Chapter IX: Conflict (3)

It has been assumed that the prejudice which blinds the people of one race to the virtues of another and leads them to exaggerate that other's faults is in the nature of a misunderstanding which further knowledge will dispel. This is so far from true that it would be more exact to say that our racial misunderstandings are merely the expression of our racial antipathies. Behind these antipathies are deep-seated, vital, and instinctive impulses. Racial antipathies represent the collision of invisible forces, the clash of interests, dimly felt but not yet clearly perceived. They are present in every situation where the fundamental interests of races and peoples are not yet regulated by some law, custom, or any other _modus vivendi_ which commands the assent and the mutual support of both parties. We hate people because we fear them, because our interests, as we understand them at any rate, run counter to theirs. On the other hand, good will is founded in the long run upon co-operation. The extension of our so-called altruistic sentiments is made possible only by the organization of our otherwise conflicting interests and by the extension of the machinery of co-operation and social control.

Race prejudice may be regarded as a spontaneous, more or less instinctive, defense-reaction, the practical effect of which is to restrict free competition between races. Its importance as a social function is due to the fact that free competition, particularly between people with different standards of living, seems to be, if not the original source, at least the stimulus to which race prejudice is the response.

From this point of view we may regard caste, or even slavery, as one of those accommodations through which the race problem found a natural solution. Caste, by relegating the subject race to an inferior status, gives to each race at any rate a monopoly of its own tasks. When this status is accepted by the subject people, as is the case where the caste or slavery systems become fully established, racial competition ceases and racial animosity tends to disappear. That is the explanation of the intimate and friendly relations which so often existed in slavery between master and servant. It is for this reason that we hear it said today that the Negro is all right in his place. In his place he is a convenience and not a competitor. Each race being in its place, no obstacle to racial co-operation exists.

The fact that race prejudice is due to, or is in some sense dependent upon, race competition is further manifest by a fact that Mr. Steiner has emphasized, namely, that prejudice against the Japanese is nowhere uniform throughout the United States. It is only where the Japanese are present in sufficient numbers to actually disturb the economic status of the white population that prejudice has manifested itself to such a degree as to demand serious consideration. It is an interesting fact also that prejudice against the Japanese is now more intense than it is against any other oriental people. The reason for this, as Mr. Steiner has pointed out, is that the Japanese are more aggressive, more disposed to test the sincerity of that statement of the Declaration of Independence which declares that all men are equally entitled to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"--a statement, by the way, which was merely a forensic assertion of the laissez faire doctrine of free and unrestricted competition as applied to the relations of individual men.

The Japanese, the Chinese, they too would be all right in their place, no doubt. That place, if they find it, will be one in which they do not greatly intensify and so embitter the struggle for existence of the white man. The difficulty is that the Japanese is still less disposed than the Negro or the Chinese to submit to the regulations of a caste system and to stay in his place. The Japanese are an organized and morally efficient nation. They have the national pride and the national egotism which rests on the consciousness of this efficiency. In fact, it is not too much to say that national egotism, if one pleases to call it such, is essential to national efficiency, just as a certain irascibility of temper seems to be essential to a good fighter.

Another difficulty is that caste and the limitation of free competition is economically unsound, even though it be politically desirable. A national policy of national efficiency demands that every individual have not merely the opportunity but the preparation necessary to perform that particular service for the community for which his natural disposition and aptitude fit him, irrespective of race or "previous condition."

Finally, caste and the limitation of economic opportunity is contrary, if not to our traditions, at least to our political principles. That means that there will always be an active minority opposed to any settlement based on the caste system as applied to either the black or the brown races, on grounds of political sentiment. This minority will be small in parts of the country immediately adversely affected by the competition of the invading race. It will be larger in regions which are not greatly affected. It will be increased if immigration is so rapid as to make the competition more acute. We must look to other measures for the solution of the Japanese problem, if it should prove true, as seems probable, that we are not able or, for various reasons, do not care permanently to hold back the rising tide of the oriental invasion.

I have said that fundamentally and in principle prejudice against the Japanese in America today was identical with the prejudice which attaches to any immigrant people. There is, as Mr. Steiner has pointed out, a difference. This is due to the existence in the human mind of a mechanism by which we inevitably and automatically classify every individual human being we meet. When a race bears an external mark by which every individual member of it can infallibly be identified, that race is by that fact set apart and segregated. Japanese, Chinese, and Negroes cannot move among us with the same freedom as the members of other races because they bear marks which identify them as members of their race. This fact isolates them. In the end the effect of this isolation, both in its effects upon the Japanese themselves and upon the human environment in which they live, is profound. Isolation is at once a cause and an effect of race prejudice. It is a vicious circle--isolation, prejudice; prejudice, isolation. Were there no other reasons which urge us to consider the case of the Japanese and the oriental peoples in a category different from that of the European immigrant, this fact, that they are bound to live in the American community a more or less isolated life, would impel us to do so.

