Systemic racism

“ Our honourable Minister, Douglas Devananda, highlighted in his opening address the racism that can develop as a reaction, when victims become perpetrators, and the last century saw enough examples of that. ”

“ It is such incessant self-questioning and the hesitation that arises from it, that is making the present period a time of vacillation and contradiction for the American Negro; combined race action is stifled, race responsibility is shirked, race enterprises languish, and the best blood, the best talent, the best energy of the Negro people cannot be marshalled to do the bidding of the race. They stand back to make room for every rascal and demagogue who chooses to cloak his selfish deviltry under the veil of race pride. ”

“ The struggle of the negro to rise out of his ignorance, his poverty and his social degradation, in consequence of the growth of these new forces and ideas within him, to the full stature of his American citizenship, has been met everywhere in the South by the active ill-will and determined race-hatred and opposition of the white people of that section. Turn where he will, he encounters this cruel and implacable spirit. He dare not speak openly the thoughts which rise in his breast. ”

“ To-day the Negro shares citizenship with you. He is not arraying himself against your social order; his hands are not dripping with dynamite, nor is he waving in your face the crimson banners of anarchy, but he is increasing in numbers and growing in intelligence, and is it not madness and folly to subject him to social and public inequalities, which are calculated to form and keep alive a hatred of race as a reaction against pride of caste? ”

“ If we listen vainly for the heart-throb of the race problem in the Negro's laziness, and criminality, and brutality, and ignorance, and inefficiency, do we detect it with clearness and certainty in the personal aversion felt by the white people for the black people, aversion which the white people can no more help feeling than the black people can help exciting? ”

“ But this kind of savage, senseless assault, driven by nothing but hate, strikes at the very heart of America's ideals and threatens the promise of our future—no matter which racial or ethnic identity of the attackers or the victims. We must stand together as a nation against all crimes of hate and say they are wrong. We must condemn hate crimes whenever they happen; we must commit ourselves to prevent them from happening again. And we must sow the seeds of harmony and respect among our people.
And let's be honest with ourselves: racism in America is not confined to acts of physical violence. ”

“ Now, under the elevating and cherishing influence of the American Anti-slavery Society, the colored race, like the white, furnishes Corinthian capitals for the noblest temples. Aroused by the American Anti-slavery Society, the very white men who had forgotten and denied the claim of the black man to the rights of humanity, now thunder that claim at every gate, from cottage to capitol, from school-house to university, from the railroad carriage to the house of God. He has a place at their firesides, a place in their hearts—the man whom they once cruelly hated for his color. ”

“ How would it look to have Negroes telling all Europe that the land which is to make the world “safe for democracy” is rotten with race-prejudice; Jim-crows Negro officers on ships coming over from France and on trains run under government control; condones lynching by silent acquiescence and refuses to let its Negro heroes vote as citizens in that part of the country in which nine-tenths of them live. ”

“ If there is a colour-problem, it is not we who raise it. No! it is the unprincipled white politician who finds anti-negro agitation a popular plank in his platform.
“Even under this government of the two races by and for the one race, the negro is loyal to the country which he has enriched by his labour, hallowed by his graves, watered with his blood.
“We are a docile and an instinctively religious race. You will find few negro atheists or infidels. We are susceptible to any and all of the forms of the Christian religion. ”

“ But, fortunately for the Negro and for humanity at large, we live now in an epoch when race malice and sectional hate are disappearing beneath the horizon of a brighter and better future. The Negro in America is free. He is now an acknowledged factor in the affairs of the continent; and no community, state, or government, in this period of the world's history, can afford to be indifferent to his moral, social, intellectual, or political well-being. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I finally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but that I would change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would; that it was not necessary for me to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead. All the while I understood that it was not discouragement or fear or search for a larger field of action and opportunity that was driving me out of the Negro race. I knew that it was shame, unbearable shame. Shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals. ”

“ I quoted to him this passage from “The Souls of Black Folk:”
“Deeply religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of the whites (in the South) , they feel acutely the false position in which the negro problems place them.... But ... the present social position of the negro stands as a menace and a portent before even the most open-minded; if there were nothing to charge against the negro but his blackness or other physical peculiarities, they argue, the problem would be comparatively simple; but what can we say to his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime?” ”

“ It will be, perhaps, maintained, that the antipathy of race is stronger in the United States than elsewhere, and that the Americans, in this respect, are inferior to the English. I am as conscious as any one else of those infamous proceedings towards free negroes which are the crime of the North, a crime no less odious than that of the South. What conscience is not aroused at the thought of those prejudices of skin which do not permit blacks to sit by the side of whites, in schools, churches, or public vehicles? ”

