This whole argument is guilty of the vicious fallacy of begging the
question by arguing in a circle. First we degrade human beings by the
curse of slavery for two hundred and fifty years, and then because
they are not advanced we argue that they have not the capacity to
rise. Far from being an advantage to both races the color line is the
curse of both. Obsessed by the Negro problem, the white South has
always been held back and still finds it impossible to think in the
large; while the Negro is daily met with such insults as shake the
very foundations of his citizenship. The argument on the mulatto goes
back to the circle already remarked. Everybody knows that in a country
predominantly white the quadroon has frequently been given some
advantage that his black friend did not have, from the time that one
was a house-servant and the other a field-hand; but no thorough test
in Negro schools has ever demonstrated that the black boy is
intellectually inferior to the fair one. This is all a part of the
general American snobbishness that places on the Negro the burden of
any blame or deficiency, but that claims for the white race any merit
that an individual may show, even while many advantages of citizenship
are withheld from both mulatto and Negro alike. Furthermore, and this
is a point not previously remarked in discussions of the Negro
problem, the element of genius that distinguishes the Negro artist of
mixed blood is most frequently one characteristically Negro rather
than Anglo-Saxon; note the romantic and elemental sculpture of Meta
Warrick Fuller and the mystical religious paintings of Henry O.
Tanner. As to labor, how can any one assert that the Negro in the
North has had an equal chance with the white man, in view of the
attitude of the labor unions? The whole matter of education represents
the circle worse than anything else. Would anybody who knows the South
contend for a moment that public school appropriations are evenly
divided between the white and black? And shall we allow one stupid
pupil in a poorly organized school to offset the brilliant attainments
in the foremost colleges in the country, from which institutions Negro
graduates are each year coming by the scores? Not a year passes now
but that some of these students win noteworthy honors, receive
valuable prizes, or take doctors' degrees. Let one observe in full
proof of this the educational number of the _Crisis_, published in
July of each year. The point about "colored universities" simply
represents a state of ignorance common throughout the South. The day
never was when Fisk and Knoxville and Morehouse simply crammed Greek
into unreceptive minds. No schools in the country have had a clearer
idea of their mission, or have done more to answer it with limited
facilities. The pity is that not one of a dozen representative
colleges has the beginning of an adequate endowment, and all have had
to do their work with the cheapest tools. And certainly such
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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