Race questions, provincialism, and other American problems

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Contents

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I. RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES . 1

Importance of the problem, 1-4. — Summary statement of various questions about races, 5, 6. — The defects of our present scientific knowledge regarding racial psychology, 6—10. — The lesson taught by Japan, 10-14. — The lesson taught by Jamaica, 15-31. — The meaning of race in the history of civilization: sceptical survey of the state of our knowledge, 31—47. — The psychology of racial antipathies, 47-52. — Conclusion, 53.

II

I refer then, first, to the wonderful lesson that Japan has been teaching us regarding what human energy and devotion have done and can do, and can do also in case of a race that is indeed remote enough from our own.

I remember well the Japan of the geography text-books of my childhood, text-books which were even then antiquated enough; but I believed them. Japan was a weird land, according to the old text-books, — a land from which foreigners were excluded, a land where all things were as perverse as possible, where criminals were boiled in oil, where Catholic missionaries had long ago been martyred. Whatever the Japanese were, they were plainly men of the wrong race. Later, however, I learned something of the contemporary history of Japan as it then was. The scene was now, indeed, vastly changed. The Japanese had opened their land; and hereupon, lo ! in a magic way, they were imitating, so we heard, all of our European customs. So we next had to alter our own opinion as to their essential nature. They became in our eyes a plastic race of wonderful little children, small of stature, quick of wit, light-minded — a folk who took up any suggestion precisely as the playful children often do. They, too, were playing, it seemed, with our whole

Western civilization. Plainly, then, they were a race who had no serious life of their own at all. Those of us who disliked them noted that they thus showed an ape-like unsteadiness of conduct. This, then, was their racial characteristic. Those who admired them thought of them as a new sort of pets, to be humored and instructed with all our superior condescension. Well, as time went on, and I grew to manhood, I myself came to know some of these Japanese as students. Hereupon, however, I gradually learned to see such men in a wholly new light. I found them, with all their steadfast courtesy, pleasantly, but impenetrably reserved — keepers of their own counsel, men whose life had, as I soon found, a vast background of opinions and customs that I could not fathom. When, I said, shall I ever see what is behind that Japanese smile ? What is in their hearts ? With an immovable self-consciousness they resisted every effort to alter, from without, any of their essential ideals. Politely, whenever you pressed them, they declined to admit that any of our Western arts or opinions were equal in value to their own most cherished national ideal treasures. And this they did even at the moment when they were present, most respectfully, as learners. They learned well ; but plainly they meant to use this learning for their own purposes. An enthusiastic lady in an American University town was once seeking to draw from a Japanese visitor some admission of the importance of Christianity for the higher civilization of his country. "Confess," she insisted, "confess what a boon our missionaries have brought you in introducing Christianity into your land." "You are right," answered the Japanese, with his usual courteous smile, "you are right; the missionaries in introducing Christianity, have indeed brought us a great good. They have completed the variety of religions in Japan." This impenetrable Japanese self-consciousness, this unconquerable polite and obstinate reserve, what did it mean ? Well, Mr. Hearn and his kin have now let us know in a literary way something of the true heart of Japan.

And the recent war has shown us what Japan meant by imitating our Western ways, and also what ancestral ideals have led her sons to death in battle, and still hold the nation so closely knit to their Emperor. Already I have heard some tender souls amongst us say: "It is they who are racially our superiors." Some of us may live to see Japanese customs pervading our land, and all of our professional imitators trying to be Japanese. Well, I myself am no worshipper of any new fancy or distant civilization, merely because of its temporary prominence. But the true lesson which Japan teaches us to-day is, that it is somewhat hard to find out by looking at the features of a man's face, or at the color of his skin, or even at the reports of travellers who visit his land, what it is of which his race is really capable. Perhaps the Japanese are not of the right race; but we now admit that so long as we judged them merely by their race, and by mere appearances, we were judging them ignorantly, and falsely. This, I say, has been to me a most interesting lesson in the fallibility of some of our race judgments.

