[31] We must, of course, be understood to speak generally.
There are to be found, among the lowest class of our
Half-castes, women of the most spotless sexual integrity
and of irreproachable sexual pride. But one is undoubtedly
justified in stating, that, generally speaking, the
Half-caste is less sexually self-respecting than the
white woman, or even than the black woman is till she has
been totally severed from her own social surroundings and
therefore practically reduced to much the same condition
as the Half-caste. In her native state the Bantu woman is
in many respects in a higher sexual position than large
numbers of civilized females. Of the price paid for her at
her marriage she receives nothing, it passes to her family.
She not only supports herself by her own labour, but is
the mainstay of the society in which she exists, largely
feeding and clothing it by her exertions. Her position is
probably much farther from that of the female who lives
idly and parasitically on society through the sale of her
sex functions than is that of most European women, married
or single.
That almighty "we," the consciousness of which lies at the base of all
organic virtue, and which in the perfect socialized man so extends the
narrow consciousness of the little individual "I," that it inwraps
at last not only all human races, but even broadens itself out till
it covers the creatures not yet human, on the good old earth--this
consciousness of unity with the living world about it, in the
Half-caste often of necessity narrows itself, till nothing is left but
an awfully isolated "I."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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