1 Studies in Shakespeare, p. 71. 1869. Apropos of this a noted psychoanalyst once objected to my saying during a discussion period that when Shakespeare said, “Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies eyes,” he actually meant black men. No, he said, there were no Negroes in England in Shakespeare’s time, and he was positive about, it. I informed him that there was not only Negro slavery in England at the time but that G. B. Harrison, an Elizabethan authority, thinks that Shakespeare, himself, had a Negro sweetheart. (For sources see Sex and Race, Vol. 1, p. 201, 1941, and Vol. II, p. 400.)
2 Donnelly, I. Atlantis, pp. 174-5. 1882.
3 Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon say, “It is asserted vociferously in certain quarters that the Nordic ‘race’ is gifted above all others with initiative and originality and that the great advances in civilization have been due to Nordic genius.
“What are the facts? The fundamental discoveries on which civilization is built are the art of writing, agriculture, the wheel and building in stone. All these appear to have originated in the Near East, among peoples who by no stretch of the imagination could be called Nordic or presumed to have but the faintest admixture of Nordic or proto-Nordic genes.” (We, Europeans, p. 94, 1935).
4 Toynbee, A. J. A Study of History, Vol. I, p. 234. 1934.
5 La Maison de Claudine, p. 99. 1922.
5a Colette, pp. 11, 17, 18. 1927. See also Sex and Race, Vol. I, p. 240. 1941
6 Sex and Sex Worship, pp. 304-06. 1922. I do not see, however, where the intermarriage of relatives would affect the computation of one’s ancestors except in the cases of those who are the product of incest, and that only in the case of where brother weds sister. Even if a man cohabited with his mother and had children by her as the ancient Britons used to do (at least that is what I infer from Caesar when he said that fathers and sons had the same wives), it seems to me something else would enter into the ancestry of the child. And there is no doubt of it when first cousin marries first cousin. The uncle or the aunt of the latter would have wed someone not related to the family, thus creating new combinations of genes. One has, it is true, only eight great-grandparents but we must not forget that behind each one of these stood enough millions of ancestors probably to go around the world several times. Truly, as Einstein has said, the number of one’s ancestors is “astronomical.”
Caesar’s statement on incest among the ancient Britons reads, “Groups of ten or twelve men have wives together in common and particularly brothers along with brothers and fathers with sons.” (Gallic Wars, Bk. V. 14.)
THE WHY AND WHEREFORE OF VOLUME THREE OF SEX AND RACE
The question of why white and black do mate in spite of all opposition, or to be more precise, why certain white people should mate with black people, has intrigued me as far back as I can remember.
I grew up in a part of the world where there was not one color line, but several, none of which, however, was anything as near as rigid, perhaps, I had better say as violent, as in the United States.
At the very top of the social ladder were the European-born whites, principally British. There were no others like them in that island-world. Oh, felt the native white and near-whites, if we were only like them, born in England! The fact that such or such was born in England invested him with an aura little short of royalty. Even the black man who had been to England, if only as a sailor, was regarded as is a Mohammedan who has been to Mecca.
Next to the European were the native-born whites, some of whom were as fair as Europeans, but who, I later discovered, to my astonishment, had sometimes a colored grandmother still living. The European whites, because of the manner in which they were catered to by the native whites naturally looked down upon the latter, even when the native white was as fair. There was, for instance, the difference of accent. English accent, like English birth, also came first. Among my friends was a tall and very handsome native white man—I believe unmixed—golden-haired and blonde as any North European; one day when I said to an Englishman that this friend of mine was just as white as he, he replied with a touch of scorn, “Yes, until you hear him talk.”
As regards the mixed population, island society was, on the whole, graded, according to the degree of pigment in the skin, which meant that the unmixed black was, except in rare instances, at the foot of the ladder.
Even a slightly lesser degree of pigment constituted some touch of “nobility.” Once when a woman, rather dark, called another woman slightly fairer than herself by her first name, instead of “Mrs.” the latter placed her hand beside that of the darker woman and said indignantly, “How dare you? Look? Me and you not the same color.”
Such being the pride of race and color, I was extraordinarily struck by one thing, and that is, how some of the European whites, “the lords of creation,” sought out the unmixed black woman, a type that most of the mulattoes would not touch. Sometimes one would run across the Europeans, mostly English and German, cohabiting with the black women in the fields, or in their huts, soiled and dirty as they were. In fact, some of the older mulatto families, who, for no valid reason considered themselves superior to both the European whites and the blacks, regarded this cohabitation as just another proof of the supposed inferiority of both groups. Why, I kept asking myself, this glaring social contradiction.
In one district settled principally by Germans, I would see some of these well-fed, rosy-cheeked white men consorting with the coal-black women and having children by them. The mulatto women seemed to have had very little attraction for them. There was even an occasional marriage of a European to a black woman. I recall the case of a Scotch doctor, the leading social figure in one town, who had a Barbadian wife of ebony blackness.
The same was in a measure true of some of the European white women. Some of them had black husbands to whom they had been married while the husbands were studying in Europe. Marriages between the native white women and the light mulatto and quadroon men were not rare; but those between the native white women, as well as the light mulatto women, with black men were very much so.
Later, I lived in a garrison town where certain of the wives of the white non-commissioned officers went to hotels with the black soldiers of the garrison, all of which, as I said, puzzled me immensely. Why, I wanted to know, had these people who had been placed on a pedestal, should get off it, of their own free will, to associate with a people considered so “low” as the blacks.
Had I seen the blacks trying to reach the white men and women I could have understood it; but the blacks, on the whole, did not seem anxious to mate even with the mulatto women. Some black men told me that the mere thought of going with a white woman gave them a creepy feeling.
When I came to the United States my astonishment was, if anything, greater. There where the color-line was much stronger and where it was not so much the white man, as the white woman, who was put on a pedestal, I found some of the “deified” creatures mixing with coal-black men, whom, they sometimes preferred to mulattoes. Even in the South, where the very air seemed to exude the “sanctity” of the white woman, I saw white women and black men, meeting “under cover.” What’s more, when I read American history, I found that this sort of thing had gone on even when the black man was a slave.
Later, when I went to Europe, my astonishment continued, though it took a different turn. While there was no color prejudice anywhere on the Continent—there was some in England, but nothing like that of the United States—I wondered why should certain white men and women, some of whom had had little or no contact with black people, showed almost no visible aversion to them. I recall once going to a very fine French restaurant with an unmixed African, who was studying law in London, and the proprietor, who happened to be a good friend of mine, seated the African on a side-seat next to a white girl of dazzling appearance, and