Ill So much, then, for one lesson of experience. I have recently been much impressed by another lesson, but by one of a very different character, occurring, so to speak, at the other extremity of the world of modern race-problems. The negro has so far shown none of the great powers of the Japanese. Let us, then, provisionally admit at this stage of our discussion that the negro is in his present backward state as a race, for reasons which are not due merely to circumstances, but which are quite innate in his mental constitution. I shall indeed return to that topic later on. But, for the moment, let that view pass as if it were finally accepted. View the negro, then, for the instant merely as a backward race. But let the race-question here be our own pressing Southern question : How can the white man and the negro, once forced, as they are in our South, to live side by side, best learn to live with a minimum of friction, with a maximum of cooperation ? I have long learned from my Southern friends that this end can only be attained by a firm and by a very constant and explicit insistence upon keeping the negro in his proper place, as a social inferior — who, then, as an inferior, should, of course, be treated humanely, but who must first be clearly and unmistakably taught where he belongs. I have observed that the pedagogical methods which my Southern friends of late years have found it their duty to use, to this end, are methods such as still keep awake a good deal of very lively and intense irritation in the minds not only of the pupils but also of the teachers.

Now irritation, viewed merely in itself, is not an enlightening state of mind. It is, therefore, according to our modern views, not a very pedagogical state of mind. I am myself, for instance, a fairly irritable person, and I am also a teacher. But at the moments when I am irritated I am certainly not just then a good teacher. Is, however, the irritation which seems to be the accompaniment of some of the recent Southern methods of teaching the negro his place an inevitable evil, a wholly necessary accompaniment of the present transition period in the South? Must such increase of racehatred first come, in order that later, whenever the negro has fully learned his lesson, and aspires no more beyond his station, peace may come ? Well, concerning just this matter I lately learned what was to me, in my inexperience, a new lesson. I have had occasion three times, in recent summers, to visit British West Indies, Jamaica, and Trinidad, at a time when few tourists were there. Upon visiting Jamaica I first went round the coast of the island, visiting its various ports. I then went inland, and walked for miles over its admirable country roads. I discussed its condition with men of various occupations. I read some of its official literature. I then consulted with a new interest its history. I watched its negroes in various places, and talked with some of them, too. I have since collected such further informac 17 tion as I had lime to collect regarding its life, as various authorities have discussed the topic, and this is the result : —

Jamaica has a population of surely not more than 14,000 or 15,000 whites, mostly English. Its black population considerably exceeds 600,000. Its mulatto population, of various shades, numbers, at the very least, some 40,000 or 50,000. Its plantation life, in the days before emancipation, was much sadder and severer, by common account, than ours in the South ever was. Both the period of emancipation and the immediately following period were of a very discouraging type. In the sixties of the last century there was one very unfortunate insurrection. The economic history of the island has also been in many ways unlucky even to the present day. Here, then, are certainly conditions which in some respects are decidedly such as would seem to tend toward a lasting state of general irritation, such as you might suppose would make race-questions acute. Moreover, the population, being a tropical one, has serious moral burdens to contend with of the sort that result from the known influences of such climates upon human character in the men of all races.

And yet, despite all these disadvantages, to-day, whatever the problems of Jamaica, whatever its defects, our own present Southern race-problem in the forms which we know best, simply does not exist. There is no public controversy about social race equality or superiority. Neither a white man nor a white woman feels insecure in moving about freely amongst the black population anywhere on the island. The colony has a Legislative Assembly, although one of extremely limited legislative powers. For the choice to this assembly a suffrage determined only by a decidedly low rate-qualification is free to all who have sufficient property, but is used by only a very small portion of the negro population. The negro is, on the whole, neither painfully obstrusive in his public manners, nor in need of being sharply kept in his place. Within the circles of the black population itself there is meanwhile a decidedly rich social differentiation. There are negroes in government service, negroes in the professions, negroes who are fairly prosperous peasant proprietors, and there are also the poor peasants ; there are the thriftless, the poor in the towns, — yes, as in any tropical country, the beggars. In Kingston and in some other towns there is a small class of negroes who are distinctly criminal. On the whole, however, the negroes and colored population, taken in the mass, are orderly, law-abiding, contented, still backward in their education, but apparently advancing. They are generally loyal to the government. The best of them are aspiring, in their own way, and wholesomely self-conscious. Yet there is no doubt whatever that English white men are the essential controllers of the destiny of the country. But these English whites, few as they are, control the country at present, with extraordinarily little friction, and wholly without those painful emotions, those insistent complaints and anxieties, which at present are so prominent in the minds of many of our own Southern brethren. Life in Jamaica is not ideal. The economical aspect of the island is in many ways unsatisfactory. But the negro race-question, in our present American sense of that term, seems to be substantially solved.

How? By race-mixture?

