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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 4. Racial Beliefs - 5. The Position of the Negro Writers
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94 An American Dilemma
American caste system. But for a much longer time they have had gifted
essayists well in touch with the trends in social sciences.. From the begin-
ning, Negro writers took the stand that the American dogma of racial
inequality was a scientific fake.*® The late Kelly Miller, particularly, knew
how to present the Negro’s case effectively. He had well digested the
anthropological criticism against the argument that the Negroes had never
produced a culture of their own in Africa and knew how to turn it around:
Because any particular race or class has not yet been caught up by the current of
the world movement is no adequate reason to conclude that it must forever fall
without the reach of its onward flow. If history teaches any clear lesson, it is that
civilization is communicable to the tougher and hardier breeds of men, whose
physical stamina can endure the awful stress of transmission. To damn a people to
everlasting inferiority because of deficiency in historical distinction shows the same
faultiness of logic as the assumption that what never has been never can be. The
application of this test a thousand years ago would have placed under the ban of
reproach all of the vigorous and virile nations of modern times,^^
and:
• • . history plays havoc with the vainglorious boasting of national and racial conceit.
Where are the Babylonians, the Assyrians and the Egyptians, who once lorded it
over the earth? In the historical recessional of races they are “one with Nineveh and
Tyre.” Expeditions must be sent from some distanct continent to unearth the glori-
ous monuments of their ancestors from beneath the very feet of their degenerate
descendants. The lordly Greeks who ruled the world through the achievements of
the mind, who gave the world Homer and Socrates and Phidias in the heyday of
their glory, have so sunken in the scale of excellence that, to use the language of
Macaulay, “their people have degenerated into timid slaves and their language into
a barbarous jargon.” On the other hand, the barbarians who, Aristotle tells us, could
not count beyond ten fingers in his day subsequently produced Kant and Shakespeare
and Newton,*®
Miller reminds his white countrymen:
Our own country has not escaped the odium of intellectual inferiority. The
generation has scarcely passed away in whose ears used to ring the standing sneer,
“Who reads an American book?” It was in the day of Thomas Jefferson that a
learned European declared: “America has not produced one good poet, one able
mathematician, one man of genius in a single art or science.” In response to this
charge Jefferson enters an eloquent special plea. He says: “When we shall have
existed as a people as long as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, the
Romans, a Virgil, the French, a Racine, the English, a Shakespeare and Milton,
should this reproach be still true, we will inquire from what unfriendly cause it has
proceeded.” How analogous to this is the reproach which you [Thomas Dixon, Jr.]
and Mr. Watson, treading the track of Thomas Nelson Page, and those of his school
of thought, now hurl against the Negro race? The lesponse of Jefferson defending
the American colonies from the reproach of innate inferiority will apply with
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