it need hardly be pointed out, were developed and survive, in so far as they still exist, in communities where the negro never has been found in sufficient numbers to have been the cause of an aroused race consciousness. In the South, where the question has perforce always been a practical rather than an academic one by reason of the presence of large masses of colored population in every community, opposition to mongrelization has been consistently grounded on the principle of culture preservation as determined strictly by race lines. Rigid insistence on the color line is, indeed, often the outgrowth of prejudice and passion rather than of scientific analysis, and as such may itself become a serious social danger. But for certain societies and for limited periods it can hardly be disputed that the practical identification of race solidarity with culture solidarity furnishes a wise principle of social action.[1]
IV
Like organisms, races are likely to be most pliable in the nascent stage. Fixity of type comes with the growth of habits and institutions. Old races which have remained plastic are generally those which have not risen above the simplest culture stage, and whose achievements have not become a part of the traditions of the ethnic group. The antipathy of the white race for the negro is no doubt due in large measure to the consciousness of long stretches of cultural advance which the darker race is deemed incapable of approximating. Professor Royce has sought to demonstrate that all our race problems are merely problems caused by our antipathies. "Train a man first to give names to his antipathies, and then to regard the antipathies thus named as sacred merely because they have a name, and then you get the phenomena of racial hatred, of religious hatred, of class hatred, and so on indefinitely."[2] But whatever be the facts about other
- ↑ In every southern state and in nine northern and western states inter-marriage of the races is prohibited by law. In some states the prohibition is absolute, in others the fraction of negro blood is specified at one-fourth or one-eighth: Howard, History of Matrimonial Institutions, II, 398, 399, 438-44, 478, 479.
- ↑ International Journal of Ethics, April, 1906.
