Few evils are less
accessible to the force of reason, or more tenacious of life and power, than a
long-standing prejudice. It is a moral disorder, which creates the conditions
necessary to its own existence, and fortifies itself by refusing all
contradiction. It paints a hateful picture according to its own diseased
imagination, and distorts the features of the fancied original to suit the
portrait. As those who believe in the visibility of ghosts can easily see them,
so it is always easy to see repulsive qualities in those we despise and hate.
Prejudice of race has
at some time in their history afflicted all nations. "I am more holy than
thou" is the boast of races, as well as that of the Pharisee. Long after
the Norman invasion and the decline of Norman power, long after the sturdy
Saxon had shaken off the dust of his humiliation and was grandly asserting his
great qualities in all directions, the descendants of the invaders continued to
regard their Saxon brothers as made of coarser clay than themselves, and were
not well pleased when one of the former subject race came between the sun and
their nobility. Having seen the Saxon a menial, a hostler, and a common drudge,
oppressed and dejected for centuries, it was easy to invest him with all sorts
of odious peculiarities, and to deny him all manly predicates. Though eight
hundred years have passed away since Norman power entered England, and the
Saxon has for centuries been giving his learning, his literature, his language,
and his laws to the world more successfully than any other people on the globe,
men in that country still boast their Norman origin and Norman perfections.
This superstition of former greatness serves to fill out the shriveled sides of
a meaningless race-pride which holds over after its power has vanished. With a
very different lesson from the one this paper is designed to impress, the great
Daniel Webster once told the people of Massachusetts (whose prejudices in the
particular instance referred to were right) that they "had conquered the
sea, and had conquered the land," but that "it remained for them to
conquer their prejudices." At one time we are told that the people in some
of the towns of Yorkshire cherished a prejudice so strong and violent against
strangers and foreigners that one who ventured to pass through their streets would
be pelted with stones.
Of all the races and
varieties of men which have suffered from this feeling, the colored people of
this country have endured most. They can resort to no disguises which will
enable them to escape its deadly aim. They carry in front the evidence which
marks them for persecution. They stand at the extreme point of difference from
the Caucasian race, and their African origin can be instantly recognized,
though they may be several removes from the typical African race. They may
remonstrate like Shylock -- "Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt
with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter, as a Christian is?" --
but such eloquence is unavailing. They are negroes -- and that is enough, in
the eye of this unreasoning prejudice, to justify indignity and violence. In
nearly every department of American life they are confronted by this insidious
influence. It fills the air. It meets them at the workshop and factory, when
they apply for work. It meets them at the church, at the hotel, at the
ballot-box, and worst of all, it meets them in the jury-box. Without crime or
offense against law or gospel, the colored man is the Jean Valjean of American
society. He has escaped from the galleys, and hence all presumptions are
against him. The workshop denies him work, and the inn denies him shelter; the
ballot-box a fair vote, and the jury-box a fair trial. He has ceased to be the
slave of society. He may not now be bought and sold like a beast in the market,
but he is the trammeled victim of a prejudice, well calculated to repress his
manly ambition, paralyze his energies, and make him a dejected and spiritless
man, if not a sullen enemy to society, fit to prey upon life and property and
to make trouble generally.
When this evil spirit
is judge, jury, and prosecutor, nothing less than overwhelming evidence is
sufficient to overcome the force of unfavorable presumptions.
Everything against the
person with the hated color is promptly taken for granted; while everything in
his favor is received with suspicion and doubt.
A boy of this color is
found in his bed tied, mutilated, and bleeding, when forthwith all ordinary
experience is set aside, and he is presumed to have been guilty of the outrage
upon himself; weeks and months he is kept on trial for the offense, and every
effort is made to entangle the poor fellow in the confused meshes of expert
testimony (the least trustworthy of all evidence). This same spirit, which
promptly assumes everything against us, just as readily denies or explains away
everything in our favor. We are not, as a race, even permitted to appropriate
the virtues and achievements of our individual representatives. Manliness,
capacity, learning, laudable ambition, heroic service, by any of our number,
are easily placed to the credit of the superior race. One drop of Teutonic
blood is enough to account for all good and great qualities occasionally
coupled with a colored skin; and on the other hand, one drop of negro blood,
though in the veins of a man of Teutonic whiteness, is enough of which to
predicate all offensive and ignoble qualities. In presence of this spirit, if a
crime is committed, and the criminal is not positively known, a
suspicious-looking colored man is sure to have been seen in the neighborhood.
