The crisis : $b A record of the darker races, Vol. I, No. 3, January 1911Various
History
The crisis : $b A record of the darker races, Vol. I, No. 3, January 1911
Various
African Americans -- Periodicals
The ante-bellum Southern lady never had much to say for herself and was
in short not “the Gothic saint in her niche” that tradition pictures,
but a kindly little creature surrounded by “Orientalism” and little
better off, so far as opportunities for development went, than any lady
of the harem.
Mrs. Putnam quotes Miss Martineau, who traveled extensively through the
slave States, to show how the system limited the white women and made
them “the greatest slaves on the plantation.” Patience was the supreme
virtue of the ante-bellum lady—they made the best of a bad state of
affairs. Logic she had little or none, and her up-bringing tended to
make her a delightful girl but a middle-aged woman of only moderate
attractions. And while she was often very kind to her slaves her
sensibilities seemed in some measure blunted by perpetual sight of
suffering and injustice.
When the war ended the ex-mistresses of slaves showed how good was the
material that had been buried under the “Orientalism” of the plantation.
RACE PREJUDICE IN THE ORIENT.
Race Prejudice: An address by Melville E. Stone to the Quill Club, New
York City.
The best review of this remarkable little pamphlet will be a few
extracts from its pages:
What is to be the outcome? What does all this mean for the future of the
world? Let us view the problem from the political, the commercial and
the moral aspects. How long will the 6,000 soldiers we have in the
Philippines be able to keep our flag afloat among 8,000,000 of natives?
How long will the 75,000 English soldiers in India be able to maintain
British sovereignty over 300,000,000 of Asians? Believe me, these are
not idle questions. They are up to us for an answer, whether we will or
no, and upon our ability to make answer will depend the future of what
we are pleased to call our Western civilization. I would not be an
alarmist, and yet I would have you feel that Macauley’s suggestion of
the New Zealander on a broken arch of London Bridge, sketching the ruins
of St. Paul, has come to be more than an extravagant figure of speech.
And I am convinced that there is real danger awaiting us unless we mend
our ways. It is not the Asian who needs educating; it is the European. I
am not worrying half so much about the heathen in his blindness as I am
about the Christian in his blindness. Asia is awake and preparing for
the coming struggle. And we are doing very much to force the issue and
to prepare her for the contest. For a century we have been sending at
enormous cost our missionaries to all parts of the hemisphere to
civilize. There may be doubt as to the amount of proselyting we have
been able to accomplish; there can be no possible doubt of the work we
have done to strengthen the Asian people politically and commercially.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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