Wherein we ask does such an attitude differ from that of any blind believer in revealed religion?
Of course this attitude is hugely amusing. It is one of a piece, too, with the feeling of certain Gentiles when they take up a book on Jewish biography and see for the first time that this or that great pioneer, scientist, or soldier whom they had all along fancied to be non-Jewish was a Jew.
The result of this attitude toward “Negro” history is that the better-known historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, with few exceptions, have been great claimers of Negroid peoples as white. The idea has been to maintain white supremacy. Pick up any national or world history and you’ll find even the Ethiopians, who such early writers as Xenophanes, Aristotle, Herodotus and Strabo, tell us were black and wooly-haired, that is, the type now called Negro, are white. They still say the Ethiopians are white though they are uniformly blacker and more wooly-haired than the American Negroes.
Whenever, too, Negroes are mentioned as having appeared anywhere, whether in prehistoric America, the Caucasus, or Albania, they are invariably spoken of as “slaves.” For instance, Ignatius Donnelly in trying to prove that the so-called New World was known to the people of the Old reproduces from the ancient Mexican monuments certain portraits of Negroes which he calls “idols.”2 But in the same breath he says they were “slaves” who “were brought to America at a very remote epoch.” (Please note the contradiction: “slaves” who were “idols!”) His reason for saying they were slaves is that “Negroes have never been a sea-going race,” for which statement he hasn’t a shred of evidence. Of course, the “slave” had to be brought in to square with white imperialism and the exploitation of the darker peoples even though what he mentions occurred in prehistoric times. The Negro must always be marked down so that his labor can be had in the cheapest market.
The motive for this twisting of history is that white imperialism must be shown a sbeing of old, aristocratic ancestry. This imperialism was built upon the backs of the darker races. A noted example was the British empire, of whose 500,000,000 people, eighty percent are colored. Now some of these colored people as the Ethiopians, Egyptians, East Indians, and Moors were the originators of Western civilization; they were highly civilized when the Europeans were savages3—a fact that cannot be denied as long as the works of Julius Caesar and Tacitus exist. But it would never do to show that the lord and master once had very humble beginnings so it must be shown that the originators of civilization were white—that the white has always been on top. Therefore, for the purposes of adding lustre to white imperialism, the Ethiopians, Egyptians and the others are called “white” but for the purposes of profit they are treated as colored. Thus the white imperialist eats his cake and has it too.
It is a blow to the pride of certain white Americans, Englishmen, and Germans to hear it said that peoples and individuals they had all along fondly believed to be “pure” white were not so. Because I said on the testimony of white people who knew Beethoven, as well as on reports of his ancestry by German scholars, that he showed evidence of Negro strain, I have received letters as cross as if I had attacked the writers themselves.
Any talk of Negro progress angers many. If the blacks advance who will they have to be better than? There will go their splendid isolation of fancied superiority. Even worse, they already see themselves losing out, a state of mind expressed by Bacon when he said, “Men of noble birth are noted to be envious towards new men when they arise for the distance between them is altered and it is like a deceit of the eye that when others come on they think themselves go back.”
So thorough has been the penetration of white imperialist propaganda that only a small percentage of the white or the colored in any part of Western civilization today have any idea that any other than white people had a hand in the origin of civilization. Although I had been an omnivorous reader from my earliest years I was well past twenty before it began to dawn upon me that the darker peoples could have had a part in it. Even now I can recall my astonishment when this occurred to me.
Even as the white manufacturers have bleached out our salt, sugar, flour, so the white historian has bleached out world history. The dark or mineral portion has been rejected. Of course this process has produced a product beautifully pleasing to the eyes of those who have been psychologized to admire it, but which, nevertheless, is constipative and harmful to the mental digestion.
But as there are those who, realizing the value of the minerals that have been rejected from our foods, have placed them in again, thereby increasing the health value, as say how bran has been restored to the bleached, starved-out white bread, so in like manner I have attempted to gather up the Negro, or dark, rejected portion of history in the hope that some day they will be restored to world history, thereby permitting a less clogging effect on the mind.
Such being my purpose I do not ever claim that I am writing world or national history. Call it the bran of history if you will. As for those who will regard this “bran” as proving that the white race has never accomplished anything and that the Negro did everything. I can do nothing about it.
I can say, in addition, that I dislike too much the whitening of history; I have too great a loathing for racial propaganda, even knowingly to indulge in it. Moreover, the facts I have given have been culled nearly always from white writers, some of them very ancient, who related facts as they saw them, and who did not worship at the shrine of white imperialism, or did not think of the effect of what they said would have in later years.
To get those little known facts I have travelled tens of thousands of miles in many lands; consulted books and printed matter so vast in number that were I to try to say how many I would sound like a Munchausen; visited the leading museums of many of the civilized lands, and engaged in research in their libraries and ever going to great pains to get my facts as humanly correct as possible. In short, I felt I have looked into books and dug up buried knowledge that many college professors or doctors of philosophy do not know exist, because just as there is a life in the deeper depths of the ocean of which the average fisherman knows nothing so there are depths in the ocean of research of which some of the most learned have never dreamed. For instance, it is estimated that in the National Library of France alone there are 8,000,000 books and pieces of printed matter. How much does the most educated man now alive know of the totality of knowledge in these books? Very, very little. One is ever learning. Truly, as Sir Isaac Newton once said as he looked out on the ocean that there he was picking up pebbles on the beach as it were while the vast ocean of unexplored knowledge lay before him.
Those who will forget their orthodoxy for a while and read my books might not find them so fantastic after all. And even should they reject them they might still profit to the extent of knowing the arguments on the other side and thus be able to refute them, not by denunciation, but in a manner more compatible with common sense.
I hasten to add that I am not accusing all the leading historians of catering to white imperialism. Some as H. G. Wells, Hendrik Van Loon, and Arnold J. Toynbee, have made striking utterances against race prejudice. I believe that these latter accepted the popular white view of history without thinking that there was another side. As the New World was not on the charts of the scholars prior to Columbus so the achievements of the Negro and Negroid peoples were not on theirs.
Furthermore, there are white writers as Volney, Godfrey Higgins, Gerald Massey, Henry M .Stanley, David Livingstone, and Frobenius, greatest of all the Africanologists, who gave a perspective of Negro history that is increasingly found to be the truth. Why, we ask, were the works of these men by-passed by Wells and Toynbee? Were what they said of the Negro in history too fantastic to be considered?
For instance, Toynbee, who is one of the most unprejudiced of historians, attributes a civilization even to the Polynesian but denies any to the Negro. He says, “When we classify Mankind by color, the only one of the primary