The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the UnbornSmith, William Benjamin
History
The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn
Smith, William Benjamin
African Americans
From the convergence of all such testimony, which may be multiplied
indefinitely, there seems no escape whatever. We must concede, with
Lombroso: "It is impossible to contemplate these facts without
admitting that marriages between some human races are much less fertile
and happy than between others;" and especially unfortunate are those
between such extremes as Whites and Negroes. When such anthropologists
as Waitz, Serres, Deschamps, Bodichon, anticipate a millennium from
universal miscegenation, it is only sentimentalism or else
forgetfulness of the distinction drawn so properly by Topinard
(Eléments d'Anthropologie générale, 1885) between the intermingling of
nearly related and of distantly related races. In the first case the
result is, in general, certainly good; in the latter, it is quite as
certainly bad.
But let us now, merely for the moment and for the sake of argument,
admit that both our premises are in doubt; that, perhaps, after all the
Negro is not inferior organically--mentally, morally, or physically--to
the Caucasian, and that interfertility might, perhaps, work no
deterioration; would the case be essentially altered? Assuredly not.
For even then the most extreme negrophilist must still admit that there
is, at least, a reasonable doubt; even if the Negro be not proved
inferior, yet he is certainly not proved equal, and there is a large
body of at least apparent evidence against him; even if it be not
certain that miscegenation would work deterioration, it is at least
very possible and seemingly probable. Who, then, would have the
foolhardihood to make this experiment of race amalgamation--an
experiment which, once made, is made forever; whose consequences could
never be undone--when there is at least and at the very lowest an
undeniable possibility, not to say certainty, that those consequences
would be disastrous in the extreme? Can we imagine a more wanton folly?
Would such an experiment beseem any other place so well as the
madhouse?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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