The considerable extent to which race-mixture went in the earlier history of Jamaica is generally known. Here, as elsewhere, however, it has been rather the social inequality of the races, than any approach to equality, which has been responsible for the mixture, in so far as such has occurred. It was the social inequality of the plantation days that began the process of mixture. If the often-mentioned desire to raise the "color" of their children, has later led the colored population to seek a further amalgamation of the two stocks, certainly that tendency, so far as it is effective, has been due to the social advantages of the lighter color — and not due to any motive which has decreased the ancient disadvantages under which the darker race has had to suffer. If race-amalgamation is inde ed to be viewed as always an evil, the best way to counteract the growth of that evil must everywhere be the cultivation of racial self-respect and not of racial degradation. As a fact, it is not the amalgamation of the stocks, so far as that has occurred, which has tended to reduce the friction between the races in Jamaica. As to the English newcomers to the island, they probably do not tend to become amalgamated with the colored stocks in Jamaica, more than in any other region where the English live. The English stock tends, here as elsewhere, to be proud of itself, and to keep to itself. How then has the solution of what was once indeed a grave race-question been brought about in Jamaica ? I answer, by the simplest means in the world — the simplest, that is, for Englishmen — viz. : by English administration, and by English reticence. When once the sad period of emancipation and of subsequent occasional disorder was passed, the Englishman did in

Jamaica what he has so often and so well done elsewhere. He organized his colony; he established good local courts, which gained by square treatment the confidence of the blacks. The judges of such courts were Englishmen. The English ruler also provided a good country constabulary, in which native blacks also found service, and in which they could exercise authority over other blacks. Black men, in other words, were trained, under English management, of course, to police black men. A sound civil service was also organized; and in that educated negroes found in due time their place, while the chiefs of each branch of the service were and are, in the main, Englishmen. The excise and the health services, both of which are very highly developed, have brought the law near to the life of the humblest negro, in ways which he sometimes finds, of course, restraining, but which he also frequently finds beneficent. Hence he is accustomed to the law; he sees its ministers often, and often, too, as men of his own race; and in the main, he is fond of order, and learns to be respectful toward the established ways of society. The Jamaica negro is described by those who know him as especially fond of bringing his petty quarrels and personal grievances into court. He is litigious just as he is vivacious. But this confidence in the law is just what the courts have encouraged. That is one way, in fact, to deal with the too forward and strident negro. Encourage him to air his grievances in court, listen to him patiently, and fine him when he deserves fines. That is a truly English type of social pedagogy. It works in the direction of making the negro a conscious helper toward good social order.

Administration, I say, has done the larger half of the work of solving Jamaica's race-problem. Administration has filled the island with good roads, has reduced to a minimum the tropical diseases by means of an excellent health-service, has taught the population loyalty and order, has led them some steps already on the long road "up from slavery," has given them, in many cases, the true self-respect of those who themselves officially cooperate in the work of the law, and it has done this without any such result as our Southern friends nowadays conceive when they think of what is called "negro domination." Administration has allayed ancient irritations. It has gone far to offset the serious economic and tropical troubles from which Jamaica meanwhile suffers.

Yes, the work has been done by administra- I tion, — and by reticence. For the Englishman, in his official and governmental dealings with backward peoples, has a great way of being superior without very often publicly saying that he is superior. You well know that in dealing, as an individual, with other individuals, trouble is seldom made by the fact that you are actually the superior of another man in any respect. The trouble comes when you tell the other man, too stridently, that you are his superior. Be my superior, quietly, simply showing your superiority in your deeds, and very likely I shall love you for the very fact of your superiority.

For we all love our leaders. But tell me that I am your inferior, and then perhaps I may grow boyish, and may throw stones. Well, it is so with races. Grant then that yours is the superior race. Then you can afford to say little about that subject in your public dealings with the backward race. Superiority is best shown by good deeds and by few boasts.

