REMARKS ON THE FIRST TWO VOLUMES OF SEX AND RACE
“Our race is essentially slavish; it is the nature of all of us to believe blindly in what we love, rather than that which is most wise. We are inclined to look upon an honest, unshrinking pursuit of truth as something irreverent. We are indignant when others pry into our idols and criticize them with impunity, just as a savage flies to arms when a missionary picks his fetish to pieces.”… Galton.
Certain orthodox scholars, white and colored, have not liked the history as given in the two preceding volumes of “Sex and Race,” as well as in my earlier books. One English editor after reading the “100 Amazing Facts About the Negro,” wrote me that it made him feel as if the white race had never accomplished anything. Others said that I claim everybody who has ever done anything as Negro, nevertheless, I had never said, or dreamed of saying, that Homer, or Pericles, or Aeschylus, or Julius Caesar, or Alfred the Great, Shakespeare, Milton, Michael Angelo, Bach, Handel, Wagner, Washington, Lincoln, Edison, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Einstein or thousands of other noted white men were of Negro ancestry; nor did I attribute to Negroes any role of any importance in Europe, itself, from say the sixteenth century onwards. Yet because I mention a few individuals, whom they had all along believed to be of unmixed white strain, I have been called “fantastic” and “credulous!”
And I have been ridiculed not on the result of research, not on examination of the sources which I have given abundantly, but on sheer belief. These scholars did not happen to run across such facts in their reading, in a word, the research I had done was off the beaten track of the college curriculum, therefore, it did not exist.
Perhaps I exaggerate, perhaps I am really being fantastic when I say this of the orthodox scholars, well, I shall give a not uncommon illustration and let the reader judge for himself.
In 1943, Gunnar Myrdal, noted economist of the University of Stockholm, Sweden, aided by 75 experts, working for five years, completed for the Carnegie Corporation at a cost of $209,000, a work on the race problem entitled “An American Dilemma” and published by Harper and Brothers. On page 1393 of this book (1st ed.) I am listed as an example of those who write “pseudo-history, fantastically glorifying the achievements of Negroes.”
On what grounds was this judgment arrived at? On anything I had written? No, I was judged on a non-existent book—a book that no mortal could ever have seen.
Here are the facts: In 1927, I finished a manuscript entitled “This Mongrel World, A Study of Negro-Caucasian Mixing In All Ages and All Countries.” At about that time I was asked to fill out a blank for “Who’s Who in Colored America,” and intending to publish the manuscript soon I listed it as being published. However, circumstances prevented my doing so. Thirteen years later, due to the much greater research I had done on the subject, I changed the title to “Sex and Race.” Parts of the manuscript I used in Volumes One and Two of that work and discarded most of the rest. In short, when “An American Dilemma” was published not even the manuscript of “This Mongrel World” existed. Nevertheless this non-existent manuscript is listed as a published book in Myrdal’s bibliography. What had happened? In reading through my biographical sketch in “Who’s Who in Colored America,” Myrdal, or some of his assistants, saw the title and on that alone condemned me. Not a word was said of any of my published books. They probably didn’t take the trouble to look into any of them.
Now what is the difference between an attitude of this sort and that of any uneducated man, or any bigot, who would similarly condemn Myrdal’s work, or that of any other scientist in such off-hand manner? So far as I am concerned, none whatever.
Furthermore, though I have no philanthropist or foundation, or staff of experts behind me, I go to as great pains as any of the most conscientious of these experts to get my facts straight, checking and re-checking, and travelling hither and yon to see with my own eyes whenever possible what I am writing about; and quoting only from the original sources and from those I have reason to believe are the most reliable. One can do no more. Of course, there will always be errors, but when seventy-six experts, working with unlimited funds as in “An American Dilemma,” make errors surely a lone worker, like myself, might be forgiven a few.
Another reason why some object to the facts as given in my books is that they feel that their own learning is being impeached. If such facts were true, why, they certainly would have known them. One able Negro musician, who had a fine education in England, admitted to me later that when he heard me say for the first time that Beethoven was colored, he was “offended.” Had he not long been acquainted with Beethoven?
In 1930 while I was carrying in the Negro press a series of articles on great Negroes, an Aframerican, studying in Germany, and now a college professor, wrote the Pittsburgh Courier, leading Negro weekly, that my stories were dubious even though I had included Bilal, Dumas, Pushkin, General Dodds, Chevalier de St. George, Henri Diaz, and others who are very plainly mentioned in biographies as being of Negro ancestry. The simple truth is that he didn’t know the first thing of the true ancestry of these individuals but never having heard it, why, that alone made what I said false. As for my statement that the Virgin Mary and Christ were once worshipped as black and that at the present time pilgrimages are made to the shrines of the Black Virgins in France, Spain, and even in Germany, that seemed a veritable Munchausen tale, One Negro columnist, a Catholic, actually resented the idea that the Madonna could have been black. Had he not all his life seen her depicted as white?
Still another reason for their rejecting my researches is that they didn’t want the present knowledge in their brains disturbed. They had been taught that the Negro’s position in history had been that of a slave and it was much more pleasant to go on believing that than to investigate.
Race prejudice is responsible too, in part. There are those who at the merest mention that this or that noted person was, or might have been, of Negro ancestry, at once set their backs up like an angry cat. So racial are such people that when one attributes Negro ancestry even to an ancient Greek or Egyptian it is “social equality”—a lowering of their own personal dignity. One white woman angrily resented the idea that Alexander Dumas, the great novelist, could possibly have been of Negro ancestry.
The classic example of this sort, however, is Mary Preston, a Southern white woman, whose readings on Shakespeare were popular in her day. Miss Preston twisted “Othello” to suit herself. While admitting that Shakespeare did make Othello “black,” that was positively not what Shakespeare meant so far as she was concerned. She said (italics hers): “In studying the play “Othello” I have always imagined its hero a white man. It is true the dramatist paints him black, but this shade does not suit the man. It is a stage decoration which my taste discards;