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CHAPTER 1
RACE TODAY
"A Charm of Powerful Trouble"
"The conception of races once so innocent," said Jean Finot, "has cast a veil of tragedy over the earth. From without it shows us humanity divided into unequal fractions ... From within this same falsely conceived science of races likewise encourages hatred and discord among the children of the same common country ... People against people, race against race ... persecution and extermination on every hand."
One writer has called it a Frankenstein monster. But that comparison is far too feeble. However, it has this point of resemblance: Frankenstein's monster was built of scraps — scraps of corpses, a hand from this one, an eye from that, a patch of skin from this other. The evil genie of race is also created from scraps — scraps of false philosophies of past centuries; a quotation from this or that prejudiced traveller; lines from this and that semi-ignorant divine of colonial days; excerpts from Gobineau, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, the Bible; passages from this or that badly mixed-up ethnologist, all jumbled together with catch-phrases from greedy plantation owners, slave-dealers, and other traffickers in human flesh.
The purpose was to create a "pure" race, a "superior" race, a race that like the philosopher's stone of the ancients, excelled all excellence — a race so meritorious that it had the right to enslave and use the rest of humanity.
Every newly discovered bit of anthropology was twisted into building this doctrine of a "superior" race. A Putnam Weale worked most industriously on this part of it; a Tom Dixon, Madison Grant, and Lothrop Stoddard on that; a William McDougall and a Frederick Hoffman busied themselves with that other, while a host of Southern politicians and other lesser fry assisted.
One can see them at work. Like the witches in Macbeth they "round about the cauldron go" and "in the poisoned entrails throw" to make "the hell-broth boil and bubble." Finally the monster stirred to life, to ravage and slaughter. His name: Adolf Hitler. His purpose: World Domination.
It is a matter of common knowledge that Hitler copied very carefully American racial tactics. For instance, Harold Callender says (New York Times, Aug. 4, 1940), that when he saw the Nazis in their beginnings in Munich in 1931, Rudolf Hess defended his stand by pointing to racial discrimination in the United States and saying. "We are very much like the Ku Klux Klan."
The creation of this monster was the easiest thing in the world. Peoples are governed not by realities but by myths. And of all the myths that of racial superiority is the sweetest. Any number of otherwise intelligent people, some of them of the highest scientific pretensions, can be found who believe that their own particular "race" is elevated far above the rest of humanity, and is actually enclosed in some air-tight compartment that keeps it free from contamination. Any number of writers can be found, like William Benjamin Smith, who will declare that race-mixing does not affect the purity of the white race, since those with the slightest degree of Negro strain are classed as Negroes.
As for the mixed-blood, he ought never to have been. No amount of Christianity or religious training, we are informed, will give him good heredity, and this as late as 1935 by no less an authority than the learned Victoria Society of London, England.In short, the mixed-blood is a creation of Satan. "God made the white man and God made the black man," said Colonial America, "but the Devil made the mulatto."
The white race flowed from "a pure source": Europe. Miscegenation with blacks there was unknown throughout the ages, we are told. "It was not until the discovery of the New World that the races of men strikingly different in appearance came to intermix," says Crawfurd. Before that, he says, inferior races did mix with superior races, but both were white.
Nothing, however, is further from the truth. We shall show in these pages that sex relations between so-called whites and blacks go back to prehistoric times and on all the continents. Furthermore, since it is held by many that it is only the mixing of the black man and the white woman that can affect the "purity of the race" that it is precisely this kind that happened most in Europe.
For instance, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), the first real scientist, tells of a white woman in Sicily who committed adultery with a Negro and had a daughter by him. Not that this was an uncommon occurrence in his day but because he was discussing whether a white woman could have a black child by atavism. Adultery was then punished with death.
Plutarch, (46-120 A.D.) first of the great biographers, speaks of "a certain Greek woman, having borne a black child, then being on trial for adultery discovered herself as being descended from an Aethiop in the fourth generation." Wanley tells of a noblewoman "who though both she and her husband were white had a child the colour of an Ethiopian, whom when she was about to suffer as an adultress, Hippocrates (460-359 B.C.) is said to have delivered her by explaining the causes of such things and by showing the picture of an Ethiop in the chamber where she and her husband lay and with which it seems she was strongly affected."
St. Jerome (340-420 A.D.) says that Quintiliani (35-100 A.D.) had freed a Roman matron charged with adultery when she bore a black child by proving the same had been caused by seeing a black man before she gave birth. Juvenal (60140 A.D.) evidently did not believe this theory of maternal impression, and advised the Roman husbands not to take away the abortive potions from their wives if they did not want blackamoor children. He said, to the husbands, "Grieve not at this, poor wretch! and with thine own hand give thy wife the potion whatever it be for did she choose to bear her leaping children in her womb thou wouldst, perchance, become the sire of an Ethiop, a blackamoor would soon be your sole heir."
