The Negro Part 8

One reason lies undoubtedly in the connotation of the term "Negro." In North America a Negro may be seven-eights white, since the term refers to any person of Negro descent. If we use the term in the same sense concerning the inhabitants of the rest of world, we may say truthfully that Negroes have been among the leaders of civilization in every age of the world's history from ancient Babylon to modern America; that they have contributed wonderful gifts in art, industry, political organization, and religion, and that they are doing the same to-day in all parts of the world.

In sharp contrast to this usage the term "Negro" in Africa has been more and more restricted until some scientists, late in the last century, declared that the great ma.s.s of the black and brown people of Africa were not Negroes at all, and that the "real" Negro dwells in a small s.p.a.ce between the Niger and the Senegal. Ratzel says, "If we ask what justifies so narrow a limitation, we find that the hideous Negro type, which the fancy of observers once saw all over Africa, but which, as Livingstone says, is really to be seen only as a sign in front of tobacco shops, has on closer inspection evaporated from all parts of Africa, to settle no one knows how in just this region. If we understand that an extreme case may have been taken for the genuine and pure form, even so we do not comprehend the ground of its geographical limitation and location; for wherever dark, woolly-haired men dwell, this ugly type also crops up. We are here in the presence of a refinement of science which to an unprejudiced eye will hardly hold water."[67]

In this restricted sense the Negro has no history, culture, or ability, for the simple fact that such human beings as have history and evidence culture and ability are not Negroes! Between these two extreme definitions, with unconscious adroitness, the most extraordinary and contradictory conclusions have been reached.

Let it therefore be said, once for all, that racial inferiority is not the cause of anti-Negro prejudice. Boaz, the anthropologist, says, "An unbiased estimate of the anthropological evidence so far brought forward does not permit us to countenance the belief in a racial inferiority which would unfit an individual of the Negro race to take his part in modern civilization. We do not know of any demand made on the human body or mind in modern life that anatomical or ethnological evidence would prove to be beyond the powers of the Negro."[68]

"We have every reason to suppose that all races are capable, under proper guidance, of being fitted into the complex scheme of our modern civilization, and the policy of artificially excluding them from its benefits is as unjustifiable scientifically as it is ethically abhorrent."[69] What is, then, this so-called "instinctive" modern prejudice against black folk?

Lord Bryce says of the intermingling of blacks and whites in South America, "The ease with which the Spaniards have intermingled by marriage with the Indian tribes--and the Portuguese have done the like, not only with the Indians, but with the more physically dissimilar Negroes--shows that race repugnance is no such constant and permanent factor in human affairs as members of the Teutonic peoples are apt to a.s.sume. Instead of being, as we Teutons suppose, the rule in the matter, we are rather the exception, for in the ancient world there seems to have been little race repulsion."

In nearly every age and land men of Negro descent have distinguished themselves. In literature there is Terence in Rome, Nosseyeb and Antar in Arabia, Es-Sa'di in the Sudan, Pushkin in Russia, Dumas in France, Al Kanemi in Spain, Heredia in the West Indies, and Dunbar in the United States, not to mention the alleged Negro strain in aesop and Robert Browning. As rulers and warriors we remember such Negroes as Queen Nefertari and Amenhotep III among many others in Egypt; Candace and Ergamenes in Ethiopia; Mansa Musa, Sonni Ali, and Mohammed Askai in the Sudan; Diaz in Brazil, Toussaint L'Ouverture in Hayti, Hannivalov in Russia, Sakanouye Tamuramaro in j.a.pan, the elder Dumas in France, Cazembe and Chaka among the Bantu, and Menelik, of Abyssinia; the numberless black leaders of India, and the mulatto strain of Alexander Hamilton. In music and art we recall Bridgewater, the friend of Beethoven, and the unexplained complexion of Beethoven's own father; Coleridge-Taylor in England, Tanner in America, Gomez in Spain; Ira Aldridge, the actor, and Johnson, Cook, and Burleigh, who are making the new American syncopated music. In the Church we know that Negro blood coursed in the veins of many of the Catholic African fathers, if not in certain of the popes; and there were in modern days Benoit of Palermo, St. Benedict, Bishop Crowther, the Mahdi who drove England from the Sudan, and Americans like Allen, Lot Carey, and Alexander Crummell. In science, discovery, and invention the Negroes claim Lislet Geoffroy of the French Academy, Latino and Amo, well known in European university circles; and in America the explorers Dorantes and Henson; Banneker, the almanac maker; Wood, the telephone improver; McCoy, inventor of modern lubrication; Matseliger, who revolutionized shoemaking. Here are names representing all degrees of genius and talent from the mediocre to the highest, but they are strong human testimony to the ability of this race.

We must, then, look for the origin of modern color prejudice not to physical or cultural causes, but to historic facts. And we shall find the answer in modern Negro slavery and the slave trade.

FOOTNOTES:

[35] "Some authors write that the Ethiopians paint the devil white, in disdain of our complexions."--Ludolf: _History of Ethiopia_, p. 72.

[36] Ripley: _Races of Europe_, pp. 58, 62.

[37] Denniker: _Races of Men_, p. 63.

[38] G. Finot: _Race Prejudice_. F. Herz: _Moderne Ra.s.sentheorien_.

[39] Ratzel: quoted in Spiller: _Inter-Racial Problems_, p. 31.

[40] Spiller: _Inter-Racial Problems_, p. 35.

[41] Ratzel: _History of Mankind_, II, 380 ff.

[42] _Industrial Evolution_, p. 47.

[43] These and other references in this chapter are from Schneider: Culturfahigkeit des Negers.

[44] Atlanta University Leaflet, No. 19.

[45] _Journal of the Royal Anthropological Inst.i.tute_, XLIII, 414, 415.

Cf. also _The Crisis_, Vol. IX, p. 234.

[46] Bucher: _Industrial Revolution_ (tr. by Wickett), pp. 57-58.

[47] Hayford: _Native Inst.i.tutions_, pp. 95-96.

[48] Ratzel, II, 376.

[49] Hayford: _Native Inst.i.tutions_, pp. 76 ff.

[50] _Impressions of South Africa_, 3d ed., p. 352.

[51] William Schneider.

[52] _West African Studies_, Chap. V.

[53] _Op. cit._

[54] _Impressions of South Africa._

[55] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, Vol. I.

[56] _West African Studies_, p. 107.

[57] Na.s.sau: _Fetishism in West Africa_, p. 36.

[58] _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, 9th ed., XX, 362.

[59] _The African Provinces_, II, 345.

[60] _Mediterranean Race_, p. 10.

[61] Stowe: _Native Races_, etc., pp. 553-554.

[62] Quoted in Schneider.

[63] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, Vol. I, Chap. XIV.

[64] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, Vol. I.

[65] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, I, 14-15.

[66] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, I, 272.

[67] Ratzel: _History of Mankind_, II, 313.

[68] Atlanta University Publications, No. 11.

[69] Robert Lowie in the _New Review_, Sept., 1914.

IX THE TRADE IN MEN

Color was never a badge of slavery in the ancient or medieval world, nor has it been in the modern world outside of Christian states. Homer sings of a black man, a "reverend herald"

Of visage solemn, sad, but sable hue, Short, woolly curls, o'erfleeced his bending head,...

Eurybiates, in whose large soul alone, Ulysses viewed an image of his own.