[The ideas expressed in the title of this chapter were formulated as early as 1915 when I was in the unique position of being the black leader and lecturer of a white lecture forum, organized by white liberals, radicals and others at the old Lenox Casino, at 116th St. & Lenox Ave., New York City. What white people in general thought of the value of my services at this forum can be read in a letter written by a white southerner and appearing in the New York Globe of December 15, 1920. After the closing of this lecture forum the same explanation of the racial significance of the whole process of the war was expressed in other lectures given to white people at a lecture forum which I maintained in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. I make these explanations here because I value somewhat the point of priority in the face of Mr. Lothrop Stoddard’s remarkable book, “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy” and the sweeping tide of racial consciousness which found expression subsequently in those Negro newspapers and magazines which have been called radical.] _The White War and the Colored World_ The newspapers which we read every day inform us that the world is at war. Searching the pages of the statisticians, we find that the world is made up of 17 hundred million people of which 12 hundred million are colored—black and brown and yellow. This vast majority is at peace and remains at peace until the white minority determines otherwise. The war in Europe is a war of the white race wherein the stakes of conflict are the titles to possession of the lands and destinies of this colored majority in Asia, Africa and the islands of the sea. There can be no doubt that the white race as it exists today, is the superior race of the world. And it is superior, not because it has better manners more religion or a higher culture; these things are metaphysical and subject to dispute. The white race rests its claim to superiority on the frankly materialistic ground that it has the guns, soldiers, the money and resources to keep it in the position of the top-dog and to make its will go. This is what white men mean by civilization, disguise it how they may. This struggle is a conflict of wills and interests among the various nations which make up the white race, to determine whose will shall be accepted as the collective will of the white race; to decide, at least for this century, who shall be the inheritors of the lands of Africa and Asia and dictators of the lives and destinies of their colored inhabitants. The peculiar feature of the conflict is that the white race in its fratricidal strife is burning up, eating up, consuming and destroying these very resources of ships, guns, men and money upon which its superiority is built. They are bent upon this form of self-destruction and nothing that we can say will stop them.