Martial, the great epigrammatist (40-102 A.D.), also satirized this tendency of the Roman matrons to cohabit with Negroes. He speaks of one Roman matron who had borne her husband seven children, none of which is his and all of which are mixed-bloods. "One of them with woolly hair like an African Moor seems to be the son of Santra, the cook. The second with flat nose and thick lips is the image of Pannicus, the wrestler ... Of the two daughters, one is "Black ... and belongs to Crotus, the flute-player . ..."
Shakespeare, drawing on Roman history, makes an empress, the German wife of the Emperor Saturninus, be madly in love with a Negro, Aaron, for whom she has a "blackamoor" child. This empress is the
"... lovely Tamora, Queen of Goths That like the stately Phoebe 'mongst her nymphs Dost overshine the gallantest dames of Rome."
Among other records of that time are how "a Princess was delivered of a black daughter by only seeing for the first time a blackamoor while she was pregnant," and of a woman who gave birth to three sons at Epiphany, "one of them born black like one of the Three Wise Men."
So much interest was aroused on this subject that "the attack and defense of a woman charged with adultery for giving birth to a black baby became a popular topic for declamation." Calpurnius Flaccus, noted Roman orator of the First Century, has left us an oration of this kind, "De Natus Aethiops." There was much academic discussion on the whys and wherefores of the mulatto. Herodotus (484-425 B.C.) had said that the semen of black peoples as the Ethiopian and the East Indian was black like their faces. Aristotle disagreed with him, saying it was white like that of other races. For centuries later, the partisans of the two argued the matter, pro and con, and how it was possible for a white woman to have a black child.
As regards the white man and the black woman, there is at least one classic case. Persina, Queen of Ethiopia, had a mulatto daughter, named Chariclea, which color "is strange among the Ethiopians." The black queen explained it by saying that at the moment of conception her eyes fell on the statue of Andromeda, Ethiopian princess, which had evidently been done in white marble. Her husband, the black King Hydaspes did not believe her. Perhaps if she had given some more commonplace cause such as that used by the black wives in our times, namely, that she had drank too much buttermilk, or had been caught in a snowstorm, she might have had better luck.
This last story was written by Heliodorus in the Third Century and is said to have been a romance. But the point so far is this: Miscegenation existed not only in early Europe but was of such proportions as to be a topic of general discussion. Later we shall show the same in northern Europe, where the interest grew even stronger after Queen Maria Theresa, consort of Louis XIV of France, had a mulatto daughter,
In the meantime this important fact about these discussions must be pointed out: They were conducted without that animus against Negroes which is so characteristic of English, American, and German writers today, especially when the white woman is involved. Furthermore, percentage of Negro population had nothing to do with it as some of the ancient European cities had Negro populations proportionately as large as some of the principal northern American ones, and even southern ones. The ancients were much more concerned with the adulterous aspects of such unions than with the racial one. Class and religion, not race, were then the legal barriers in marriage.
Are White and Black Inherent Enemies?
The ancients, being much more interested in the broad question of human conduct than in race, had a favorite problem of discussion which ran something like this: If a man who had never seen another human being were to meet with one suddenly in the woods would he fight him or make friends with him? The idea was to determine whether human beings were inherently friendly to one another — whether war was natural to mankind.
The old philosophers were never able to solve that question. There was no way of getting at the facts. However, in this day when war and race occupy the centre of the world stage, a similar question could be put and with more profit, namely: Were two men of different races, say a white and a black, to meet suddenly for the first time and alone would they fight or make friends?
There is probably no record of such a meeting in ancient times. The nearest to it was when Ptolemy, son of Lagus, (323-285 B.C.) brought a piebald Negro from Egypt and placed him on exhibition in Greece. The greater part of the audience at seeing a human being, part white and part black, burst into violent laughter, while the rest "was horror-struck as if they beheld a prodigy of mischievous portent."
The old Romans, too, according to Juvenal, thought it unlucky to see a blackamoor before breakfast.
"One of that hue that should he cross the way His omen would discolor all the day."
That great satirist did not say, however, what happened if they saw one after supper, or as we say in America, after night-fall.
The answer to what two men of different races would do in our times if they met suddenly under the above-mentioned conditions is probably this: The more enlightened one of the two would try to make friends, the less enlightened one would take to his heels if he were superstitious, or if he were brave would put himself on the defensive.
