Through Afro-America: An English Reading of the Race Problem

¿The problem of the twentieth century,¿ says Mr. W. B. Du Bois, ¿is the problem of the colour line.¿ That, no doubt, is the view of a man born ¿within the veil¿; but, whatever our point of view, we cannot but admit that racial adjustment is one of the two or three most urgent problems of the near future. Ought the colour-lines drawn by Nature to be enforced by human ordinance, and even by geographical segregation? Or ought they to be gradually obliterated by free intermingling and intermarriage? Or, while intermarriage is forbidden (whether by law or public sentiment), is it possible for people of different colours to dwell together in approximately equal numbers and on terms of democratic equality? Or is it for the benefit of both races that one race should always maintain, by social and political discriminations, its superiority over the other? Or is this opinion a mere hypocritical disguise of the instinct which begot, and maintained throughout the ages, the ¿institution¿ of slavery? These are questions which the coming century will have to answer, not only in America, but in Africa. It is in the Southern United States, however, that the problem presents itself in its acutest and most fully developed form. In South Africa it is looming ahead, in America it is present and hourly insistent. Though the conditions in the two countries can never be precisely similar, yet the experience of the one ought certainly to be of the utmost value in shaping the counsels of the other. My interest, then, in the colour-question in the South was not a mere abstract interest in an alien problem; nor was it due solely to the special sympathy for America and all things American which (I am happy to say) has been strong in me from my youth upward. It was a personal interest which ought, I think, to be shared by every Englishman who is so far an Imperialist as to feel that he cannot simply wash his hands of the problems of Empire. It was heightened, moreover, by the feeling that a great deal of what passes in England as advanced thought on the subject of race-relations is very superficial and remote from the realities of the case. This suspicion had for some time beset me, and was perhaps the main factor in inducing me to utilize a rare interval of leisure in getting into touch with the facts of the problem as it presents itself in Afro-America. Some thinkers display an almost furious antipathy to the very idea of race. They hold it a mere superstition or illusion, and look forward, not only with equanimity, but with eagerness, to an obliteration of all race-boundaries in a universal ¿pan-mixture.¿ I cannot believe that this is a true ideal of progress; nor does it seem to me that the world at large is verging in that direction. No considerable fusion is taking place between the European and the Asiatic races. No one dreams of seeking on that line the solution of our difficulties in India. No practical politician dreams of encouraging yellow immigration into America or Australia on the same terms of permanent citizenship and free intermixture that obtain in the case of white settlers. If the myriads of China and Japan are to ¿expand¿ in the same sense in which the European races have expanded, it must be by conquest and something like extermination. That is, in fact, the ¿yellow peril¿ which haunts so many dreams. The truth is, it seems to me, that no race problem, properly so called, arises until two races are found occupying the same territory in such an approach to equal numbers as to make it a serious question which colour shall ultimately predominate. A handful of white administrators, as in India, or of white traders, as in China and Japan, may give rise, no doubt, to important and difficult questions, but they are not specifically questions of race.

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