The Conservation of RacesDu Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
General
The Conservation of Races
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
African Americans -- Race identity; African Americans -- Social conditions; United States -- Race relations
It is necessary, therefore, in planning our movements, in
guiding our future development, that at times we rise above the
pressing, but smaller questions of separate schools and cars,
wage-discrimination and lynch law, to survey the whole questions
of race in human philosophy and to lay, on a basis of broad
knowledge and careful insight, those large lines of policy and
higher ideals which may form our guiding lines and boundaries in
the practical difficulties of every day. For it is certain that
all human striving must recognize the hard limits of natural
law, and that any striving, no matter how intense and earnest,
which is against the constitution of the world, is vain. The
question, then, which we must seriously consider is this: What
is the real meaning of Race; what has, in the past, been the law
of race development, and what lessons has the past history of
race development to teach the rising Negro people?
When we thus come to inquire into the essential difference
of races we find it hard to come at once to any definite
conclusion. Many criteria of race differences have in the past
been proposed, as color, hair, cranial measurements and
language. And manifestly, in each of these respects, human
beings differ widely. They vary in color, for instance, from the
marble-like pallor of the Scandinavian to the rich, dark brown
of the Zulu, passing by the creamy Slav, the yellow Chinese, the
light brown Sicilian and the brown Egyptian. Men vary, too, in
the texture of hair from the obstinately straight hair of the
Chinese to the obstinately tufted and frizzled hair of the
Bushman. In measurement of heads, again, men vary; from the
broad-headed Tartar to the medium-headed European and the
narrow-headed Hottentot; or, again in language, from the highly-
inflected Roman tongue to the monosyllabic Chinese. All these
physical characteristics are patent enough, and if they agreed
with each other it would be very easy to classify mankind.
Unfortunately for scientists, however, these criteria of race
are most exasperatingly intermingled. Color does not agree with
texture of hair, for many of the dark races have straight hair;
nor does color agree with the breadth of the head, for the
yellow Tartar has a broader head than the German; nor, again,
has the science of language as yet succeeded in clearing up the
relative authority of these various and contradictory criteria.
The final word of science, so far, is that we have at least two,
perhaps three, great families of human beings—the whites and
Negroes, possibly the yellow race. That other races have arisen
from the intermingling of the blood of these two. This broad
division of the world's races which men like Huxley and Raetzel
have introduced as more nearly true than the old five-race
scheme of Blumenbach, is nothing more than an acknowledgment
that, so far as purely physical characteristics are concerned,
the differences between men do not explain all the differences
of their history.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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