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REMARKS ON THE FIRST TWO VOLUMES OF SEX AND RACE

“Our race is essentially slavish; it is the nature of all of us to believe blindly in what we love, rather than that which is most wise. We are inclined to look upon an honest, unshrinking pursuit of truth as something irreverent. We are indignant when others pry into our idols and criticize them with impunity, just as a savage flies to arms when a missionary picks his fetish to pieces.”… Galton.

Certain orthodox scholars, white and colored, have not liked the history as given in the two preceding volumes of “Sex and Race,” as well as in my earlier books. One English editor after reading the “100 Amazing Facts About the Negro,” wrote me that it made him feel as if the white race had never accomplished anything. Others said that I claim everybody who has ever done anything as Negro, nevertheless, I had never said, or dreamed of saying, that Homer, or Pericles, or Aeschylus, or Julius Caesar, or Alfred the Great, Shakespeare, Milton, Michael Angelo, Bach, Handel, Wagner, Washington, Lincoln, Edison, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Einstein or thousands of other noted white men were of Negro ancestry; nor did I attribute to Negroes any role of any importance in Europe, itself, from say the sixteenth century onwards. Yet because I mention a few individuals, whom they had all along believed to be of unmixed white strain, I have been called “fantastic” and “credulous!”

And I have been ridiculed not on the result of research, not on examination of the sources which I have given abundantly, but on sheer belief. These scholars did not happen to run across such facts in their reading, in a word, the research I had done was off the beaten track of the college curriculum, therefore, it did not exist.

Perhaps I exaggerate, perhaps I am really being fantastic when I say this of the orthodox scholars, well, I shall give a not uncommon illustration and let the reader judge for himself.

In 1943, Gunnar Myrdal, noted economist of the University of Stockholm, Sweden, aided by 75 experts, working for five years, completed for the Carnegie Corporation at a cost of $209,000, a work on the race problem entitled “An American Dilemma” and published by Harper and Brothers. On page 1393 of this book (1st ed.) I am listed as an example of those who write “pseudo-history, fantastically glorifying the achievements of Negroes.”

On what grounds was this judgment arrived at? On anything I had written? No, I was judged on a non-existent book—a book that no mortal could ever have seen.

Here are the facts: In 1927, I finished a manuscript entitled “This Mongrel World, A Study of Negro-Caucasian Mixing In All Ages and All Countries.” At about that time I was asked to fill out a blank for “Who’s Who in Colored America,” and intending to publish the manuscript soon I listed it as being published. However, circumstances prevented my doing so. Thirteen years later, due to the much greater research I had done on the subject, I changed the title to “Sex and Race.” Parts of the manuscript I used in Volumes One and Two of that work and discarded most of the rest. In short, when “An American Dilemma” was published not even the manuscript of “This Mongrel World” existed. Nevertheless this non-existent manuscript is listed as a published book in Myrdal’s bibliography. What had happened? In reading through my biographical sketch in “Who’s Who in Colored America,” Myrdal, or some of his assistants, saw the title and on that alone condemned me. Not a word was said of any of my published books. They probably didn’t take the trouble to look into any of them.

Now what is the difference between an attitude of this sort and that of any uneducated man, or any bigot, who would similarly condemn Myrdal’s work, or that of any other scientist in such off-hand manner? So far as I am concerned, none whatever.

Furthermore, though I have no philanthropist or foundation, or staff of experts behind me, I go to as great pains as any of the most conscientious of these experts to get my facts straight, checking and re-checking, and travelling hither and yon to see with my own eyes whenever possible what I am writing about; and quoting only from the original sources and from those I have reason to believe are the most reliable. One can do no more. Of course, there will always be errors, but when seventy-six experts, working with unlimited funds as in “An American Dilemma,” make errors surely a lone worker, like myself, might be forgiven a few.

Another reason why some object to the facts as given in my books is that they feel that their own learning is being impeached. If such facts were true, why, they certainly would have known them. One able Negro musician, who had a fine education in England, admitted to me later that when he heard me say for the first time that Beethoven was colored, he was “offended.” Had he not long been acquainted with Beethoven?