In conclusion, I may perhaps say in a word what seems to me the practical bearing of Mr. Steiner's book. Race prejudice is a mechanism of the group mind which acts reflexly and automatically in response to its proper stimulus. That stimulus seems to be, in the cases where I have met it, unrestricted competition of peoples with different standards of living. Racial animosities and the so-called racial misunderstandings that grow out of them cannot be explained or argued away. They can only be affected when there has been a readjustment of relations and an organization of interests in such a way as to bring about a larger measure of co-operation and a lesser amount of friction and conflict. This demands something more than a diplomacy of kind words. It demands a national policy based on an unflinching examination of the facts.

2. Conflict and Race Consciousness[216]

The Civil War weakened but did not fully destroy the _modus vivendi_ which slavery had established between the slave and his master. With emancipation the authority which had formerly been exercised by the master was transferred to the state, and Washington, D.C., began to assume in the mind of the freedman the position that formerly had been occupied by the "big house" on the plantation. The masses of the Negro people still maintained their habit of dependence, however, and after the first confusion of the change had passed, life went on, for most of them, much as it had before the war. As one old farmer explained, the only difference he could see was that in slavery he "was working for old Marster and now he was working for himself."

There was one difference between slavery and freedom, nevertheless, which was very real to the freedman. And this was the liberty to move. To move from one plantation to another in case he was discontented was one of the ways in which a freedman was able to realize his freedom and to make sure that he possessed it. This liberty to move meant a good deal more to the plantation Negro than one not acquainted with the situation in the South is likely to understand.

If there had been an abundance of labor in the South; if the situation had been such that the Negro laborer was seeking the opportunity to work, or such that the Negro tenant farmers were competing for the opportunity to get a place on the land, as is so frequently the case in Europe, the situation would have been fundamentally different from what it actually was. But the South was, and is today, what Nieboer called a country of "open," in contradistinction to a country of "closed" resources. In other words, there is more land in the South than there is labor to till it. Land owners are driven to competing for laborers and tenants to work their plantations.

Owing to his ignorance of business matters and to a long-established habit of submission, the Negro after emancipation was placed at a great disadvantage in his dealings with the white man. His right to move from one plantation to another became, therefore, the Negro tenant's method of enforcing consideration from the planter. He might not dispute the planter's accounts, because he was not capable of doing so, and it was unprofitable to attempt it, but if he felt aggrieved he could move.

This was the significance of the exodus in some of the southern states which took place about 1879, when 40,000 people left the plantations in the Black Belts of Louisiana and Mississippi and went to Kansas. The masses of the colored people were dissatisfied with the treatment they were receiving from the planters and made up their minds to move to "a free country," as they described it. At the same time it was the attempt of the planter to bind the Negro tenant who was in debt to him to his place on the plantation that gave rise to the system of peonage that still exists in a mitigated form in the South today.

When the Negro moved off the plantation upon which he was reared he severed the personal relations which bound him to his master's people. It was just at this point that the two races began to lose touch with each other. From this time on the relations of the black man and white, which in slavery had been direct and personal, became every year, as the old associations were broken, more and more indirect and secondary. There lingers still the disposition on the part of the white man to treat every Negro familiarly, and the disposition on the part of every Negro to treat every white man respectfully. But these are habits which are gradually disappearing. The breaking down of the instincts and habits of servitude and the acquisition by the masses of the Negro people of the instincts and habits of freedom have proceeded slowly but steadily. The reason the change seems to have gone on more rapidly in some cases than others is explained by the fact that at the time of emancipation 10 per cent of the Negroes in the United States were already free, and others, those who had worked in trades, many of whom had hired their own time from their masters, had become more or less adapted to the competitive conditions of free society.

One of the effects of the mobilization of the Negro has been to bring him into closer and more intimate contact with his own people. Common interests have drawn the blacks together, and caste sentiment has kept the black and white apart. The segregation of the races, which began as a spontaneous movement on the part of both, has been fostered by the policy of the dominant race. The agitation of the Reconstruction period made the division between the races in politics absolute. Segregation and separation in other matters have gone on steadily ever since. The Negro at the present time has separate churches, schools, libraries, hospitals, Y.M.C.A. associations, and even separate towns. There are, perhaps, a half-dozen communities in the United States, every inhabitant of which is a Negro. Most of these so-called Negro towns are suburban villages; two of them, at any rate, are the centers of a considerable Negro farming population. In general it may be said that where the Negro schools, churches, and Y.M.C.A. associations are not separate they do not exist.

It is hard to estimate the ultimate effect of this isolation of the black man. One of the most important effects has been to establish a common interest among all the different colors and classes of the race. This sense of solidarity has grown up gradually with the organization of the Negro people. It is stronger in the South, where segregation is more complete, than it is in the North where, twenty years ago, it would have been safe to say it did not exist. Gradually, imperceptibly, within the larger world of the white man, a smaller world, the world of the black man, is silently taking form and shape.