IV So much for the lesson that Jamaica has suggested to me. The widely different conditions of Trinidad suggest, despite the differences, a somewhat similar lesson. Here also there are great defects in the social order; but again, our Southern race-problem does not exist. When, with such lessons in mind, I recall our problem, as I hear it from my brethren of certain regions of our Union, I see how easily we can all mistake for a permanent race-problem a difficulty that is essentially a problem of quite another sort. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page in his recent book on the "Southerners' Problem" speaks, in one notable passage, of the possibility which he calls Utopian, that perhaps some day the negro in the South may be made to cooperate in the keeping of order by the organization under State control of a police of his own race, who shall deal with blacks. He even mentions that the English in the East Indies use native constabulary. But this possibility is not Utopian. When I hear the complaint of the Southerner, that the race-problem is such as constantly to endanger the safety of his home, I now feel disposed to say: "The problem that endangers the sanctity of your homes and that is said sometimes to make lynching a necessity, is not a race-problem. It is an administrative problem. You have never organized a country constabulary. Hence, when various social conditions, amongst which the habit of irritating public speech about race-questions is indeed one, though only one, condition, have tended to the producing and to the arousing of extremely dangerous criminals in your communities, you have no adequate means of guarding against the danger. When you complain that such criminals, when they flee from justice, get sympathy from some portion of their ignorant fellows and so are aided to get away, you forget that you have not first made your negro countryman familiar with, and fond of, the law, by means of a vigorous and well-organized and generally beneficent administration constantly before his eyes, not only in the pursuit of criminals, but in the whole care of public order and health. If you insist that in some districts the white population is too sparse or too poor, or both, to furnish an efficient country constabulary constantly on duty, why, then, have you not long since trained black men to police black men? Sympathy with the law grows with responsibility for its administration. If it is revolting to you to see black men possessed of the authority of a country constabulary, still, if you will, you can limit their authority to a control over their own race. If you say all this speech of mine is professorial, unpractical, Utopian, and if you still cry out bitterly for the effective protection of your womankind, I reply merely, look at Jamaica. Look at other English colonies.

In any case, the Southern race-problem will never be relieved by speech or by practices such as increase irritation. It will be relieved when administration grows sufficiently effective, and when the negroes themselves get an increasingly responsible part in this administration in so far as it relates to their own race. That may seem a wild scheme. But I insist : It is the English way. Look at Jamaica, and learn how to protect your own homes.

I have reviewed two very different lessons which I have recently had brought home to me regarding race-problems. What is there which is common to these two lessons ? Is it not this : In estimating, in dealing with races, in defining what their supposedly unchangeable characteristics are, in planning what to do with them, we are all prone to confuse the accidental with the essential. We are likely to take for an essential race-characteristic what is a transient incident, or a product of special social conditions. We are disposed to view as a fatal and overwhelming race-problem what is a perfectly curable accident of our present form of administration. If we are indeed of a superior race ourselves, we shall, however, best prove the fact by learning to distinguish the accidental from the essential in our relations with other races. I speak with no lack of sympathy for the genuine and bitter trials of our Southern brethren when I say that I suppose the mistake which I now point out, the mistake of confusing the essential and the accidental, is the mistake that they are now making in many of their sincerest expressions of concern over their race-problem. So much for the two lessons that have led me to the present discussion. But now let me pass to a somewhat wider view of race-problems. Let me ask a little more generally, What, if anything, can be known to be essential about the characteristics of a race of men and consequently an essentially important consideration in our dealings with alien races ? Speaking so far as we can, apart from prejudice, what can we say about what it is which distinguishes the various races of men from one another?

V The term "race" is popularly used in a very vague way. The newspapers not long ago said, during trouble in Poland, that the Russian soldiers then in Warsaw showed "race-antipathy" in their conflicts with the people. We all know, however, that the mutual hatred of Russians and Poles is due mainly to political and to religious causes. Frenchmen of the northern provinces, who are anthropologically wholly indistinguishable, as Professor Ripley tells us, from the inhabitants of many western German districts, still have what they call a " race-antipathy " for the men across the border. Thus almost any national or political or religious barrier, if it is old enough, may lead to a consciousness of difference of race. On the other hand, there are, of course, unquestionable physical varieties of mankind, distinguished by well-known physical contrasts.

But the anthropologists still almost hopelessly disagree as to what the accurate classification of these true races may be. Such a classification, however, does not concern us here. We are now interested in the minds of men. We want to know what the races of men are socially good for. And not in the study of skulls or of hair, or of skin color, and not in the survey of all these bewildering complications with which physical anthropology deals, shall we easily find an answer to our more practical questions, viz., to our questions regarding the way in which these various races of men are related to the interests of civilization, and regarding the spirit in which we ought to estimate and practically to deal with these racial traits of mankind.