If an unarmed colored man is shot down and dies in his tracks, a jury, under
the influence of this spirit, does not hesitate to find the murdered man the
real criminal, and the murderer innocent.
Now let us examine this
subject a little more closely. It is claimed that this wonder-working prejudice
-- this moral magic that can change virtue into vice, and innocence to crime;
which makes the dead man the murderer, and holds the living homicide harmless
-- is a natural, instinctive, and invincible attribute of the white race, and
one that cannot be eradicated; that even evolution itself cannot carry us
beyond or above it. Alas for this poor suffering world (for four-fifths of
mankind are colored), if this claim be true! In that case men are forever
doomed to injustice, oppression, hate, and strife; and the religious sentiment
of the world, with its grand idea of human brotherhood, its "peace on
earth and good-will to men," and its golden rule, must be voted a dream, a
delusion, and a snare.
But is this color
prejudice the natural and inevitable thing it claims to be? If it is so, then
it is utterly idle to write against it, preach, pray, or legislate against it,
or pass constitutional amendments against it. Nature will have her course, and
one might as well preach and pray to a horse against running, to a fish against
swimming, or to a bird against flying. Fortunately, however, there is good
ground for calling in question this high pretension of a vulgar and wicked
prepossession.
If I could talk with
all my white fellow-countrymen on this subject, I would say to them, in the
language of Scripture: "Come and let us reason together." Now,
without being too elementary and formal, it may be stated here that there are
at least seven points which candid men will be likely to admit, but which, if
admitted, will prove fatal to the popular thought and practice of the times.
First. If what we call
prejudice against color be natural, i.e., a part of human nature itself, it
follows that it must be co-extensive with human nature, and will and must
manifest itself whenever and wherever the two races are brought into contact.
It would not vary with either latitude, longitude, or altitude; but like fire
and gunpowder, whenever brought together, there would be an explosion of
contempt, aversion, and hatred.
Secondly. If it can be
shown that there is anywhere on the globe any considerable country where the
contact of the African and Caucasian is not distinguished by this explosion of
race-wrath, there is reason to doubt that the prejudice is an ineradicable part
of human nature.
Thirdly. If this
so-called natural, instinctive prejudice can be satisfactorily accounted for by
facts and considerations wholly apart from the color features of the respective
races, thus placing it among the things subject to human volition and control,
we may venture to deny the claim set up for it in the name of human nature.
Fourthly. If any
considerable number of white people have overcome this prejudice in themselves,
have cast it out as an unworthy sentiment, and have survived the operation, the
fact shows that this prejudice is not at any rate a vital part of human nature,
and may be eliminated from the race without harm.
Fifthly. If this
prejudice shall, after all, prove to be, in its essence and in its natural
manifestation, simply a prejudice against condition, and not against race or
color, and that it disappears when this or that condition is absent, then the
argument drawn from the nature of the Caucasian race falls to the ground.
Sixthly. If prejudice
of race and color is only natural in the sense that ignorance, superstition,
bigotry, and vice are natural, then it has no better defense than they, and
should be despised and put away from human relations as an enemy to the peace,
good order, and happiness of human society.
Seventhly. If, still
further, this averson* to the negro arises out of the fact that he is as we see
him, poor, spiritless, ignorant, and degraded, then whatever is humane, noble,
and superior, in the mind of the superior and more fortunate race, will desire
that all arbitrary barriers against his manhood, intelligence, and elevation
shall be removed, and a fair chance in the race of life be given him.