Every advance in education and intelligence puts the Negro in possession of the technique of communication and organization of the white man, and so contributes to the extension and consolidation of the Negro world within the white.

The motive for this increasing solidarity is furnished by the increasing pressure, or perhaps I should say by the increasing sensibility of Negroes to the pressure and the prejudice without. The sentiment of racial loyalty, which is a comparatively recent manifestation of the growing self-consciousness of the race, must be regarded as a response and "accommodation" to changing internal and external relations of the race. The sentiment which Negroes are beginning to call "race pride" does not exist to the same extent in the North as in the South, but an increasing disposition to enforce racial distinctions in the North, as in the South, is bringing it into existence.

One or two incidents in this connection are significant. A few years ago a man who is the head of the largest Negro publishing business in this country sent to Germany and had a number of Negro dolls manufactured according to specifications of his own. At the time this company was started, Negro children were in the habit of playing with white dolls. There were already Negro dolls on the market, but they were for white children and represented the white man's conception of the Negro and not the Negro's ideal of himself. The new Negro doll was a mulatto with regular features slightly modified in favor of the conventional Negro type. It was a neat, prim, well-dressed, well-behaved, self-respecting doll. Later on, as I understand, there were other dolls, equally tidy and respectable in appearance, but in darker shades, with Negro features a little more pronounced. The man who designed these dolls was perfectly clear in regard to the significance of the substitution that he was making. He said that he thought it was a good thing to let Negro girls become accustomed to dolls of their own color. He thought it important, as long as the races were to be segregated, that the dolls, which, like other forms of art, are patterns and represent ideals, should be segregated also.

This substitution of the Negro model for the white is a very interesting and a very significant fact. It means that the Negro has begun to fashion his own ideals and in his own image rather than in that of the white man. It is also interesting to know that the Negro doll company has been a success and that these dolls are now widely sold in every part of the United States. Nothing exhibits more clearly the extent to which the Negro had become assimilated in slavery or the extent to which he has broken with the past in recent years than this episode of the Negro doll.

The incident is typical. It is an indication of the nature of tendencies and of forces that are stirring in the background of the Negro's mind, although they have not succeeded in forcing themselves, except in special instances, into clear consciousness.

In this same category must be reckoned the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, in whom, as William Dean Howells has said, the Negro "attained civilization." Before Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Negro literature had been either apologetic or self-assertive, but Dunbar "studied the Negro objectively." He represented him as he found him, not only without apology, but with an affectionate understanding and sympathy which one can have only for what is one's own. In Dunbar, Negro literature attained an ethnocentric point of view. Through the medium of his verses the ordinary shapes and forms of the Negro's life have taken on the color of his affections and sentiments, and we see the black man, not as he looks, but as he feels and is.

It is a significant fact that a certain number of educated--or rather the so-called educated--Negroes were not at first disposed to accept at their full value either Dunbar's dialect verse or the familiar pictures of Negro life which are the symbols in which his poetry usually found expression. The explanation sometimes offered for the dialect poems was that "they were made to please white folk." The assumption seems to have been that if they had been written for Negroes it would have been impossible in his poetry to distinguish black people from white. This was a sentiment which was never shared by the masses of the people, who, upon the occasions when Dunbar recited to them, were fairly bowled over with amusement and delight because of the authenticity of the portraits he offered them. At the present time Dunbar is so far accepted as to have hundreds of imitators.

Literature and art have played a similar and perhaps more important rôle in the racial struggles of Europe than of America. One reason seems to be that racial conflicts, as they occur in secondary groups, are primarily sentimental and secondarily economic. Literature and art, when they are employed to give expression to racial sentiment and form to racial ideals, serve, along with other agencies, to mobilize the group and put the masses _en rapport_ with their leaders and with each other. In such cases art and literature are like silent drummers which summon into action the latent instincts and energies of the race.

These struggles, I might add, in which a submerged people seek to rise and make for themselves a place in a world occupied by superior and privileged races, are not less vital or less important because they are bloodless. They serve to stimulate ambitions and inspire ideals which years, perhaps, of subjection and subordination have suppressed. In fact, it seems as if it were through conflicts of this kind, rather than through war, that the minor peoples were destined to gain the moral concentration and discipline that fit them to share, on anything like equal terms, in the conscious life of the civilized world.

Until the beginning of the last century the European peasant, like the Negro slave, bound as he was to the soil, lived in the little world of direct and personal relations, under what we may call a domestic régime. It was military necessity that first turned the attention of statesmen like Frederick the Great of Prussia to the welfare of the peasant. It was the overthrow of Prussia by Napoleon in 1807 that brought about his final emancipation in that country. In recent years it has been the international struggle for economic efficiency which has contributed most to mobilize the peasant and laboring classes in Europe.