In 1930 while I was carrying in the Negro press a series of articles on great Negroes, an Aframerican, studying in Germany, and now a college professor, wrote the Pittsburgh Courier, leading Negro weekly, that my stories were dubious even though I had included Bilal, Dumas, Pushkin, General Dodds, Chevalier de St. George, Henri Diaz, and others who are very plainly mentioned in biographies as being of Negro ancestry. The simple truth is that he didn’t know the first thing of the true ancestry of these individuals but never having heard it, why, that alone made what I said false. As for my statement that the Virgin Mary and Christ were once worshipped as black and that at the present time pilgrimages are made to the shrines of the Black Virgins in France, Spain, and even in Germany, that seemed a veritable Munchausen tale, One Negro columnist, a Catholic, actually resented the idea that the Madonna could have been black. Had he not all his life seen her depicted as white?

Still another reason for their rejecting my researches is that they didn’t want the present knowledge in their brains disturbed. They had been taught that the Negro’s position in history had been that of a slave and it was much more pleasant to go on believing that than to investigate.

Race prejudice is responsible too, in part. There are those who at the merest mention that this or that noted person was, or might have been, of Negro ancestry, at once set their backs up like an angry cat. So racial are such people that when one attributes Negro ancestry even to an ancient Greek or Egyptian it is “social equality”—a lowering of their own personal dignity. One white woman angrily resented the idea that Alexander Dumas, the great novelist, could possibly have been of Negro ancestry.

The classic example of this sort, however, is Mary Preston, a Southern white woman, whose readings on Shakespeare were popular in her day. Miss Preston twisted “Othello” to suit herself. While admitting that Shakespeare did make Othello “black,” that was positively not what Shakespeare meant so far as she was concerned. She said (italics hers): “In studying the play “Othello” I have always imagined its hero a white man. It is true the dramatist paints him black, but this shade does not suit the man. It is a stage decoration which my taste discards; a fault of color from an artistic point of view. I have, therefore, as I before stated in my readings of this play, dispensed with it. Shakespeare was too correct a delineator of human nature to have colored Othello black if he had personally acquainted himself with the idiosyncracies of the African race. We may regard, then, the daub of black upon Othello’s portrait as an ebullition of fancy, a freak of imagination—the visionary concept of an ideal figure … Othello was a white man.”¹

Wherein we ask does such an attitude differ from that of any blind believer in revealed religion?

Of course this attitude is hugely amusing. It is one of a piece, too, with the feeling of certain Gentiles when they take up a book on Jewish biography and see for the first time that this or that great pioneer, scientist, or soldier whom they had all along fancied to be non-Jewish was a Jew.

The result of this attitude toward “Negro” history is that the better-known historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, with few exceptions, have been great claimers of Negroid peoples as white. The idea has been to maintain white supremacy. Pick up any national or world history and you’ll find even the Ethiopians, who such early writers as Xenophanes, Aristotle, Herodotus and Strabo, tell us were black and wooly-haired, that is, the type now called Negro, are white. They still say the Ethiopians are white though they are uniformly blacker and more wooly-haired than the American Negroes.

Whenever, too, Negroes are mentioned as having appeared anywhere, whether in prehistoric America, the Caucasus, or Albania, they are invariably spoken of as “slaves.” For instance, Ignatius Donnelly in trying to prove that the so-called New World was known to the people of the Old reproduces from the ancient Mexican monuments certain portraits of Negroes which he calls “idols.”² But in the same breath he says they were “slaves” who “were brought to America at a very remote epoch.” (Please note the contradiction: “slaves” who were “idols!”) His reason for saying they were slaves is that “Negroes have never been a sea-going race,” for which statement he hasn’t a shred of evidence. Of course, the “slave” had to be brought in to square with white imperialism and the exploitation of the darker peoples even though what he mentions occurred in prehistoric times. The Negro must always be marked down so that his labor can be had in the cheapest market.

The motive for this twisting of history is that white imperialism must be shown a sbeing of old, aristocratic ancestry. This imperialism was built upon the backs of the darker races. A noted example was the British empire, of whose 500,000,000 people, eighty percent are colored. Now some of these colored people as the Ethiopians, Egyptians, East Indians, and Moors were the originators of Western civilization; they were highly civilized when the Europeans were savages³—a fact that cannot be denied as long as the works of Julius Caesar and Tacitus exist. But it would never do to show that the lord and master once had very humble beginnings so it must be shown that the originators of civilization were white—that the white has always been on top. Therefore, for the purposes of adding lustre to white imperialism, the Ethiopians, Egyptians and the others are called “white” but for the purposes of profit they are treated as colored. Thus the white imperialist eats his cake and has it too.

