Perhaps it may not be out of place just here for the writer to disclose
what he considers, from close observation, to be the attitude of the
Negroes on the question of the intermarriage of the races. They do not
hold with that group of writers who contend that the Negro is
inherently inferior to the whites and that a mixture of the blood of the
races produces an essentially inferior being. Dumas, holding his own
among the French; Browning and S. Coleridge-Taylor among the English,
and Douglass, among the Americans, to their minds belie that assertion.
Nor yet do they hold that the races must needs depend upon this infusion
for its greatness. The unmixed Toussaint L'Ouverture, Paul Laurence
Dunbar and J. C. Price speak up for the innate powers of the race.
Accepting the race as it came to them from slavery, during which
mulattoism was forced upon it, the Negroes have gone on developing race
pride and visiting their supreme disfavor upon all who signify inability
to find thorough contentment within the race. The marriage of Frederick
Douglass to a white woman created a great gulf between himself and his
people, and it is said that so great was the alienation that Mr.
Douglass was never afterwards the orator that he had been. The delicate
network of wires over which the inner soul conveys itself to the hearts
of its hearers was totally disarranged by that marriage.
PRIDE OF RACE.
It was this feeling of race pride which the Negroes have and thoroughly
understand, that Mr. Dixon was picturing in that Northern statesman who
would not give his daughter in marriage to a Negro suitor who was his
political ally. This pride of race Mr. Dixon confounds with the
prejudice which he would glorify. How utterly absurd it is to infer that
it is inconsistent in a father to apply a totally different test to a
man aspiring to be his son-in-law to that applied to a man asking for
political rights! The rejection of a man because he lacks generations of
approved blood behind him is classed by Mr. Dixon as race
discrimination, whereas such rejections are daily made for similar
reasons within all civilized races.
BACKWARD AFRICA.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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