As the peasant slowly emerged from serfdom he found himself a member of a depressed class, without education, political privileges, or capital. It was the struggle of this class for wider opportunity and better conditions of life that made most of the history of the previous century. Among the peoples in the racial borderland the effect of this struggle has been, on the whole, to substitute for a horizontal organization of society--in which the upper strata, that is to say, the wealthy or privileged class, was mainly of one race and the poorer and subject class was mainly of another--a vertical organization in which all classes of each racial group were united under the title of their respective nationalities. Thus organized, the nationalities represent, on the one hand, intractable minorities engaged in a ruthless partisan struggle for political privilege or economic advantage and, on the other, they represent cultural groups, each struggling to maintain a sentiment of loyalty to the distinctive traditions, language, and institutions of the race they represent.

This sketch of the racial situation in Europe is, of course, the barest abstraction and should not be accepted realistically. It is intended merely as an indication of similarities, in the broader outlines, of the motives that have produced nationalities in Europe and are making the Negro in America, as Booker Washington says, "a nation within a nation."

It may be said that there is one profound difference between the Negro and the European nationalities, namely, that the Negro has had his separateness and consequent race consciousness thrust upon him because of his exclusion and forcible isolation from white society. The Slavic nationalities, on the contrary, have segregated themselves in order to escape assimilation and escape racial extinction in the larger cosmopolitan states.

The difference is, however, not so great as it seems. With the exception of the Poles, nationalistic sentiment may be said hardly to have existed fifty years ago. Forty years ago when German was the language of the educated classes, educated Bohemians were a little ashamed to speak their own language in public. Now nationalist sentiment is so strong that, where the Czech nationality has gained control, it has sought to wipe out every vestige of the German language. It has changed the names of streets, buildings, and public places. In the city of Prag, for example, all that formerly held German associations now fairly reeks with the sentiment of Bohemian nationality.

On the other hand, the masses of the Polish people cherished very little nationalist sentiment until after the Franco-Prussian War. The fact is that nationalist sentiment among the Slavs, like racial sentiment among the Negroes, has sprung up as the result of a struggle against privilege and discrimination based upon racial distinctions. The movement is not so far advanced among Negroes; sentiment is not so intense, and for several reasons probably never will be.

From what has been said it seems fair to draw one conclusion, namely: under conditions of secondary contact, that is to say, conditions of individual liberty and individual competition, characteristic of modern civilization, depressed racial groups tend to assume the form of nationalities. A nationality, in this narrower sense, may be defined as the racial group which has attained self-consciousness, no matter whether it has at the same time gained political independence or not.

In societies organized along horizontal lines the disposition of individuals in the lower strata is to seek their models in the strata above them. Loyalty attaches to individuals, particularly to the upper classes, who furnish, in their persons and in their lives, the models for the masses of the people below them. Long after the nobility has lost every other social function connected with its vocation the ideals of the nobility have survived in our conception of the gentleman, genteel manners and bearing--gentility.

The sentiment of the Negro slave was, in a certain sense, not merely loyalty to his master but to the white race. Negroes of the older generations speak very frequently, with a sense of proprietorship, of "our white folks." This sentiment was not always confined to the ignorant masses. An educated colored man once explained to me "that we colored people always want our white folks to be superior." He was shocked when I showed no particular enthusiasm for that form of sentiment.

The fundamental significance of the nationalist movement must be sought in the effort of subject races, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, to substitute, for those supplied them by aliens, models based on their own racial individuality and embodying sentiments and ideals which spring naturally out of their own lives.

After a race has achieved in this way its moral independence, assimilation, in the sense of copying, will still continue. Nations and races borrow from those whom they fear as well as from those whom they admire. Materials taken over in this way, however, are inevitably stamped with the individuality of the nationalities that appropriate them. These materials will contribute to the dignity, to the prestige, and to the solidarity of the nationality which borrows them, but they will no longer inspire loyalty to the race from which they are borrowed. A race which has attained the character of a nationality may still retain its loyalty to the state of which it is a part, but only in so far as that state incorporates, as an integral part of its organization, the practical interests, the aspirations and ideals of that nationality.

The aim of the contending nationalities in Austria-Hungary at the present time seems to be a federation, like that of Switzerland, based upon the autonomy of the different races composing the empire. In the South, similarly, the races seem to be tending in the direction of a bi-racial organization of society, in which the Negro is gradually gaining a limited autonomy. What the ultimate outcome of this movement may be it is not safe to predict.

