Even the negrophobia is not likely to remain eternally at its present
barbarous pitch. Mr. William Archer, who has won a new fame as student
of that black problem, which is America's nemesis for her ancient
slave-raiding, and who favours the creation of a Black State as one of
the United States, observes: "It is noteworthy that neither David
Quixano nor anyone else in the play makes the slightest reference to
that inconvenient element in the crucible of God--the negro." This is an
oversight of Mr. Archer's, for Baron Revendal defends the Jew-baiting of
Russia by asking of an American: "Don't you lynch and roast your
niggers?" And David Quixano expressly throws both "black and yellow"
into the crucible. No doubt there is an instinctive antipathy which
tends to keep the white man free from black blood, though this antipathy
having been overcome by a large minority in all the many periods and all
the many countries of their contiguity, it is equally certain that there
are at work forces of attraction as well as of repulsion, and that even
upon the negro the "Melting Pot" of America will not fail to act in a
measure as it has acted on the Red Indian, who has found it almost as
facile to mate with his white neighbours as with his black. Indeed, it
is as much social prejudice as racial antipathy that to-day divides
black and white in the New World; and Sir Sydney Olivier has recorded
that in Jamaica the white is far more on his guard and his dignity
against the half-white than against the all-black, while in Guiana,
according to Sir Harry Johnston in his great work "The Negro in the New
World," it is the half-white that, in his turn, despises the black and
succeeds in marrying still further whitewards. It might have been
thought that the dark-white races on the northern shore of the
Mediterranean--the Spaniards, Sicilians, &c.--who have already been
crossed with the sons of Ham from its southern shore, would, among the
American immigrants, be the natural links towards the fusion of white
and black, but a similar instinct of pride and peril seems to hold them
back. But whether the antipathy in America be a race instinct or a
social prejudice, the accusations against the black are largely
panic-born myths, for the alleged repulsive smell of the negro is
consistent with being shaved by him, and the immorality of the negress
is consistent with her control of the nurseries of the South. The devil
is not so black nor the black so devilish as he is painted. This is not
to deny that the prognathous face is an ugly and undesirable type of
countenance or that it connotes a lower average of intellect and ethics,
or that white and black are as yet too far apart for profitable fusion.
Melanophobia, or fear of the black, may be pragmatically as valuable a
racial defence for the white as the counter-instinct of philoleucosis,
or love of the white, is a force of racial uplifting for the black. But
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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