“The Black Race has not helped to create any civilization while the Polynesian White Race has helped to create one civilization, the Brown Race two, the Yellow Race three, the Red Race and the Nordic Whit Race four apiece, the Alpine White Race nine, and the Mediterranean White Race ten.”4
What is the Polynesian White Race? There is no such people. The Polynesians, prior to the migration of white people to their islands, were chiefly of mixed Negro and Mongolian strain, with probably a slight admixture of white strain from Asiatic Russia. The Paris Museum of Ethnology in the Jardin des Plantes has what is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive collection of casts of Polynesian types from nearly all the islands and they are shown to be what would be loosely called Negroes in the United States. Of course, much white “blood” has been mixed in with the South Sea islander since these casts were made over a century ago. Gobineau calls the Polynesians black and he was right at the time he wrote.
Let me express here once again my theory of so-called race. It is this: There is a single human race, which by imperceptible degrees shades from the blond of the Scandinavian to the blackness of the Senegambian or the Solomon Islander with the Sicilian or the Maltese somewhere in the centre. Some peoples as the Portuguese are nearer to the blond, while others as those of Mauretania or Southern India are nearer to the black, therefore, when I see anywhere, no matter where, an individual whose appearance is Negroid, that it, if his facial contour, his lips, nose, hair, present what a lifetime of observation has taught me are signs of Negro inheritance, I say that that person had a Negro ancestor near or distant according to the Negroid signs he presents. One’s ancestry, I know, does not come out of the air, but is a reality of realities.
Similarly, if I see anywhere an individual whose appearance is Caucasian, that is, his lips, nose, hair, etc., present what a lifetime of observation has taught me are signs of “unmixed” Caucasian inheritance, I set that person down as white. If it is logical to speak of Caucasian strain among Negroes it is just as logical to speak of Negro strain among Caucasians. In this latter respect the Nazi anthropologists are at least right.
For instance, I once attended a reception given to an American Negro publisher and his wife in London. The latter was very fair and in her evening gown looked whiter in skin and more regular in profile than some of the Englishwomen present. If I attributed Negro ancestry to the publisher’s wife, whose mother was undoubtedly colored, what should I have said of these Englishwomen who were more colored than she is in appearance?
One may sometimes find Negro ancestry where one least expects it. Take Colette, France’s leading woman writer. She is blonde and to all appearances a European. Only a very experienced eye would discover signs of a strain not “pure” Nordic in her. Yet she had a Negro ancestor. When I said that in 1930, I was again charged with claiming all noted white persons as Negroes. But who said it first? Colette, herself.5 The European, unlike the American, is not inclined to hide his Negro strain, if any. Also J. Larnac in his biography of her says that she inherited some Negro strain from her grandfather (“tenant de son grandpère un peu de sang coloré”). Her mother, “Madame Colette,” he says, “is the daughter of Sophie Celeste Chatenay and a colored man with violet fingernails, who manufactured chocolates in Belgium, Henri Marie Landay.”5a If Colette, who is so blonde, has a Negro strain, I fail to see where the same would be impossible in the case of Beethoven, who did show Negro ancestry.
Again, there are those dear souls who will say that I exaggerate when I call these apparently white persons “Negroes.” Would such kindly address themselves to the United State Census Bureau which decrees that if one has a known Negro ancestor, he is a Negro. The wife of the Negro editor mentioned above, was listed as a Negro. And the unwritten law is that if one is known to be of such ancestry, however distant, he is at once marked down. As long as this “one drop” theory remains refutation of alleged Negro inferiority must follow the arbitrary lines set by the Bureau of the Census.
However, no one can possibly know what so-called racial elements enter into his make-up. O. A. Wall estimated that the total number of one’s ancestors since the time of Christ was around 144 quadrillions, and said that if one did not count the intermarriage of relatives the figure would be 288,230,376,151,711,742.6 Thus since life goes back at least a million years the ancestors of any individual would be as many as the sands of the sea or the stars of the firmament.
Talk of a pure race after that!
I, furthermore, visualize changes in human types as I visualize changes in cosmography, that is, as land that was once at the bottom of the sea now rears lofty peaks among the Alps and the Himalayas and vice versa; and as lands that were once tropical are now frigid, all due to the eternal change in Nature, so peoples who were once black are now white, and the opposite. Or to use a symbol: As parts of the earth are white or black or intermediate tints depending on whether such parts are facing, or are behind, or are sideways to the sun, so, in cosmic time it is with the coloring of the human race.
That humanity is one, that the earliest human beings were of a single color, is evident to even the Australian Bushman, supposedly the lowest in intelligence on earth. Dr. Berkeley Hill says they believe “that a white man is only one of themselves re-born. ‘Tumble-down black fellow, jump up white fellow’, is the common phrase among them “to express this belief,” he says.
There are two principal sides to every question both of which when mixed together go to form the truth as oxygen and hydrogen to form water. My aim is to glean from both sides, using experience and an open mind as my guide. Because one is definitely opposed to our theory, he is not necessarily wrong, and because one favors us, neither does that make him right.
Everything that is, is truth by sheer force of its existence. Therefore by truth I mean that principle, which, at every moment, upholds the right of each individual, regardless of whoever or whatever he may be, to equality of dignity and opportunity, in short, equal justice.
As regards the term, Nature, I use it in no anthropomorphic sense. I do not think of it as a deity but as meaning the totality of all things—that unknown Force which is forever being unfolded, and within which lies the destiny of all things. The term, Nature, is inadequate of course, but since it is impossible to find a correct name that seems to me as good as any other.
I have also tried to get away from the crass materialism of Western civilization, which because of its eagerness to get hold of material things is forever rending itself and bringing untold misery on itself and all mankind. Three appallingly catastrophic wars in a quarter of a century!
Happily, there is a certain trend in the West today towards the animism of the East and of Africa, to explore into and to make one’s self a part of the great inner forces of Nature. For the really cultured Western thinker of today, a bit of board is no longer just board but a segment of the universe seething with the life of the atom; trees are no longer just trees but breathing organisms, marvellous with their own psychology, their own loves and aversions; bees, insects, spiders, animalculae are discovered to have histories almost as intricate and hardly less interesting than those of man; cats, dogs, apes, elephants are discovered to have intelligence which has been cut out of the same cloth, so to speak, as man’s. Though its reach is far lower, it operates essentially the same, all intelligence, human and animal, being but a part of the Great Whole.
Finally, as regards human beings, we are getting farther and farther away from the old “science” of physiognomy, and are appraising individuals, not on their looks, but on their acts. We are learning that to gauge intelligence by skull measurement, size of brain, skin color and hair are the sheerest infantilism, no matter how high the reputation of the scientist who advances such theories.
Let not those who think they are up be jealous of those who have been down and are rising. Let them rather rejoice that the human race, of which we are all part, is advancing. Let the thrill of feeling superior come not as the result of looking down on others but in seeing them rise, and in knowing that we are in a position to help them to do so.
To love one’s fellow-man is the beginning of all true wisdom and the end of war, the greatest of all insanities.
In the better days that