White male

“ 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. ”

“ He continued:
“The Southern white man boasts he knows the Negro better than anybody else, but he knows less what the coloured man is really thinking than the man in the moon. I’ll bet anything you say, that seven out of every ten men in town believe that you and I and all the rest of us coloured folks are scared to death every time we hear the word ‘Ku Klux.’ They believe the sight of one of those fool robes’ll make us run and hide under a bed⸺”
[130] “Oh, I don’t go quite that far,” interrupted Kenneth. ”

“ Folks like you and me could live here for a hundred years and there’d never be no trouble. There’d never be no race problem if they was only like us. But”—and his voice took on a doubtful and sorrowful sound—“the most of this trouble we’re havin’ is caused by fool Negroes who go up No’th to school and run around with those coloured folks in New York and Chicago who tell ‘em how bad we po’ coloured folks are bein’ treated in the South. ”

“ Some bring in clothes, to be sure, because the white man asks it; but why no sensible man could say. They are hung from one shoulder, flap merrily in the breeze, and are always quite frankly tucked up about the neck or under the arms when the wearer happens to be in haste. As a matter of fact these savages are so beautifully and smoothly formed; their red-brown or chocolate-brown skin is so fine in texture, and their complete unconsciousness so genuine that in an hour the newcomer is quite accustomed to their nakedness. ”

“ Tell us; which is the white man, who, with a prudent regard to his own character, can associate one of you on terms of equality? Ask us which is the white man who would decline such association with one of our number, whose intellectual and moral qualities are not an objection? To both of these questions we unhesitatingly make the same answer: there is no such white man. ”

“ The average white man in the United States has the idea that the average Negro spends most of his time in bemoaning the fact that he is not a white man, or in trying to devise some way by which he will be permitted to mingle, in a purely social way, with white people. This is far from the truth. In my intercourse with all classes of the Negro, North and South, it is a rare occurrence when the matter of getting away from the race, or of social intermingling with the white people, is so much as mentioned. ”

“ After all, some very well informed and very well meaning people will read what I have now said, and what seems to me so just and reasonable, and will still insist that the color of the negro has something to do with the feeling entertained toward him; that the white man naturally shudders at the thought of contact with one who is black -- that the impulse is one which he can neither resist nor control. ”

“ I remember the first white man I ever saw. Since that long, long-ago time I have seen many, but never until now have I ever truly known and felt a white man’s heart. All the white men I have heretofore met wanted to get something from us. ”

“ One man to four hundred is great odds, I own, But this 'yer's a White Man—I plays it alone!" And he sprang up the hillside—to stop him none dare— Till a yell from the top told a "White Man was there!" A White Man was there! We prayed he might spare Those misguided heathens The few clothes they wear. They fled, and he followed, but no matter where; They fled to escape him,—the "White Man was there,"— Till we missed first his voice on the pine-wooded slope, And we knew for the heathen henceforth was no hope ”

“ The white man's gun and knife and metal kettle, his fire-water and his horse and his woollen blanket, had the same attraction for the wild warrior. But as to everything done or gained by the white man which required industry, toil, labor, he would have none of it, — the thing was not worth its cost. He looked on with a contempt which smothered his curiosity. The white man was a squaw. Perhaps the noblest thing that can be said of an Indian is that he never could be made into a slave. ”

“ Without attempting to show which party is to blame in this controversy, I have no hesitation in saying that this division itself is most unfortunate, disgraceful, and mortifying. It cannot fail, I fear, to make an unfavorable impression for us upon thoughtful observers. But, standing here as your mouthpiece to-day, I beg the disgusted public to remember that colored men are but men, and that the best men will sometimes differ, and will often differ more widely and violently about trifles than about things of substance, where a difference of opinion would be at least dignified. ”

“ And then he thought of Roy Ewing and the operation of the night before. Must have been a mighty terrible ordeal for them to have to call a Negro in to operate on their daughter. Race prejudice is a funny thing! A white man will eat food prepared by black hands, have it served by black hands, have his children nursed by a black nurse who most of the time was more a mother to them than their own mother, let his clothes be taken into a black home to [226] be washed, allow all the most intimate details of his life to be handled by black folks. ”

“ A good-looking, well-dressed colored man approached a white man, in a business-like manner, and began talking to him, but ere he had finished the question, the white raised his walking stick, and with much force, knocked off the black man’s hat, and with an oath said, “Don’t you know better than to speak to a white man with your hat on, where’s your manners?” The negro picked up his hat, held it in his hand, and resumed the conversation. ”

“ My mother’s father was an American white man. Her mother was a full-blooded African woman. What am I?”
Pathetic Desire of Negroes to Be Like White Men
Even among those Negroes who are most emphatic in defence of the race there is, deep down, the pathetic desire to be like the dominant white man. It is not unreasonable, nor unnatural, for all outward opportunity of development lies open to the white man. To be coloured is to be handicapped in the race for those things in life which men call desirable. I remember discussing the race question one evening with a group of intelligent coloured men. ”

