touched the wretched beggar!" remarked one. Persons ignorant of the
racial problem may regard it as improbable, if not impossible, that men
who could perform acts of ruffianly brutality towards an African should
yet be so sensitive as to be deeply concerned that they had momentarily
distressed a looker-on, whom they hardly knew and had no personal
friendship for, but who was of their own race. Yet, persons who have
practically no knowledge of inter-racial relations know that not merely
is this psychologic attitude possible, but that it is a matter of
universal occurrence.)
Social instinct has never in the past, and does not to-day, except in
a few and exceptional instances, spontaneously tend to cross the limits
of race.
The sooner this truth is recognized as axiomatic by all who attempt
to deal with problems of race, the greater will be the possibility of
dealing with them in a spirit of wisdom.
To blind our eyes to this fact, and then attempt to comprehend or deal
rationally with race-problems, is to act as would a schoolboy who sets
himself to solve an arithmetical puzzle in which he had failed to set
down the leading term. The sooner it is recognized as axiomatic that
the distinctions of race are not imaginary and artificial, but real and
operative; that they form a barrier so potent that the social instincts
and the consciousness of moral obligation continually fail to surmount
them; that the men or the nations which may safely be trusted to act
with justice and humanity within the limits of their own race are yet,
in the majority of cases, wholly incapable of so acting beyond those
limits; that only in the case of exceptional individuals gifted with
those rare powers of sympathetic insight which enable them, beneath
the multitudinous and real differences, mental and physical, which
divide wholly distinct races, to see clearly those far more important
elements of a common humanity which underlie and unite them, is the
instinctive and unconscious extension of social feeling beyond the
limits of race possible; that, for all others, wholly just and humane
action beyond the limits of their own race, can be only attained as the
result of a stern, conscious, unending, mental discipline; and that
perhaps no individual man or woman is at the present day so highly
developed as regards social instinct as to be certain that they can
at all times depend on themselves to act with perfect equity where
inter-racial relations are concerned; that no individual is so highly
developed morally as to be able wholly to dispense with a most careful
intellectual self-examination when dealings with persons of alien race
and colour are entered on; and, finally, that the great moral and
intellectual expansion which humanity has during the ensuing centuries
to undergo, if harmonized human life on the globe is ever to be,
is in the direction of extending the social instincts beyond those
limits of the family, the nation, and the race, to the humanity beyond
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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