The first of these
propositions does not require discussion. It commends itself to the
understanding at once. Natural qualities are common and universal, and do not
change essentially on the mountain or in the valley. I come therefore to the
second point -- the existence of countries where this malignant prejudice, as
we know it in America, does not prevail; where character, not color, is the
passport to consideration; where the right of the black man to be a man, and a
man among men, is not questioned; where he may, without offense, even presume
to be a gentleman. That there are such countries in the world there is ample
evidence. Intelligent and observing travelers, having no theory to support, men
whose testimony would be received without question in respect of any other
matter, and should not be questioned in this, tell us that they find no color
prejudice in Europe, except among Americans who reside there. In England and on
the Continent, the colored man is no more an object of hate than any other
person. He mingles with the multitude unquestioned, without offense given or
received. During the two years which the writer spent abroad, though he was
much in society, and was sometimes in the company of lords and ladies, he does
not remember one word, look, or gesture that indicated the slightest aversion
to him on account of color. His experience was not in this respect exceptional
or singular. Messrs. Remond, Ward, Garnet, Brown, Pennington, Crummell, and
Bruce, all of them colored, and some of them black, bear the same testimony. If
what these gentleman say (and it can be corroborated by a thousand witnesses)
is true there is no prejudice against color in England, save as it is carried
there by Americans -- carried there as a moral disease from an infected
country. It is American, not European; local, not general; limited, not
universal, and must be ascribed to artificial conditions, and not to any fixed
and universal law of nature.
The third point is: Can
this prejudice against color, as it is called, be accounted for by
circumstances outside and independent of race or color? If it can be thus
explained, an incubus may be removed from the breasts of both the white and the
black people of this country, as well as from that large intermediate
population which has sprung up between these alleged irreconcilable extremes.
It will help us to see that it is not necessary that the Ethiopian shall change
his skin, nor needful that the white man shall change the essential elements of
his nature, in order that mutual respect and consideration may exist between
the two races.
Now it is easy to
explain the conditions outside of race or color from which may spring feelings
akin to those which we call prejudice. A man without the ability or the
disposition to pay a just debt does not feel at ease in the presence of his
creditor. He does not want to meet him on the street, or in the market-place.
Such meeting makes him uncomfortable. He would rather find fault with the bill
than pay the debt, and the creditor himself will soon develop in the eyes of
the debtor qualities not altogether to his taste.
Some one has well said,
we may easily forgive those who injure us, but it is hard to forgive those whom
we injure. The greatest injury this side of death, which one human being can
inflict on another, is to enslave him, to blot out his personality, degrade his
manhood, and sink him to the condition of a beast of burden; and just this has
been done here during more than two centuries. No other people under heaven, of
whatever type or endowments, could have been so enslaved without falling into
contempt and scorn on the part of those enslaving them. Their slavery would
itself stamp them with odious features, and give their oppressors arguments in
favor of oppression. Besides the long years of wrong and injury inflicted upon
the colored race in this country, and the effect of these wrongs upon that
race, morally, intellectually, and physically, corrupting their morals,
darkening their minds, and twisting their bodies and limbs out of all approach
to symmetry, there has been a mountain of gold -- uncounted millions of dollars
-- resting upon them with crushing weight. During all the years of their
bondage, the slave master had a direct interest in discrediting the personality
of those he held as property. Every man who had a thousand dollars so invested
had a thousand reasons for painting the black man as fit only for slavery.
Having made him the companion of horses and mules, he naturally sought to
justify himself by assuming that the negro was not much better than a mule. The
holders of twenty hundred million dollars' worth of property in human chattels
procured the means of influencing press, pulpit, and politician, and through
these instrumentalities they belittled our virtues and magnified our vices, and
have made us odious in the eyes of the world. Slavery had the power at one time
to make and unmake Presidents, to construe the law, dictate the policy, set the
fashion in national manners and customs, interpret the Bible, and control the
church; and, naturally enough, the old masters set themselves up as much too
high as they set the manhood of the negro too low. Out of the depths of slavery
has come this prejudice and this color line. It is broad enough and black
enough to explain all the malign influences which assail the newly emancipated millions
to-day. In reply to this argument it will perhaps be said that the negro has no
slavery now to contend with, and that having been free during the last sixteen
years, he ought by this time to have contradicted the degrading qualities which
slavery formerly ascribed to him. All very true as to the letter, but utterly
false as to the spirit. Slavery is indeed gone, but its shadow still lingers
over the country and poisons more or less the moral atmosphere of all sections
of the republic. The money motive for assailing the negro which slavery
represented is indeed absent, but love of power and dominion, strengthened by
two centuries of irresponsible power, still remains.