As it happens we have a very definite index to this. Livingstone say that when he entered certain villages of Central Africa for the first time the women and children and even the dogs and hens would run away as if the devil himself were at their heels. It was their first sight of a white man and the effect, he said, was precisely as if a mummy in the British Museum were to come to life.
Other white travelers have reported similarly of the South Sea and the Australian blacks. Lady Diana Cooper says that a Negro woman in Timbuctoo laughed at her because of her white skin.
On the other hand, how do the inhabitants of remote villages in Europe act at the sight of their first black man? They usually come crowding around in intense curiosity. I have seen French and German children, three and four years of age go up to the black-skinned, saucer-lipped Ubangi women when they were on tour in Europe and rub their fingers on them and look at their fingers to make sure that the grown-ups were not passing off a burnt-cork comedian on them.
One fact was significant in the attitude of the children. Even under the hideous Ubangi distortion they did not fail to recognize instinctively their bond of common humanity with the black women. Similarly was it with Livingstone. The blacks had run away, not because they had failed to recognize him as human, but precisely because they had. He had eyes, ears, and hands like themselves and walked as they did, but being black, their devil was white. Later, they discovered, however, that he was a very good man, that though "as white as the devil," he had "a black soul," (reverse Anglo-Saxon of course), and when next he visited them they ran to welcome him. The bugaboo of color was entirely forgotten.
In short, the child and the so-called savage have no difficulty in realizing the essential oneness of mankind. Little children are not only free from national and religious prejudices but from racial ones, also.
The royalty of all lands, as we shall see, was singularly free from color prejudice too. Even recent European monarchs adopted Negroes as their sons and daughters. The Popes of Rome, too, were particularly kind to Negroes. In short, the universal thinkers of every race and every land have known but one race — the human race.
On What Do the Mischief-Makers Base Their Doctrine of Racial Superiority?
Of Man's single race, there are scores and even hundreds of varieties. Variational differences are based largely on head-form, hair, and color. Some human varieties have a greater proportion of long-heads; others more of roundheads, but all peoples have long-heads and round-heads in their group. As for hair, some white peoples have frizzly hair and certain black ones, silky hair. Color? That is not even skin-deep. It is only a varnish, so to speak. But since color, whether it be in man, plant, or material, is what catches the eye first, color has come to be installed as the chief racial difference in mankind by the civilized Nordic.
Scientists, who wouldn't dream of classifying dogs, horses, or cats, according to color, claim to see in the color of the human skin something so important as to warrant establishing mankind into separate and distinct races — white race, red race, black race, yellow race, brown race, brunette race, blond race, etc., etc., etc.
For nearly three hundred years they have been dinning "Race, Race, Race," into the ears of humanity. The books they have written on the subject would tower miles into the sky. One does not exaggerate.
Superior races!
Inferior races!
Pure races. High-bred, heaven-sent races, born to command.
Mongrel races. Debased races, born to slavery.
Racial messiahs rose to world prominence They waxed fat. Mankind became race-conscious as it became bingo-conscious, baseball conscious, or prizefighting conscious. And when people become conscious about anything they usually strive for supremacy in that particular field, to see who is the world champion.
"Superior" Race Versus "Super-Superior" One
It was inevitable that this should be so too in the matter of race. The battle for world racial supremacy is now on. Superior Anglo-Saxon versus super-superior Aryan!
For centuries the Anglo-Saxon had proclaimed himself the racial cock-of-the-walk. But now the Hitler Aryan has announced that he is "the master race, destined to rule the world." He is looking down on the Anglo-Saxon much as how the latter looks down on the Negro. In a word, he is calling the Anglo-Saxon "nigger."
Of course this is quite in line with the traditions of the "superior" race. In America when one member of the "superior" race wishes to sting another, he either rents his home in the white residential district to Negroes, or broadcasts that his opponent is a Negro. It will be recalled that the political opponents of Warren G. Harding published in many of the leading newspapers that Harding was a Negro on the eve of the 1920 presidential election, reserving their fire till the last, and not giving Harding a chance to reply.
Hitler, too, has adopted these tactics. German propagandists are declaring that white Americans, after cohabiting with Negroes for centuries, are a Negroid people, and are bringing their Negro strain into the British Isles.
In September 1939, Lord Haw Haw, German radio back-biter and a New Yorker by birth, said in his broadcast, "Mr. Winston Churchill, whose mother is an American Negress, and whose father, Lord Randolph Churchill, died of an unmentionable disease ..." That is, he gave the British Prime Minister, the worst ancestry possible on both sides of his family.
After what Hitler has said about French and other European ancestry, this leaves the German as the only "pure, pure race."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Sex and Race Volume I the Old World"
by .
Copyright © 1968 Helga M. Rogers.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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