3. Conflict and Accommodation[217]

In the first place, what is race friction? To answer this elementary question it is necessary to define the abstract mental quality upon which race friction finally rests. This is racial "antipathy," popularly spoken of as "race prejudice." Whereas prejudice means mere predilection, either for or against, antipathy means "natural contrariety," "incompatibility," or "repugnance of qualities." To quote the Century Dictionary, antipathy "expresses most of constitutional feeling and least of volition"; "it is a dislike that seems constitutional toward persons, things, conduct, etc.; hence it involves a dislike for which sometimes no good reason can be given." I would define racial antipathy, then, as a natural contrariety, repugnancy of qualities, or incompatibility between individuals or groups which are sufficiently differentiated to constitute what, for want of a more exact term, we call races. What is most important is that it involves an instinctive feeling of dislike, distaste, or repugnance, for which sometimes no good reason can be given. Friction is defined primarily as a "lack of harmony," or a "mutual irritation." In the case of races it is accentuated by antipathy. We do not have to depend on race riots or other acts of violence as a measure of the growth of race friction. Its existence may be manifested by a look or a gesture as well as by a word or an act.

A verbal cause of much useless and unnecessary controversy is found in the use of the word "race." When we speak of "race problems" or "racial antipathies," what do we mean by "race"? Clearly nothing scientifically definite, since ethnologists themselves are not agreed upon any classification of the human family along racial lines. Nor would this so-called race prejudice have the slightest regard for such classification, if one were agreed upon. It is something which is not bounded by the confines of a philological or ethnological definition. The British scientist may tell the British soldier in India that the native is in reality his brother, and that it is wholly absurd and illogical and unscientific for such a thing as "race prejudice" to exist between them. Tommy Atkins simply replies with a shrug that to him and his messmates the native is a "nigger"; and in so far as their attitude is concerned, that is the end of the matter. The same suggestion, regardless of the scientific accuracy of the parallel, if made to the American soldier in the Philippines, meets with the same reply. We have wasted an infinite amount of time in interminable controversies over the relative superiority and inferiority of different races. Such discussions have a certain value when conducted by scientific men in a purely scientific spirit. But for the purpose of explaining or establishing any fixed principle of race relations they are little better than worthless. The Japanese is doubtless quite well satisfied of the superiority of his people over the mushroom growths of western civilization, and finds no difficulty in borrowing from the latter whatever is worth reproducing, and improving on it in adapting it to his own racial needs. The Chinese do not waste their time in idle chatter over the relative status of their race as compared with the white barbarians who have intruded themselves upon them with their grotesque customs, their heathenish ideas, and their childishly new religion. The Hindu regards with veiled contempt the racial pretensions of his conqueror, and, while biding the time when the darker races of the earth shall once more come into their own, does not bother himself with such an idle question as whether his temporary overlord is his racial equal. Only the white man writes volumes to establish on paper the fact of a superiority which is either self-evident and not in need of demonstration, on the one hand, or is not a fact and is not demonstrable, on the other. The really important matter is one about which there need be little dispute--the fact of racial differences. It is the practical question of differences--the fundamental differences of physical appearance, of mental habit and thought, of social customs and religious beliefs, of the thousand and one things keenly and clearly appreciable, yet sometimes elusive and undefinable--these are the things which at once create and find expression in what we call race problems and race prejudices, for want of better terms. In just so far as these differences are fixed and permanently associated characteristics of two groups of people will the antipathies and problems between the two be permanent.

Probably the closest approach we shall ever make to a satisfactory classification of races as a basis of antipathy will be that of grouping men according to color, along certain broad lines, the color being accompanied by various and often widely different, but always fairly persistent, differentiating physical and mental characteristics. This would give us substantially the white--not Caucasian, the yellow--not Chinese or Japanese, and the dark--not Negro, races. The antipathies between these general groups and between certain of their subdivisions will be found to be essentially fundamental, but they will also be found to present almost endless differences of degrees of actual and potential acuteness. Here elementary psychology also plays its part. One of the subdivisions of the Negro race is composed of persons of mixed blood. In many instances these are more white than black, yet the association of ideas has through several generations identified them with the Negro--and in this country friction between this class and white people is on some lines even greater than between whites and blacks.

Race conflicts are merely the more pronounced concrete expressions of such friction. They are the visible phenomena of the abstract quality of racial antipathy--the tangible evidence of the existence of racial problems. The form of such expressions of antipathy varies with the nature of the racial contact in each instance. Their different and widely varying aspects are the confusing and often contradictory phenomena of race relations. They are dependent upon diverse conditions, and are no more susceptible of rigid and permanent classification than are the whims and moods of human nature. It is more than a truism to say that a condition precedent to race friction or race conflict is contact between sufficient numbers of two diverse racial groups. There is a definite and positive difference between contact between individuals and contact between masses. The association between two isolated individual members of two races may be wholly different from contact between masses of the same race groups. The factor of numbers embraces, indeed, the very crux of the problems arising from contact between different races.

A primary cause of race friction is the vague, rather intangible, but wholly real, feeling of "pressure" which comes to the white man almost instinctively in the presence of a mass of people of a different race. In a certain important sense all racial problems are distinctly problems of racial distribution. Certainly the definite action of the controlling race, particularly as expressed in laws, is determined by the factor of the numerical difference between its population and that of the inferior group. This fact stands out prominently in the history of our colonial legislation for the control of Negro slaves. These laws increased in severity up to a certain point as the slave population increased in numbers. The same condition is disclosed in the history of the ante-bellum legislation of the southern, eastern, New England, and middle western states for the control of the free Negro population. So today no state in the Union would have separate car laws where the Negro constituted only 10 or 15 per cent of its total population. No state would burden itself with the maintenance of two separate school systems with a negro element of less than 10 per cent. Means of local separation might be found, but there would be no expression of law on the subject.