Having now shown how
slavery created and sustained this prejudice against race and color, and the
powerful motive for its creation, the other four points made against it need
not be discussed in detail and at length, but may only be referred to in a
general way.
If what is called the
instinctive aversion of the white race for the colored, when analyzed, is seen
to be the same as that which men feel or have felt toward other objects wholly
apart from color; if it should be the same as that sometimes exhibited by the
haughty and rich to the humble and poor, the same as the Brahmin feels toward
the lower caste, the same as the Norman felt toward the Saxon, the same as that
cherished by the Turk against Christians, the same as Christians have felt
toward the Jews, the same as that which murders a Christian in Wallachia, calls
him a "dog" in Constantinople, oppresses and persecutes a Jew in
Berlin, hunts down a socialist in St. Petersburg, drives a Hebrew from an hotel
at Saratoga, that scorns the Irishman in London, the same as Catholics once
felt for Protestants, the same as that which insults, abuses, and kills the
Chinaman on the Pacific slope -- then may we well enough affirm that this
prejudice really has nothing whatever to do with race or color, and that it has
its motive and mainspring in some other source with which the mere facts of color
and race have nothing to do.
After all, some very
well informed and very well meaning people will read what I have now said, and
what seems to me so just and reasonable, and will still insist that the color
of the negro has something to do with the feeling entertained toward him; that
the white man naturally shudders at the thought of contact with one who is
black -- that the impulse is one which he can neither resist nor control. Let
us see if this conclusion is a sound one. An argument is unsound when it proves
too little or too much, or when it proves nothing. If color is an offense, it
is so, entirely apart from the manhood it envelops. There must be something in
color of itself to kindle rage and inflame hate, and render the white man
generally uncomfortable. If the white man were really so constituted that color
were, in itself, a torment to him, this grand old earth of ours would be no
place for him. Colored objects confront him here at every point of the compass.
If he should shrink and shudder every time he sees anything dark, he would have
little time for anything else. He would require a colorless world to live in --
a world where flowers, fields, and floods should all be of snowy whiteness;
where rivers, lakes, and oceans should all be white; where all the men, and
women, and children should be white; where all the fish of the sea, all the
birds of the air, all the "cattle upon a thousand hills," should be
white; where the heavens above and the earth beneath should be white, and where
day and night should not be divided by light and darkness, but the world should
be one eternal scene of light. In such a white world, the entrance of a black
man would be hailed with joy by the inhabitants. Anybody or anything would be
welcome that would break the oppressive and tormenting monotony of the
all-prevailing white.
In the abstract, there
is no prejudice against color. No man shrinks from another because he is
clothed in a suit of black, nor offended with his boots because they are black.
We are told by those who have resided there that a white man in Africa comes to
think that ebony is about the proper color for man. Good old Thomas Whitson --
a noble old Quaker -- a man of rather odd appearance -- used to say that even
he would be handsome if he could change public opinion.