It is a blow to the pride of certain white Americans, Englishmen, and Germans to hear it said that peoples and individuals they had all along fondly believed to be “pure” white were not so. Because I said on the testimony of white people who knew Beethoven, as well as on reports of his ancestry by German scholars, that he showed evidence of Negro strain, I have received letters as cross as if I had attacked the writers themselves.

Any talk of Negro progress angers many. If the blacks advance who will they have to be better than? There will go their splendid isolation of fancied superiority. Even worse, they already see themselves losing out, a state of mind expressed by Bacon when he said, “Men of noble birth are noted to be envious towards new men when they arise for the distance between them is altered and it is like a deceit of the eye that when others come on they think themselves go back.”

So thorough has been the penetration of white imperialist propaganda that only a small percentage of the white or the colored in any part of Western civilization today have any idea that any other than white people had a hand in the origin of civilization. Although I had been an omnivorous reader from my earliest years I was well past twenty before it began to dawn upon me that the darker peoples could have had a part in it. Even now I can recall my astonishment when this occurred to me.

Even as the white manufacturers have bleached out our salt, sugar, flour, so the white historian has bleached out world history. The dark or mineral portion has been rejected. Of course this process has produced a product beautifully pleasing to the eyes of those who have been psychologized to admire it, but which, nevertheless, is constipative and harmful to the mental digestion.

But as there are those who, realizing the value of the minerals that have been rejected from our foods, have placed them in again, thereby increasing the health value, as say how bran has been restored to the bleached, starved-out white bread, so in like manner I have attempted to gather up the Negro, or dark, rejected portion of history in the hope that some day they will be restored to world history, thereby permitting a less clogging effect on the mind.

Such being my purpose I do not ever claim that I am writing world or national history. Call it the bran of history if you will. As for those who will regard this “bran” as proving that the white race has never accomplished anything and that the Negro did everything. I can do nothing about it.

I can say, in addition, that I dislike too much the whitening of history; I have too great a loathing for racial propaganda, even knowingly to indulge in it. Moreover, the facts I have given have been culled nearly always from white writers, some of them very ancient, who related facts as they saw them, and who did not worship at the shrine of white imperialism, or did not think of the effect of what they said would have in later years.

To get those little known facts I have travelled tens of thousands of miles in many lands; consulted books and printed matter so vast in number that were I to try to say how many I would sound like a Munchausen; visited the leading museums of many of the civilized lands, and engaged in research in their libraries and ever going to great pains to get my facts as humanly correct as possible. In short, I felt I have looked into books and dug up buried knowledge that many college professors or doctors of philosophy do not know exist, because just as there is a life in the deeper depths of the ocean of which the average fisherman knows nothing so there are depths in the ocean of research of which some of the most learned have never dreamed. For instance, it is estimated that in the National Library of France alone there are 8,000,000 books and pieces of printed matter. How much does the most educated man now alive know of the totality of knowledge in these books? Very, very little. One is ever learning. Truly, as Sir Isaac Newton once said as he looked out on the ocean that there he was picking up pebbles on the beach as it were while the vast ocean of unexplored knowledge lay before him.

Those who will forget their orthodoxy for a while and read my books might not find them so fantastic after all. And even should they reject them they might still profit to the extent of knowing the arguments on the other side and thus be able to refute them, not by denunciation, but in a manner more compatible with common sense.

I hasten to add that I am not accusing all the leading historians of catering to white imperialism. Some as H. G. Wells, Hendrik Van Loon, and Arnold J. Toynbee, have made striking utterances against race prejudice. I believe that these latter accepted the popular white view of history without thinking that there was another side. As the New World was not on the charts of the scholars prior to Columbus so the achievements of the Negro and Negroid peoples were not on theirs.

Furthermore, there are white writers as Volney, Godfrey Higgins, Gerald Massey, Henry M .Stanley, David Livingstone, and Frobenius, greatest of all the Africanologists, who gave a perspective of Negro history that is increasingly found to be the truth. Why, we ask, were the works of these men by-passed by Wells and Toynbee? Were what they said of the Negro in history too fantastic to be considered?