Just as a heavy increase of Negro population makes for an increase of friction, direct legislation, the protection of drastic social customs, and a general feeling of unrest or uneasiness on the part of the white population, so a decrease of such population, or a relatively small increase as compared with the whites, makes for less friction, greater racial tolerance, and a lessening of the feeling of necessity for severely discriminating laws or customs. And this quite aside from the fact of a difference of increase or decrease of actual points of contact, varying with differences of numbers. The statement will scarcely be questioned that the general attitude of the white race, as a whole, toward the Negro would become much less uncompromising if we were to discover that through two census periods the race had shown a positive decrease in numbers. Racial antipathy would not decrease, but the conditions which provoke its outward expression would undergo a change for the better. There is a direct relation between the mollified attitude of the people of the Pacific coast toward the Chinese population and the fact that the Chinese population decreased between 1890 and 1900. There would in time be a difference of feeling toward the Japanese now there if the immigration of more were prohibited by treaty stipulation. There is the same immediate relation between the tolerant attitude of whites toward the natives in the Hawaiian Islands and the feeling that the native is a decadent and dying race. Aside from the influence of the Indian's warlike qualities and of his refusal to submit to slavery, the attitude and disposition of the white race toward him have been influenced by considerations similar to those which today operate in Hawaii. And the same influence has been a factor in determining the attitude of the English toward the slowly dying Maoris of New Zealand.

At no time in the history of the English-speaking people and at no place of which we have any record where large numbers of them have been brought into contact with an approximately equal number of Negroes have the former granted to the latter absolute equality, either political, social, or economic. With the exception of five New England states, with a total Negro population of only 16,084 in 1860, every state in the Union discriminated against the Negro politically before the Civil War. The white people continued to do so--North as well as South--as long as they retained control of the suffrage regulations of their states. The determination to do so renders one whole section of the country practically a political unit to this day. In South Africa we see the same determination of the white man to rule, regardless of the numerical superiority of the black. The same determination made Jamaica surrender the right of self-government and renders her satisfied with a hybrid political arrangement today. The presence of practically 100,000 Negroes in the District of Columbia makes 200,000 white people content to live under an anomaly in a self-governing country. The proposition is too elementary for discussion that the white man when confronted with a sufficient number of Negroes to create in his mind a sense of political unrest or danger either alters his form of government in order to be rid of the incubus or destroys the political strength of the Negro by force, by evasion, or by direct action.

In the main, the millions in the South live at peace with their white neighbors. The masses, just one generation out of slavery and thousands of them still largely controlled by its influences, accept the superiority of the white race as a race, whatever may be their private opinion of some of its members. And, furthermore, they accept this relation of superior and inferior as a mere matter of course--as part of their lives--as something neither to be questioned, wondered at, or worried over. Despite apparent impressions to the contrary, the average southern white man gives no more thought to the matter than does the Negro. As I tried to make clear at the outset, the status of superior and inferior is simply an inherited part of his instinctive mental equipment--a concept which he does not have to reason out. The respective attitudes are complementary, and under the mutual acceptance and understanding there still exist unnumbered thousands of instances of kindly and affectionate relations--relations of which the outside world knows nothing and understands nothing. In the mass, the southern Negro has not bothered himself about the ballot for more than twenty years, not since his so-called political leaders let him alone; he is not disturbed over the matter of separate schools and cars, and he neither knows nor cares anything about "social equality."

But what of the other class? The "masses" is at best an unsatisfactory and indefinite term. It is very far from embracing even the southern Negro, and we need not forget that seven years ago there were 900,000 members of the race living outside of the South. What of the class, mainly urban and large in number, who have lost the typical habit and attitude of the Negro of the mass, and who, more and more, are becoming restless and chafing under existing conditions? There is an intimate and very natural relation between the social and intellectual advance of the so-called Negro and the matter of friction along social lines. It is, in fact, only as we touch the higher groups that we can appreciate the potential results of contact upon a different plane from that common to the masses in the South. There is a large and steadily increasing group of men, more or less related to the Negro by blood and wholly identified with him by American social usage, who refuse to accept quietly the white man's attitude toward the race. I appreciate the mistake of laying too great stress upon the utterances of any one man or group of men, but the mistakes in this case lie the other way. The American white man knows little or nothing about the thought and opinion of the colored men and women who today largely mold and direct Negro public opinion in this country. Even the white man who considers himself a student of "the race question" rarely exhibits anything more than profound ignorance of the Negro's side of the problem. He does not know what the other man is thinking and saying on the subject. This composite type which we poetically call "black," but which in reality is every shade from black to white, is slowly developing a consciousness of its own racial solidarity. It is finding its own distinctive voice, and through its own books and papers and magazines, and through its own social organizations, is at once giving utterance to its discontent and making known its demands.

