"Oh, but, you say, President Phillips means for us to associate only
with those who are worthy, those who have ’risen.’ Even that would be
fatal, Mr. President. Beyond the truth already stated that
considerations of merit will be forgotten and brushed aside if the
social racial barrier is broken down at any point, and that social
intermingling inevitably leads to intermarriage, there is a greater
fact, a deeper truth, underlying this question. That fact, that truth,
is that in estimating the result of mixing racial bloods not the man
only and his personal accomplishments or individual culture must be
considered, but his heredity, his race peculiarities and proclivities,
every element that has gone into his blood.
"An occasional isolated negro may have broken the shackles of ignorance,
measurably and admirably brought under control the half-savage passions
of his nature, acquired palpable elegances of person and manner, and
taken on largely the indefinable graces of culture: yet beneath all this
creditable but thin veneer of civilization there slumber in his blood
the primitive passions and propensities of his immediate ancestors,
which are transmitted through him as latent forces of evil to burst out
in his children and grandchildren in answer to the call of the wild. A
man is not made in one generation or two. Every man gets the few ruling
passions of his life from the numberless endowments of a hundred
progenitors, and these few show out, while scores of others run so deep
in his blood that they never crop out in his deeds but pass quietly on
as static forces of good or evil to his children and their children
before rising to the surface as dynamics in life and character.
"A Northern gentlewoman in a recent magazine article, defending her
willingness to offer social courtesies to a prominent negro, speaks of
him as one ’of whom an exquisite woman once said he has the soul of a
Christian, the heart of a gentleman, and the eyes of the jungle.’ That
illustrates the idea perfectly, Mr. President,—_the eyes of the jungle_.
Despite the fact that it is easier to breed up physical than
temperamental qualities in man or beast, easier to breed out physical
than mental or moral or spiritual blood-traits, this negro, with all his
culture, with a large mixture of white blood in his veins, has yet in
his very face that sinister mark—the eyes of the jungle: and in his
blood who shall say what jungle passions, predilections and impulses,
nobly and hardly held in check, that hark back to the African wilds from
which they are so lately transplanted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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