For after all, it is a man's mind, rather than his skull, or his hair, or his skin, that we most need to estimate. And if hereupon we ask ourselves just how these physical varieties of the human stock, just how these shades of color, these types of hair, these forms of skull, or these contours of body, are related to the mental powers and to the moral characteristics of the men in question, then, if only we set prejudice wholly aside, and appeal to science to help us, we find ourselves in the present state of knowledge almost hopelessly at sea. We know too little as yet about the natural history of the human mind, our psychology is far too infantile a science, to give us any precise information as to the way in which the inherited, the native, the constitutional aspects of the minds of men really vary with their complexions or with their hair. Yet that, of course, is just what we most want to know. It is easy to show that an Australian is just now far below our mental level. But how far is his degradation due to the inherited and unchangeable characters of his race, and how far to his long struggle with the dreary desert ? How far is he, as we now find him, a degenerate, whose ancestors were on some far higher level ? In other words, is his type of mind a true variety of the human mind, inbred and unchangeable ? How far is it, so to speak, a mere incident ? Upon d 33

EACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES

what level were the minds of our own ancestors in the early stone age of Europe? How did their minds then compare with the minds of those ancestors of the Australian who were then their contemporaries ? Who shall answer such questions ? Yet just such questions we should have to answer before we could decide upon the true relations of race and of mind.

To be sure, anthropology has made a beginning, and a very important beginning, in the study of the mental types of primitive man. By various comparative and archaeological methods we can already learn a good deal about the minds of our own ancestors. We can also study various races as they are to-day. We know, about the early stages of human culture, far more than we knew a little while since. But one result may forthwith be stated regarding what we have so far learned concerning the early history of the human mind, whether it is the mind of our ancestors, or of other races. Of course, we cannot doubt that, just as now we widely differ in mental life, so always there must have been great contrasts between the minds of the various stocks of men. No doubt, if the science of man were exact, it would indeed include a race-psychology. But my present scepticism concerns the present state of science, and the result of such study as we have yet made of the racial psychology of man is distinctly disappointing to those who want to make their task easy by insisting that the physical varieties of mankind are in our present state of knowledge sufficient guides to an interpretation of the whole inner contrast of the characters and of the mental processes of men. For what anthropology thus far shows us is, that, so soon as you go back beyond those stages of cultivation where history is possible, and so soon as you view men as they are apart from the higher culture — well, then, all men, so far as we can yet study them, appear to us not, of course, the same in mind, but yet surprisingly alike in their minds, in their morals, and in their arts. Widely as the primitive men differ, in certain broad features they remain, for our present knowledge, notably similar. And these common features are such as are by no means altogether flattering to our racial pride, when we think that our own ancestors, too, were, not very long since, comparatively, primitive men like the rest.

All the more primitive men, namely, are largely alike in the grossness and in the unpromising stupidity of their superstitions, and in their moral defects and virtues. Very many of them, belonging to the most various races, resemble one another in possessing customs which we now, for the most part, profoundly abhor, and which we are at present prone to view as characteristic of essentially debased minds. Such customs as cannibalism, or as human sacrifice, or as the systematic torturing of prisoners of war, such horrors as those of the witchcraft from whose bondage Europeans escaped only since the seventeenth century — such things, I say, are characteristic of no one race of men. To surround one's life with a confused mass of spiritual horrors, to believe in ghosts, or in vampires, in demons, in magic, in witchcraft, and in hostile gods of all sorts, to tangle up one's daily activities in a net of superstitious customs, to waste time in elaborate incantations, to live in fantastic terrors of an unseen world, to be terrified by tabus of all kinds, so that numerous sorts of useful deeds are superstitiously forbidden, to narrafe impossible stories and believe in them, to live in filth, to persecute, to resist light, to fight against progress, to be mentally slothful, dull, sensuous, cruel, to be the prey of endless foolishness, to be treacherous, to be destructive — well, these are the mental traits of no one or two races of men. These are simply the common evil, traits of primitive humanity, traits to which our own ancestors were very long ago a prey, traits against which civilized man has still constantly to fight. Any frenzied mob of civilized men may relapse in an hour to the level of a very base savagery. All the religions of men, without exception, and however lofty the heights that they have since climbed, appear to have begun with much the same chaos of weird customs and of unreasonable delusions. Man's mental burdens have thus been, in all races, of very much the same sort, except, to be sure, that civilization, side by side with the good that it has created, has invented some new mental burdens, such as our increasing percentage of insanity in recent times illustrates.