And with this dawning consciousness of race there is likewise coming an appreciation of the limitations and restrictions which hem in its unfolding and development. One of the best indices to the possibilities of increased racial friction is the Negro's own recognition of the universality of the white man's racial antipathy toward him. This is the one clear note above the storm of protest against the things that are, that in his highest aspirations everywhere the white man's "prejudice" blocks the colored man's path. And the white man may with possible profit pause long enough to ask the deeper significance of the Negro's finding of himself. May it not be only part of a general awakening of the darker races of the earth? Captain H. A. Wilson, of the English army, says that through all Africa there has penetrated in some way a vague confused report that far off somewhere, in the unknown, outside world, a great war has been fought between a white and a yellow race, and won by the yellow man. And even before the Japanese-Russian conflict, "Ethiopianism" and the cry of "Africa for the Africans" had begun to disturb the English in South Africa. It is said time and again that the dissatisfaction and unrest in India are accentuated by the results of this same war. There can be no doubt in the mind of any man who carefully reads American Negro journals that their rejoicing over the Japanese victory sounded a very different note from that of the white American. It was far from being a mere expression of sympathy with a people fighting for national existence against a power which had made itself odious to the civilized world by its treatment of its subjects. It was, instead, a quite clear cry of exultation over the defeat of a white race by a dark one. The white man is no wiser than the ostrich if he refuses to see the truth that in the possibilities of race friction the Negro's increasing consciousness of race is to play a part scarcely less important than the white man's racial antipathies, prejudices, or whatever we may elect to call them.

III. INVESTIGATIONS AND PROBLEMS

1. The Psychology and Sociology of Conflict, Conscious Competition, and Rivalry

Consciousness has been described as an effect of conflict--conflict of motor tendencies in the individual, conflict of sentiments, attitudes, and cultures in the group. The individual, activated in a given situation by opposing tendencies, is compelled to redefine his attitude. Consciousness is an incident of this readjustment.

Frequently adjustment involves a suppression of one tendency in the interest of another, of one wish in favor of another. Where these suppressions are permanent, they frequently result in disorders of conduct and disorganization of the personality. The suppressed wish, when suppression results in disturbances of the conscious life, has been called by psychoanalysts a _complex_. Freud and his colleagues have isolated and described certain of these complexes. Most familiar of these are the Oedipus complex, which is explained as an effect of the unconscious conflict of father and son for the love of the mother; and the Electra complex, which similarly has as its source the unconscious struggle of mother and daughter for the affection of the father. Adler, in his description of the "inferiority" complex, explains it as an effect of the conflict growing out of the contrast between the ideal and the actual status of the person. Other mental conflicts described by the psychoanalysts are referred to the "adopted child" complex, the Narcissus complex, the sex shock, etc. These conflicts which disturb the mental life of the person are all the reflections of social relations and are to be explained in terms of status and the rôle of the individual in the group.

Emulation and rivalry represent conflict at higher social levels, where competition has been translated into forms that inure to the survival and success of the group. Research in this field, fragmentary as it is, confirms the current impression of the stimulation of effort in the person through conscious competition with his fellows. Adler's theory of "psychic compensation" is based on the observation that handicapped individuals frequently excel in the very fields in which they are apparently least qualified to compete. Demosthenes, for example, became a great orator in spite of the fact that he stuttered. Ordahl presents the only comprehensive survey of the literature in this field.

Simmel has made the outstanding contribution to the sociological conception of conflict. Just as the attitudes of the individual person represent an organization of antagonistic elements, society, as he interprets it, is a unity of which the elements are conflicting tendencies. Society, he insists, would be quite other than it is, were it not for the aversions, antagonisms, differences, as well as the sympathies, affections, and similarities between individuals and groups of individuals. The unity of society includes these opposing forces, and, as a matter of fact, society is organized upon the basis of conflict.

Conflict is an organizing principle in society. Just as the individual, under the influences of contact and conflict with other individuals, acquires a status and develops a personality, so groups of individuals, in conflict with other groups, achieve unity, organization, group consciousness, and assume the forms characteristic of conflict groups--that is to say, they become parties, sects, and nationalities, etc.

2. Types of Conflict

Simmel, in his study of conflict, distinguished four types--namely, war, feud and faction, litigation, and discussion, i.e., the impersonal struggles of parties and causes. This classification, while discriminating, is certainly not complete. There are, for example, the varied forms of sport, in which conflict assumes the form of rivalry. These are nevertheless organized on a conflict pattern. Particularly interesting in this connection are games of chance, gambling and gambling devices which appeal to human traits so fundamental that no people is without example of them in its folkways.