Aside from the curious
contrast to himself, the white child feels nothing on the first sight of a
colored man. Curiosity is the only feeling. The office of color in the color
line is a very plain and subordinate one. It simply advertises the objects of
oppression, insult, and persecution. It is not the maddening liquor, but the
black letters on the sign telling the world where it may be had. It is not the
hated Quaker, but the broad brim and the plain coat. It is not the hateful Cain,
but the mark by which he is known. The color is innocent enough, but things
with which it is coupled make it hated. Slavery, ignorance, stupidity,
servility, poverty, dependence, are undesirable conditions. When these shall
cease to be coupled with color, there will be no color line drawn. It may help
in this direction to observe a few of the inconsistencies of the color-line
feeling, for it is neither uniform in its operations nor consistent in its
principles. Its contradictions in the latter respect would be amusing if the
feeling itself were not so deserving of unqualified abhorrence. Our Californian
brothers, of Hibernian descent, hate the Chinaman, and kill him, and when asked
why they do so, their answer is that a Chinaman is so industrious he will do
all the work, and can live by wages upon which other people would starve. When
the same people and others are asked why they hate the colored people, the
answer is that they are indolent and wasteful, and cannot take care of
themselves. Statesmen of the South will tell you that the negro is too ignorant
and stupid properly to exercise the elective franchise, and yet his greatest
offense is that he acts with the only party intelligent enough in the eyes of
the nation to legislate for the country. In one breath they tell us that the
negro is so weak in intellect, and so destitute of manhood, that he is but the
echo of designing white men, and yet in another they will virtually tell you
that the negro is so clear in his moral perceptions, so firm in purpose, so
steadfast in his convictions, that he cannot be persuaded by arguments or
intimidated by threats, and that nothing but the shot-gun can restrain him from
voting for the men and measures he approves. They shrink back in horror from
contact with the negro as a man and a gentleman, but like him very well as a
barber, waiter, coachman, or cook. As a slave, he could ride anywhere, side by
side with his white master, but as a freeman, he must be thrust into the
smoking- car. As a slave, he could go into the first cabin; as a freeman, he
was not allowed abaft the wheel. Formerly it was said he was incapable of
learning, and at the same time it was a crime against the State for any man to
teach him to read. To-day he is said to be originally and permanently inferior
to the white race, and yet wild apprehensions are expressed lest six millions
of this inferior race will somehow or other manage to rule over thirty-five
millions of the superior race. If inconsistency can prove the hollowness of
anything, certainly the emptiness of this pretense that color has any terrors
is easily shown. The trouble is that most men, and especially mean men, want to
have something under them. The rich man would have the poor man, the white
would have the black, the Irish would have the negro, and the negro must have a
dog, if he can get nothing higher in the scale of intelligence to dominate.
This feeling is one of the vanities which enlightenment will dispel. A good but
simple-minded Abolitionist said to me that he was not ashamed to walk with me
down Broadway arm-in-arm, in open daylight, and evidently thought he was saying
something that must be very pleasing to my self-importance, but it occurred to
me, at the moment, this man does not dream of any reason why I might be ashamed
to walk arm-in-arm with him through Broadway in open daylight. Riding in a
stage-coach from Concord, New Hampshire, to Vergennes, Vermont, many years ago,
I found myself on very pleasant terms with all the passengers through the
night, but the morning light came to me as it comes to the stars; I was as Dr.
Beecher says he was at the first fire he witnessed, when a bucket of cold water
was poured down his back -- "the fire was not put out, but he was."
The fact is, the higher the colored man rises in the scale of society, the less
prejudice does he meet.
The writer has met and
mingled freely with the leading great men of his time, -- at home and abroad,
in public halls and private houses, on the platform and at the fireside, -- and
can remember no instance when among such men has he been made to feel himself
an object of aversion. Men who are really great are too great to be small. This
was gloriously true of the late Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, Salmon P.
Chase, Henry Wilson, John P. Hale, Lewis Tappan, Edmund Quincy, Joshua R.
Giddings, Gerrit Smith, and Charles Sumner, and many others among the dead.
Good taste will not permit me now to speak of the living, except to say that
the number of those who rise superior to prejudice is great and increasing. Let
those who wish to see what is to be the future of America, as relates to races
and race relations, attend, as I have attended, during the administration of
President Hayes, the grand diplomatic receptions at the executive mansion, and
see there, as I have seen, in its splendid east room, the wealth, culture,
refinement, and beauty of the nation assembled, and with it the eminent
representatives of other nations, -- the swarthy Turk with his "fez,"
the Englishman shining with gold, the German, the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the
Japanese, the Chinaman, the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the Sandwich Islander,
and the negro, -- all moving about freely, each respecting the rights and
dignity of the other, and neither receiving nor giving offense.
"Then let us pray
that come it may,
As come it will for a'
that,
That sense and worth,
o'er a' the earth,
May bear the gree, and
a' that;
"That man to man,
the world o'er,
Shall brothers be, for
a' that."
FREDERICK DOUGLASS.