In Europe there are few noblemen who do not feel hurt if mistaken for a commoner; and few commoners in Europe or America who would not be pleased if mistaken for a lord. Again, there are few mistresses in a household who would not feel insulted if mistaken for the maid—a reason why many prefer Negro maids—and few maids who would not be pleased if taken for the mistress.
Similarly in the United States few white persons would not be incensed if taken for a Negro. In Virginia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Georgia, and all those states where centuries of race-mixing give color to the allegation, to question a white man’s color is like questioning a woman’s chastity. In the first three states and in Oklahoma, it is a libel, according to the Supreme Court of these states, to call one presumably white, a Negro, as in Nazi Germany it was a gross libel to call an “Aryan” a Jew. In 1929, Professor Fuenfkircker of the University of Budapest sued editors of the Budapest “Who’s Who” for listing him as a Jew, and the judge in awarding him the verdict, ordered confiiscated 6,700 copies of the book.
Furthermore, in Europe, the one who works hard is said to toil “like a peasant”; in America, “like a nigger.” The Negro who has a good position will boast that he has “a white man’s job,” quite mindless of the fact that the wages of most white men doing the same kind of work is higher than his and that the United States with its highest paid workers contains but a sixth of the white race.
The result of all this is to create a powerful bias in the mind of the female, white or black, in favor of the white man. Of course, we’re speaking only of present conditions and not of slavery days when white prestige among Negroes was much higher than now.
To pursue the comparison: As in Europe certain commoners wish to enter lordly society, and those in that group are doing all they can to bar them because they believe them inferior; as certain rich in the United States are doing their best to enter aristocratic American circles, as say buying boxes in the Golden Horse Shoe, and getting into certain clubs, and those in that circle are fighting to keep them out because they deem them inferior; even so are the more aspiring Negroes trying to get certain advantages from a dominant group, incidentally white, and that group is doing its best to bar them, because it believes them inferior. It is in this sense that Ward‘s first law of racial intermixture is true—a law, which, in its final sense is, as was said, an economic one. In short, it is but a matter of human beings, regardless of so-called race, shunning what they have been taught to consider disadvantageous, and seeking that which they are taught to consider advantageous.
RACE-MIXING IN AFRICA
XII. The Rev. George Grenfell, who had a Negro wife. (See Sex and Race, Vol. I Chap. 14).
In the above analysis, however, it is seen that false values can be set above real ones; that a diseased and inferior white man, provided he belongs to a “good” family may, in Europe, be set above a healthy and intelligent white man who comes from a humble one; that, in America, a diseased social parasite, who, perhaps never did a useful thing in his life may have advantages that a healthy working-man may not; and that the most vicious ex-criminal, provided he has a white skin, will be permitted advantages as entrance to certain hotels, parks, libraries, bathing beaches, trade unions, railway cars, from which the most intelligent and worthy citizen would be barred if he had a “colored” skin.
A social value is not necessarily a biological one. Values created by man may be in direct opposition to natural ones—values such as are conducive to the health and happiness of the human race. The deduction, therefore, is that there is no real difference between a woman, incidentally white, who surrenders herself to a white man she has been taught to believe is of a higher social order; and that of a woman, incidentally colored, who surrenders herself to a man of a group she has been taught to believe superior. Both are identical cases of love dazzled by economic advantage. As Dr. Jacobus X says, “The love of the Negro woman for the white man, though it is flattering to her pride, is rather an affection of the head than of the heart.”5
A large number of Christianized Negro women would prefer a white man as husband or lover, especially the former. This will be strongly denied in the United States, but it is true of the West Indies and South America where weakness of the color bar makes such marriages possible.
Hannibal Thomas, a Negro who served in the Civil War, tells how the Negro women, who had all along been going with white Southerners, flocked to the camps of the Union soldiery for infamous riot with white Northerners.6
Will one say that there is any fundamental difference between the colored woman south of the Rio Grande, and the one north of it; indeed, that there is any well-defined psychic difference between women of the different varieties of the human race? The colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady, no matter what their color are forever sisters under the skin. The sole difference I have been able to discover between white American women and colored ones, for example, is that the latter usually have an inferiority complex, while the former have a superiority complex.
As was said, the majority of Negro women, whenever their group comes into competitive contact with the whites, consciously and unconsciously, prefer a white man, because of the better advantages to be gained for themselves and their offspring, that is, it is a matter of protective coloration as among the so-called lower animals.
A large number of colored women, and the number is increasing rapidly, believe that in order for their children to be of any consequence, they must be light-skinned and flossy-haired. At any rate, they will find it easier to love them if they are. That is to say, if they had their choice they would have preferred the child’s father to be white or near-white.
I once heard a full-blood Negro preacher tell an outdoor audience composed almost wholly of his own color, “Any time a woman of your color have a child for you she sho’ does love you.” The crowd applauded.
A black man of social standing rarely, if ever, marries a woman of his own complexion. In the West Indies one who does so would be charged with having done nothing to elevate his race. The slogan there is: Raise the color. In New York I once heard a prominent colored woman blame the black West Indians there for continuing to have so many black children.
The bias of the Aframerican woman is decidedly toward having light-colored children with straight hair. Negro hair is quite popularly described as “bad” hair, and is disappearing, at least to outward appearance, under a flood of anti-kink preparations. Black children, in orphan asylums, stand a better chance of adoption by white women than by colored women. The latter select the lightest babies, which they will wheel down the street with great pride.
It is important to note, however, that had these women been reared in Africa, their selection would have been just the reverse; it would have been progressively toward black, that being the color of the chiefs.
Shooter wrote of the black of Natal, South Africa, in 1857, when they had much less contact with the whites than now. “Dark complexions as being most common are naturally held in high esteem. To be told that he is light-colored or like a white man would be deemed a poor compliment to a Kafir.”7 Certain ethnologists class the Ethiopians as white, that also would be considered no compliment. Indeed, I knew Ethiopians who would be as highly insulted if called a natch, or white man, as there are white Southerners who would be if called a “nigger.”
Henry M. Stanley, the famous explorer, said that he found at the court of the noted King Mtesa