For instance, Toynbee, who is one of the most unprejudiced of historians, attributes a civilization even to the Polynesian but denies any to the Negro. He says, “When we classify Mankind by color, the only one of the primary races … which has not made a creative contribution to any of our twenty-one civilizations is the Black Race …

“The Black Race has not helped to create any civilization while the Polynesian White Race has helped to create one civilization, the Brown Race two, the Yellow Race three, the Red Race and the Nordic Whit Race four apiece, the Alpine White Race nine, and the Mediterranean White Race ten.”⁴

What is the Polynesian White Race? There is no such people. The Polynesians, prior to the migration of white people to their islands, were chiefly of mixed Negro and Mongolian strain, with probably a slight admixture of white strain from Asiatic Russia. The Paris Museum of Ethnology in the Jardin des Plantes has what is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive collection of casts of Polynesian types from nearly all the islands and they are shown to be what would be loosely called Negroes in the United States. Of course, much white “blood” has been mixed in with the South Sea islander since these casts were made over a century ago. Gobineau calls the Polynesians black and he was right at the time he wrote.

Let me express here once again my theory of so-called race. It is this: There is a single human race, which by imperceptible degrees shades from the blond of the Scandinavian to the blackness of the Senegambian or the Solomon Islander with the Sicilian or the Maltese somewhere in the centre. Some peoples as the Portuguese are nearer to the blond, while others as those of Mauretania or Southern India are nearer to the black, therefore, when I see anywhere, no matter where, an individual whose appearance is Negroid, that it, if his facial contour, his lips, nose, hair, present what a lifetime of observation has taught me are signs of Negro inheritance, I say that that person had a Negro ancestor near or distant according to the Negroid signs he presents. One’s ancestry, I know, does not come out of the air, but is a reality of realities.

Similarly, if I see anywhere an individual whose appearance is Caucasian, that is, his lips, nose, hair, etc., present what a lifetime of observation has taught me are signs of “unmixed” Caucasian inheritance, I set that person down as white. If it is logical to speak of Caucasian strain among Negroes it is just as logical to speak of Negro strain among Caucasians. In this latter respect the Nazi anthropologists are at least right.

For instance, I once attended a reception given to an American Negro publisher and his wife in London. The latter was very fair and in her evening gown looked whiter in skin and more regular in profile than some of the Englishwomen present. If I attributed Negro ancestry to the publisher’s wife, whose mother was undoubtedly colored, what should I have said of these Englishwomen who were more colored than she is in appearance?

One may sometimes find Negro ancestry where one least expects it. Take Colette, France’s leading woman writer. She is blonde and to all appearances a European. Only a very experienced eye would discover signs of a strain not “pure” Nordic in her. Yet she had a Negro ancestor. When I said that in 1930, I was again charged with claiming all noted white persons as Negroes. But who said it first? Colette, herself.⁵ The European, unlike the American, is not inclined to hide his Negro strain, if any. Also J. Larnac in his biography of her says that she inherited some Negro strain from her grandfather (“tenant de son grandpère un peu de sang coloré”). Her mother, “Madame Colette,” he says, “is the daughter of Sophie Celeste Chatenay and a colored man with violet fingernails, who manufactured chocolates in Belgium, Henri Marie Landay.”^5a If Colette, who is so blonde, has a Negro strain, I fail to see where the same would be impossible in the case of Beethoven, who did show Negro ancestry.

Again, there are those dear souls who will say that I exaggerate when I call these apparently white persons “Negroes.” Would such kindly address themselves to the United State Census Bureau which decrees that if one has a known Negro ancestor, he is a Negro. The wife of the Negro editor mentioned above, was listed as a Negro. And the unwritten law is that if one is known to be of such ancestry, however distant, he is at once marked down. As long as this “one drop” theory remains refutation of alleged Negro inferiority must follow the arbitrary lines set by the Bureau of the Census.

However, no one can possibly know what so-called racial elements enter into his make-up. O. A. Wall estimated that the total number of one’s ancestors since the time of Christ was around 144 quadrillions, and said that if one did not count the intermarriage of relatives the figure would be 288,230,376,151,711,742.⁶ Thus since life goes back at least a million years the ancestors of any individual would be as many as the sands of the sea or the stars of the firmament.

Talk of a pure race after that!

