In all walks of life the Negro is liable to meet some objection to his presence or some discourteous treatment. If an invitation is issued to the public for any occasion, the Negro can never know whether he would be welcomed or not; if he goes he is liable to have his feelings hurt and get into unpleasant altercation; if he stays away, he is blamed for indifference. If he meet a lifelong white friend on the street, he is in a dilemma; if he does not greet the friend he is put down as boorish and impolite; if he does greet the friend he is liable to be flatly snubbed. If by chance he is introduced to a white woman or man, he expects to be ignored on the next meeting, and usually is. White friends may call on him, but he is scarcely expected to call on them, save for strictly business matters. If he gain the affections of a white woman and marry her he may invariably expect that slurs will be thrown on her reputation and on his, and that both his and her race will shun their company. When he dies he cannot be buried beside white corpses. Kelly Miller, himself a full-blooded black (for which the Negroes have expressed their gratitude), refers to the backwardness of the negro in the following terms: To expect the Negroes of Georgia to produce a great general like Napoleon when they are not even allowed to carry arms, or to deride them for not producing scholars like those of the Renaissance when a few years ago they were forbidden the use of letters, verges closely upon the outer rim of absurdity. Do you look for great Negro statesmen in states where black men are not allowed to vote? Above all, for southern white men to berate the Negro for failing to gain the highest rounds of distinction reaches the climax of cruel inconsistency. One is reminded of the barbarous Teutons in _Titus Andronicus_, who, after cutting out the tongue and hacking off the hands of the lovely Lavinia, ghoulishly chided her for not calling for sweet water with which to wash her delicate hands. It is not too much to say that no Negro and no mulatto, in America at least, has ever been fully in the white man's world. But we must recognize that their backwardness is not wholly due to prejudice. A race with an adequate technique can live in the midst of prejudice and even receive some stimulation from it. But the Negro has lost many of the occupations which were particularly his own, and is outclassed in others--not through prejudice but through the faster pace of his competitors. Obviously obstacles which discourage one race may stimulate another. Even the extreme measures in Russia and Roumania against the Jew have not isolated him. He has resources and traditions and technique of his own, and we have even been borrowers from him. C. ISOLATION AND SEGREGATION 1. Segregation as a Process[110]