, are the black shapes of contempt and repulsion towards the race once their servants, made their equals by a wordy fiction of their enemies, but still under their feet. ”

“ The upshot, as we find it to-day, is that in a magnificent country, well outside the torrid zone, and eminently suited to be the home of a white race, one person in every three is coloured, and one person in every four is physically indistinguishable from an African savage. It would be the extravagance of paradox to maintain that this is a positively desirable condition, preferable to that of a country which presents a normal uniformity of complexion. ”

“ The peculiar disposition of the American to overlook mixed blood in a foreigner will simplify the gradual absorption of these Southern races.
The real problem, then, the only hard problem in connection with the future American race, lies in the Negro element of our population. ”

“ The race antipathy is fomented in the schools. The progressive negro is held up as a bugbear to the white child, who is told to ‘Look out, or he will get ahead of you!’ Fear, jealousy, and hatred are actively taught to the rising generation of whites. ”

“ We must educate them. It is not a question of choice, but of necessity.
We have the Negro here among us to the number of ten millions and increasing at a rate of about twenty-five per cent. every ten years. They are here; what must we do with them? One of three courses must be taken: We must either debase them, keep them stationary, or improve them.
[Pg 299]
Everyone will discard the first plan.
No one can make the second feasible. A race, like a class, is always in a state of change, at least, under conditions like those in America. ”

“ The noticeable reservation in all attempts, North and South, to separate black folk and white is the saving phrase, “Except servants.”
Are not servants colored? Is the objection, then, to colored people or to colored people who are not servants? In other words, is this race prejudice inborn antipathy or a social and economic caste?
22
SOCIAL CONTROL
By JANE ADDAMS, of Hull House I always find it very difficult to write upon the great race problem which we have in America. ”

“ We have seen that the essence of the whole situation lies in the negro’s inevitable ambition (even though it be unformulated and largely unconscious) to be drawn upward, through physical coalescence, into the white race, and the white man’s intense resolve that, on a large and determining scale, no such coalescence shall take place. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ First: one set of people, the Caucasian, with a normal death-rate of less than 16 per thousand per annum, and right alongside of them is the negro race, with a death-rate of 25 to 30 per thousand. Second: the first-named race furnishing a normal, and the second race an abnormal, percentage of criminals.... The negro is with you for all time. He is what you will make him, and it is “up to” the white people to prevent him from becoming a criminal, and to guard him against tuberculosis, syphilis, etc. ”

“ 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. ”