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Chapter Seven

THE “FOUR LAWS” OF RACE-MIXING

“Men are like bricks alike, but placed high or low by chance.” Webster.

HAVING seen arguments in great variety of pro and con offered by whites and Negroes of all classes, we shall now proceed to examine the subject in its more intimate detail.

As a basis for this, I can think of nothing better than the so-called four laws of race-mixing laid down by Lester F. Ward (1841-1913), the Father of American sociology, when discussing the rape of white women by black men as the supposed reason for lynching. Ward, it is true, wrote some fifty years ago but his view is still held not only by the masses but, I have reason to believe, by most of the white sociologists and certainly most Southern politicians and racial agitators. Since, therefore, it is popular opinion we are dealing with here, we shall examine these four “laws.” They are:

1. “The women of any race will freely accept the men of a race which they regard as higher than their own.”

2. “The women of any race will vehemently reject the men of a race which they regard as lower than their own.”

3. “The men of any race will greatly prefer the women of a race which they regard higher than their own.”

4. “The men of any race, in default of women of a higher race, will be content with women of a lower race.”¹

Roughly adapted they read:

1. “Negro women will freely accept white men.”

2. “White women will vehemently reject Negro men.”

3. “Negro men will greatly prefer white women.”

4. “Negro men, unable to get white women, will be content with Negro women.”

Do Negro Women Freely Accept White Men?

Taking the first law I suggest for concurrent consideration another “law” which I will as broadly state:

The women of any social status will freely accept the men of a status which they regard as higher than their own, that is, lower-class white women will freely accept upper-class white men²; and lower-class Negro women will freely accept upper-class Negro men; and so on with Chinese, Africans, Jews and other peoples. In all countries, primitive and civilized, wealth and social position are powerful factors in deciding a woman’s choice of husband or lover. As Byron says:

“Maidens, like moths, are ever caught by glare

And Mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair.”

In Europe and Asia, the beautiful untitled girl, rich or poor, if ambitious, dreams of marrying a lord. It is the old story of Cinderella and the prince. Sir Harry Johnston tells of the craze that existed among English girls of the lower middle class to marry into the African nobility, as Zulu princes and Ashanti noblemen.³ The white peasant woman thinks highly of an illegitimate child got by a lord or famous man and one suspects that the American 400 would not regard with too unmoral an eye a child got by one of its debutantes by a certain prince of the “royal” blood, when the latter visited America in the 1930’s.

The daughter of a lord, if ambitious, looks forward to carrying the son of a duke or prince; the daughter of a kinglet, as say one of the many little monarchies that used to exist in Germany looked forward to capturing a Prince of Wales, and so on.

There are, I believe, few dyed-in-the-wool Americans, who, however much they may turn up their noses, do not feel a certain elevation in being in the company of a titled person, even though he is bogus. Many are attracted to titles as a Solomon Islander to five-and-ten-cent jewelry, as note the slobbering of the American press over titled visitors.

Two notorious instances of American plutocrats being bamboozled by bogus lords come to mind; that of a stableman of the Emperor Franz Joseph II, who, posing as “Count Gregory of Austria,” ruled the American beau monde for ten years, extracting millions of dollars from it; and of a French cook, Edouard Rousselot, who, as a “marquis,” fleeced the elite of New York and Washington of large sums.⁴ “A smile from a lord,” says the old proverb, “is a breakfast for a fool.”

Now what titles or social positions are in Europe, Asia and other parts of the world, that is, the standard of social value, irrespective of mental or moral worth—the aristocrat may be a diseased rogue and yet be considered the superior of many an honest, healthy and intelligent man of the people—even so, in every respect, is a “white” or almost unpigmented epidermis in the United States of America. As rank in Europe is generally a passport to superior opportunities, so is a white epidermis in America. As in Europe the commoner is forced to look up to the lord, so in the United States, the majority of Negroes are forced in various ways to look up to, or to bow, to white. In short, “white” ideas predominate as in Europe titular ones do.