Gambling is, according to Groos, "a fighting play," and the universal human interest in this sport is due to the fact that "no other form of play displays in so many-sided a fashion the combativeness of human nature."[218]

The history of the duel, either in the form of the judicial combat, the wager of battle of the Middle Ages, or as a form of private vengeance, offers interesting material for psychological or sociological investigation. The transition from private vengeance to public prosecution, of which the passing of the duel is an example, has not been completed. In fact, new forms are in some cases gradually gaining social sanction. We still have our "unwritten laws" for certain offenses. It is proverbially difficult to secure the conviction, in certain parts of the country, Chicago, for example, of a woman who kills her husband or her lover. The practice of lynching Negroes in the southern states, for offenses against women, and for any other form of conduct that is construed as a challenge to the dominant race, is an illustration from a somewhat different field, not merely of the persistence, but the gradual development of the so-called unwritten law. The circumstances under which these and all other unwritten laws arise, in which custom controls in contravention of the formal written code, have not been investigated from the point of view of sociology and in their human-nature aspects.

Several studies of games and gambling, in some respects the most unique objectivations of human interest, have been made from the point of view of the fundamental human traits involved, notably Thomas' article on _The Gaming Instinct_, Groos's chapter on "Fighting Play," in his _Play of Man_, and G. T. W. Patrick's _Psychology of Relaxation_, in which the theory of catharsis, familiar since Aristotle, is employed to explain play, laughter, profanity, the drink habit, and war.

Original materials exist in abundance for the study of feud, litigation, and war. No attempt seems to have been made to study feud and litigation comparatively, as Westermarck has studied marriage institutions. Something has indeed been done in this direction with the subject of war, notably by Letourneau in France and by Frobenius in Germany. Sumner's notable essay on _War_ is likewise an important contribution to the subject. The literature upon war, however, is so voluminous and so important that it will be discussed later, separately, and in greater detail.

Quite as interesting and important as that of war is the natural history of discussion, including under that term political and religious controversy and social agitation, already referred to as impersonal or secondary conflict.

The history of discussion, however, is the history of freedom--freedom, at any rate, of thought and of speech. It is only when peace and freedom have been established that discussion is practicable or possible. A number of histories have been written in recent years describing the rise of rationalism, as it is called, and the rôle of discussion and agitation in social life. Draper's _History of the Intellectual Development of Europe_ and Lecky's _History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe_ are among the earlier works in this field. Robertson's _History of Free Thought_ is mainly a survey of religious skepticism but contains important and suggestive references to the natural processes by which abstract thought has arisen out of the cultural contacts and conflicts among peoples, which conquest and commerce have brought into the same universe of discourse. What we seem to have in these works are materials for the study of the communal processes through which thought is formulated. Once formulated it becomes a permanent factor in the life of the group. The rôle of discussion in the communal process will be considered later in connection with the newspaper, the press agent, propaganda, and the various factors and mechanisms determining the formation of public opinion.

3. The Literature of War

The emphasis upon the struggle for existence which followed the publication of Darwin's _The Origin of Species_, in 1859, seemed to many thinkers to give a biological basis for the necessity and the inevitability of war. No distinction was made by writers of this school of thought between competition and conflict. Both were supposed to be based on instinct. Nicolai's _The Biology of War_ is an essay with the avowed design of refuting the biological justification of war.

Psychological studies of war have explained war either as an expression of instinct or as a reversion to a primordial animal-human type of behavior. Patrick, who is representative of this latter school, interprets war as a form of relaxation. G. W. Crile has offered a mechanistic interpretation of war and peace based on studies of the chemical changes which men undergo in warfare. Crile comes to the conclusion, however, that war is an action pattern, fixed in the social heredity of the national group, and not a type of behavior determined biologically.

The human nature of war and the motives which impel the person to the great adventure and the supreme risk of war have not been subjected to sociological study. A mass of material, however, consisting of personal documents of all types, letters, common-sense observation, and diaries is now available for such study.

Much of the literature of war has been concentrated on this problem of the abolition of war. There are the idealists and the conscientious objectors who look to good will, humanitarian sentiment, and pacificism to end war by the transformation of attitudes of men and the policies of nations. On the other hand, there are the hard-headed and practical thinkers and statesmen who believe, with Hobbes, that war will not end until there is established a power strong enough to overawe a recalcitrant state. Finally, there is a third group of social thinkers who emphasize the significance of the formation of a world public opinion. This "international mind" they regard of far greater significance for the future of humanity than the problem of war or peace, of national rivalries, or of future race conflicts.

4. Race Conflict

A European school of sociologists emphasizes conflict as the fundamental social process. Gumplowicz, in his book _Die Rassenkampf_, formulated a theory of social contacts and conflicts upon the conception of original ethnic groups in terms of whose interaction the history of humanity might be written. Novicow and Ratzenhofer maintain similar, though not so extreme, theories of social origins and historical developments.