“ 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. ”

“ That which is really a great national problem and which ought to be so considered by the whole American people, dwarfs into a “Negro Problem.” The device is not new. It is an old trick. It has been oft repeated and with a similar purpose and effect. For truth, it gives us falsehood. For innocence, it gives us guilt. It removes the burden of proof from the old master class and imposes it upon the Negro. It puts upon the race a work which belongs to the nation. It belongs to that craftiness often displayed by disputants who aim to make the worse appear the better reason. ”

“ The accursed shadow of miscegenation hangs over the South to-day like a pall of hell. We talk much of the Negro question and all of its possible ramifications and consequences, but, gentlemen, the trouble is not far afield. Our own people, our white men with their black concubines, are destroying the integrity of the Negro race, raising up a menace to the white race, lowering the standard of both races and preparing the way for riot, mob, criminal assaults, and, finally, a death struggle for racial supremacy. The trouble is at our own door. ”

“ The reckless among the white population, the element most subject to the passions fomented and stirred by a race-antipathy, and most responsive to the catch-phrases of the demagogue, will understand it as a justification of all the things done to put down the negro and as an incitement to further steps along the same line. ”

“ Hence the run on Democracy’s bank—“the Negro unrest” of the newspaper paragraphers.
Undoubtedly some of these newly-awakened Negroes will take to Socialism and Bolshevism. But here again the reason is racial. Since they suffer racially from the world as at present organized by the white race, some of their ablest hold that it is “good play” to encourage and give aid to every subversive movement within that white world which makes for its destruction “as it is.” For by its subversion they have much to gain and nothing to lose. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Therefore, if the negro will insist upon some race manipulation in order to raise the average of intelligence, thrift and morality in our national citizenship, the only safe and sane method is to take measures to restrict the increase of the negro race and let it die out like the Indian. ”

“ It is for no other purpose than to escape the social ostracism and civic disabilities of the Negro. Why is it that we see so many pathetic attempts to be white? It is simply to escape injustice. In a country where every opportunity is open to the white, in business, in society, in government, and the door shut against or reluctantly opened to the black, the natural unconscious effort of the black is to get white. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The truth is, in fact, that constant inter-racial irritation leaves neither race entirely sane, and that abominable crime and no less abominable punishment are merely the acutest symptom of an ill-omened conjuncture of things, which puts an unfair and unnatural strain upon both black and white human nature. The criminal stupidity that brought the negro to America cannot be annulled by passively “making the best of it.” If its evil effects are to be counteracted, corrected, and wiped out, it must be through an active and constructive effort of large-minded statesmanship. ”

“ So is art, war, the family, rum and the exploitation of labor. But none of these is entitled to extend the mantle of its own peculiar “internationalism” to cover the present case of the Negro discontent—although this has been attempted. The international Fact to which Negroes in America are now reacting is not the exploitation of laborers by capitalists; but the social, political and economic subjection of colored peoples by white. It is not the Class Line, but the Color Line, which is the incorrect but accepted expression for the Dead Line of racial inferiority. ”

“ Indeed, the constant evolution of negro character is one of the most marked and encouraging social phenomena of the times; it constantly tends upwards, in moral, mental development and material betterment. Those who contend that the negro is standing still, or "relapsing into barbarism," are the falsest of false prophets. They resolutely shut their eyes to facts all around them, and devote columns upon columns of newspaper, magazine and book argument—imaginary pictures—to the immorality, mental sterility and innate improvidence of this people ”

“ 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. ”

“ The best way to get up a mob, is to say there will be one, and this is what is being done. Colonization is no solution, but an evasion. It is not repentance but putting the wronged ones out of our presence. It is not atonement, but banishment. It is not love, but hate. Its reiteration and agitation only serves to fan the flame of popular prejudice and to add insult to to injury.
The righteous judgment of mankind will say if the American people could endure the Negro’s presence while a slave, they certainly can and ought to endure his presence as a free man. ”

“ We are to conceive, in the first place, an immense advance in the negro race—an advance in education, industry, thrift, and general efficiency. Well, this is possible enough—the negro is certainly civilizable, if not indefinitely, at any rate far beyond the average level he has yet attained. Negro crime might easily be reduced within normal limits; for the race is not inherently criminal, but is rendered so by ignorance, poverty, vice, injustice, and a thoroughly bad penal system. ”

“ Our books, our reviews, our newspapers, our almanacs, have all been silent, or exerted their influence on the wrong side. The negro's crimes are repeated, but his sufferings are never told. Even in our geographies it is taught that the colored race must always be degraded. Now and then anecdotes of cruelties committed in the slave-holding States are told by individuals who witnessed them ”