In Europe there are few noblemen who do not feel hurt if mistaken for a commoner; and few commoners in Europe or America who would not be pleased if mistaken for a lord. Again, there are few mistresses in a household who would not feel insulted if mistaken for the maid—a reason why many prefer Negro maids—and few maids who would not be pleased if taken for the mistress.

Similarly in the United States few white persons would not be incensed if taken for a Negro. In Virginia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Georgia, and all those states where centuries of race-mixing give color to the allegation, to question a white man’s color is like questioning a woman’s chastity. In the first three states and in Oklahoma, it is a libel, according to the Supreme Court of these states, to call one presumably white, a Negro, as in Nazi Germany it was a gross libel to call an “Aryan” a Jew. In 1929, Professor Fuenfkircker of the University of Budapest sued editors of the Budapest “Who’s Who” for listing him as a Jew, and the judge in awarding him the verdict, ordered confiiscated 6,700 copies of the book.

Furthermore, in Europe, the one who works hard is said to toil “like a peasant”; in America, “like a nigger.” The Negro who has a good position will boast that he has “a white man’s job,” quite mindless of the fact that the wages of most white men doing the same kind of work is higher than his and that the United States with its highest paid workers contains but a sixth of the white race.

The result of all this is to create a powerful bias in the mind of the female, white or black, in favor of the white man. Of course, we’re speaking only of present conditions and not of slavery days when white prestige among Negroes was much higher than now.

To pursue the comparison: As in Europe certain commoners wish to enter lordly society, and those in that group are doing all they can to bar them because they believe them inferior; as certain rich in the United States are doing their best to enter aristocratic American circles, as say buying boxes in the Golden Horse Shoe, and getting into certain clubs, and those in that circle are fighting to keep them out because they deem them inferior; even so are the more aspiring Negroes trying to get certain advantages from a dominant group, incidentally white, and that group is doing its best to bar them, because it believes them inferior. It is in this sense that Ward‘s first law of racial intermixture is true—a law, which, in its final sense is, as was said, an economic one. In short, it is but a matter of human beings, regardless of so-called race, shunning what they have been taught to consider disadvantageous, and seeking that which they are taught to consider advantageous.

RACE-MIXING IN AFRICA

XII. The Rev. George Grenfell, who had a Negro wife. (See Sex and Race, Vol. I Chap. 14).

In the above analysis, however, it is seen that false values can be set above real ones; that a diseased and inferior white man, provided he belongs to a “good” family may, in Europe, be set above a healthy and intelligent white man who comes from a humble one; that, in America, a diseased social parasite, who, perhaps never did a useful thing in his life may have advantages that a healthy working-man may not; and that the most vicious ex-criminal, provided he has a white skin, will be permitted advantages as entrance to certain hotels, parks, libraries, bathing beaches, trade unions, railway cars, from which the most intelligent and worthy citizen would be barred if he had a “colored” skin.

A social value is not necessarily a biological one. Values created by man may be in direct opposition to natural ones—values such as are conducive to the health and happiness of the human race. The deduction, therefore, is that there is no real difference between a woman, incidentally white, who surrenders herself to a white man she has been taught to believe is of a higher social order; and that of a woman, incidentally colored, who surrenders herself to a man of a group she has been taught to believe superior. Both are identical cases of love dazzled by economic advantage. As Dr. Jacobus X says, “The love of the Negro woman for the white man, though it is flattering to her pride, is rather an affection of the head than of the heart.”⁵

A large number of Christianized Negro women would prefer a white man as husband or lover, especially the former. This will be strongly denied in the United States, but it is true of the West Indies and South America where weakness of the color bar makes such marriages possible.

Hannibal Thomas, a Negro who served in the Civil War, tells how the Negro women, who had all along been going with white Southerners, flocked to the camps of the Union soldiery for infamous riot with white Northerners.⁶

Will one say that there is any fundamental difference between the colored woman south of the Rio Grande, and the one north of it; indeed, that there is any well-defined psychic difference between women of the different varieties of the human race? The colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady, no matter what their color are forever sisters under the skin. The sole difference I have been able to discover between white American women and colored ones, for example, is that the latter usually have an inferiority complex, while the former have a superiority complex.