“ Not before has a composite and proportionate presentation of the entire race, embracing all of its various groups and elements, showing their relations with each other and to the whites, been made.
It is very likely that the Negroes of the United States have a fairly correct idea of what the white people of the country think of them, for that opinion has for a long time been and is still being constantly stated; but they are themselves more or less a sphinx to the whites. ”

“ And, whenever you find a white man who expresses the same sentiment toward the people of other races, there, too, in almost every case, you will find a narrow-minded, prejudiced white man.
That person is the broadest, strongest, and most useful who sees something to love and admire in all races, no matter what their colour. ”

“ And it is not merely the demand of the white man that the Negro step aside by himself, for the Negro himself is drawing the colour line, and drawing it with as much enthusiasm as the white man. A genuine race-spirit or race-consciousness is developing. Negroes are meeting prejudice with self-development. ”

“ I may here express my opinion in passing that the white colour of the skin is not natural to man, but that by nature he has a black or brown skin, like our forefathers the Hindus; that consequently a white man has never originally sprung from the womb of Nature, and that thus there is no such thing as a white race, much as this is talked of, but every white man is a faded or bleached one. Forced into this strange world, where he only exists like an exotic plant, and like this requires in winter the hothouse, in the course of thousands of years man became white. ”

“ It was good to know there were some white men who were thinking seriously on the race problem. And trying to be fair. Most white Southerners were modern Pontius Pilates. Figuratively and literally, mentally and morally, they washed their hands of all personal responsibility for the increasing complexities of the race question. He wondered how many more men there were in the South like those three. Broadminded but afraid to speak out. Ewing, Judge Stevenson, Scott, Anthony, Gordon—all by word or action seemed [264] mortally afraid lest the public know they were even thinking of justice. ”

“ But ... it is always to be remembered that in their contact with white men, they did not assume that creeping posture of debasement—nor did the whites expect it—which has more or less been forced upon them in fiction. In fact, their handsome, good-natured faces seem almost incapable of despair. It is true the whites were superior to them, but they, in their turn, were superior, and infinitely superior, to the blacks, and had as much objection to associating with the blacks on terms of equality as any white men could have to associating with them. ”

“ Most of the white men that these native darkies knew had been of a rough sort, adventurous Dutchmen and others, who kicked them about and treated them without the least regard until the poor black boys—we call all blacks “boys”—thought that it was the white man’s natural way. ”

“ In such a white world, the entrance of a black man would be hailed with joy by the inhabitants. Anybody or anything would be welcome that would break the oppressive and tormenting monotony of the all-prevailing white. ”

“ As a matter of fact we cannot take such extreme and largely fanciful stock as typifying that which we may fairly call the Negro race. In the case of no other race is so narrow a definition attempted. A "white" man may be of any color, size, or facial conformation and have endless variety of cranial measurement and physical characteristics. A "yellow" man is perhaps an even vaguer conception. ”

“ No Negro who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in America has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these cross-roads; has failed to ask himself at some time: What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates Black and White America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? ”

“ I am speaking mainly to colored men to-night, but I want my words to find their way to the eyes, ears, heads and hearts of my white fellow-countrymen, hoping that some among them may be made to think, some hearts among them will be made to feel, and some of their number will be made to act. ”

“ Even when American art undertakes to picture the types of the two races, it invariably places in comparison, not the best of both races as common fairness would dictate, but it puts side by side and in glaring contrast, the lowest type of the Negro with the highest type of the white man and then calls upon the world to “look upon this picture, then upon that.” ”

“ With the white man this element of his being is less on the surface, and he wears it uneasily, as though it were foreign to his genius, and at the same time a curb on his actions. With the other it is a loose-fitting garment, worn on the outside, and he seems rather pleased than otherwise that he is thus rendered a spectacle to his fellow-men. ”

“ The 16th of April, the anniversary of this great act of the nation, strangely and erroneously enough has been considered simply as the colored man’s day only. The business of consecrating and preserving its memory has been, by common consent, relegated to him exclusively. But, in this, our fellow-citizens have been more generous to us than just to themselves. Colored men have very little more reason to hallow this day than have white men. ”

“ This gives to every colored man, in proportion to his intellectuality, a sort of dual personality; there is one phase of him which is disclosed only in the freemasonry of his own race. I have often watched with interest and sometimes with amazement even ignorant colored men under cover of broad grins and minstrel antics maintain this dualism in the presence of white men. ”

“ He does not gain by civilization: he loses by it. The very nobleness which shows in him in the woods, his reserve, his taciturnity, his suppression of feeling, — all disappear under social subjection to white men. His mental gaze, which seemed to be withdrawn or concentrated, now seems wholly vacant and disappears. His special faculties and aptitudes fail because he has no use for them. He despises what we estimate most highly. Our appliances and comforts are a fret and torment to him. He generally becomes abject and mean, like the beast of the woods or the jungle in a menagerie. ”

“ In thus traveling about through the country I was sometimes amused on arriving at some little railroad-station town to be taken for and treated as a white man, and six hours later, when it was learned that I was stopping at the house of the colored preacher or school teacher, to note the attitude of the whole town change. At times this led even to embarrassment. Yet it cannot be so embarrassing for a colored man to be taken for white as for a white man to be taken for colored ”