As was said, the majority of Negro women, whenever their group comes into competitive contact with the whites, consciously and unconsciously, prefer a white man, because of the better advantages to be gained for themselves and their offspring, that is, it is a matter of protective coloration as among the so-called lower animals.

A large number of colored women, and the number is increasing rapidly, believe that in order for their children to be of any consequence, they must be light-skinned and flossy-haired. At any rate, they will find it easier to love them if they are. That is to say, if they had their choice they would have preferred the child’s father to be white or near-white.

I once heard a full-blood Negro preacher tell an outdoor audience composed almost wholly of his own color, “Any time a woman of your color have a child for you she sho’ does love you.” The crowd applauded.

A black man of social standing rarely, if ever, marries a woman of his own complexion. In the West Indies one who does so would be charged with having done nothing to elevate his race. The slogan there is: Raise the color. In New York I once heard a prominent colored woman blame the black West Indians there for continuing to have so many black children.

The bias of the Aframerican woman is decidedly toward having light-colored children with straight hair. Negro hair is quite popularly described as “bad” hair, and is disappearing, at least to outward appearance, under a flood of anti-kink preparations. Black children, in orphan asylums, stand a better chance of adoption by white women than by colored women. The latter select the lightest babies, which they will wheel down the street with great pride.

It is important to note, however, that had these women been reared in Africa, their selection would have been just the reverse; it would have been progressively toward black, that being the color of the chiefs.

Shooter wrote of the black of Natal, South Africa, in 1857, when they had much less contact with the whites than now. “Dark complexions as being most common are naturally held in high esteem. To be told that he is light-colored or like a white man would be deemed a poor compliment to a Kafir.”⁷ Certain ethnologists class the Ethiopians as white, that also would be considered no compliment. Indeed, I knew Ethiopians who would be as highly insulted if called a natch, or white man, as there are white Southerners who would be if called a “nigger.”

Henry M. Stanley, the famous explorer, said that he found at the court of the noted King Mtesa of Uganda that the light-colored women were not specially favored. Of three of the most comely of the twenty beauties he saw there, he said, “They had the complexions of quadroons, were straight-nosed and thin-lipped with large lustrous eyes. In the other graces of a beautiful form they excelled and Hafiz might have said with poetic rapture that they were ‘straight as palm trees and beautiful as moons.’ The only drawback was their hair—the short, crisp hair of the Negro race—but in all other points they might be exhibited as the perfection of beauty which Central Africa can produce.” The king, however, said Stanley, did not think these three girls any more beautiful, or “superior, or even equal” to his other flat-nosed, black wives and that one day when he pointed them out to the king as being especially beautiful the king “even regarded them with a sneer.”⁸

In Negro Africa, the married women shun a white man “like the devil,” roundly abusing those who make advances to them, fearing visible proof of unfaithfulness. On the other hand, in America, it is no uncommon sight to see a married woman with a child very much lighter than herself or her husband.

1 Ward, L. F., Pure Sociology, pp. 358-60. 1911.

2 For good treatment of caste within the white “race” itself see Prof. E. A. Ross, “Caste and Class,” American Jour. of Sociology, Vol. 22, pp. 467-76; 594-608;

3 Johnston, H. H., Negro In The New World, pp. 462n. 1910.

4 For how one Negro potato-peeler, posing as a prince, fooled the American 400, see Sex and Race, Vol. II, pp. 359-62 1942.

5 For additional confirmation of this, see Sex and Race, Vol. 2, p. 403, 1942, especially what Lady Dorothy Mills says.

6 For the exact quotation and additional instances, see Sex and Race, Vol. II, pp. 260-62. 1942.

7 Kafirs of Natal, p. 1. 1857.

8 Through the Dark Continent, Vol. 1, p. 308. 1878.