I, furthermore, visualize changes in human types as I visualize changes in cosmography, that is, as land that was once at the bottom of the sea now rears lofty peaks among the Alps and the Himalayas and vice versa; and as lands that were once tropical are now frigid, all due to the eternal change in Nature, so peoples who were once black are now white, and the opposite. Or to use a symbol: As parts of the earth are white or black or intermediate tints depending on whether such parts are facing, or are behind, or are sideways to the sun, so, in cosmic time it is with the coloring of the human race.

That humanity is one, that the earliest human beings were of a single color, is evident to even the Australian Bushman, supposedly the lowest in intelligence on earth. Dr. Berkeley Hill says they believe “that a white man is only one of themselves re-born. ‘Tumble-down black fellow, jump up white fellow’, is the common phrase among them “to express this belief,” he says.

There are two principal sides to every question both of which when mixed together go to form the truth as oxygen and hydrogen to form water. My aim is to glean from both sides, using experience and an open mind as my guide. Because one is definitely opposed to our theory, he is not necessarily wrong, and because one favors us, neither does that make him right.

Everything that is, is truth by sheer force of its existence. Therefore by truth I mean that principle, which, at every moment, upholds the right of each individual, regardless of whoever or whatever he may be, to equality of dignity and opportunity, in short, equal justice.

As regards the term, Nature, I use it in no anthropomorphic sense. I do not think of it as a deity but as meaning the totality of all things—that unknown Force which is forever being unfolded, and within which lies the destiny of all things. The term, Nature, is inadequate of course, but since it is impossible to find a correct name that seems to me as good as any other.

I have also tried to get away from the crass materialism of Western civilization, which because of its eagerness to get hold of material things is forever rending itself and bringing untold misery on itself and all mankind. Three appallingly catastrophic wars in a quarter of a century!

Happily, there is a certain trend in the West today towards the animism of the East and of Africa, to explore into and to make one’s self a part of the great inner forces of Nature. For the really cultured Western thinker of today, a bit of board is no longer just board but a segment of the universe seething with the life of the atom; trees are no longer just trees but breathing organisms, marvellous with their own psychology, their own loves and aversions; bees, insects, spiders, animalculae are discovered to have histories almost as intricate and hardly less interesting than those of man; cats, dogs, apes, elephants are discovered to have intelligence which has been cut out of the same cloth, so to speak, as man’s. Though its reach is far lower, it operates essentially the same, all intelligence, human and animal, being but a part of the Great Whole.

Finally, as regards human beings, we are getting farther and farther away from the old “science” of physiognomy, and are appraising individuals, not on their looks, but on their acts. We are learning that to gauge intelligence by skull measurement, size of brain, skin color and hair are the sheerest infantilism, no matter how high the reputation of the scientist who advances such theories.

Let not those who think they are up be jealous of those who have been down and are rising. Let them rather rejoice that the human race, of which we are all part, is advancing. Let the thrill of feeling superior come not as the result of looking down on others but in seeing them rise, and in knowing that we are in a position to help them to do so.

To love one’s fellow-man is the beginning of all true wisdom and the end of war, the greatest of all insanities.

In the better days that are coming it will be immaterial what color or what race of human beings did this or that great thing. This insanity of color fastened on us by the Virginia slaveholder and the New England slave-dealer will pass as other fantastic theories have passed. In the meantime the reciting of Negro accomplishment, past and present, will be necessary to counteract anti-Negro propaganda even as the reciting of Jewish accomplishment is a foil to anti-Semitism.

1 Studies in Shakespeare, p. 71. 1869. Apropos of this a noted psychoanalyst once objected to my saying during a discussion period that when Shakespeare said, “Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies eyes,” he actually meant black men. No, he said, there were no Negroes in England in Shakespeare’s time, and he was positive about, it. I informed him that there was not only Negro slavery in England at the time but that G. B. Harrison, an Elizabethan authority, thinks that Shakespeare, himself, had a Negro sweetheart. (For sources see Sex and Race, Vol. 1, p. 201, 1941, and Vol. II, p. 400.)

2 Donnelly, I. Atlantis, pp. 174-5. 1882.

3 Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon say, “It is asserted vociferously in certain quarters that the Nordic ‘race’ is gifted above all others with initiative and originality and that the great advances in civilization have been due to Nordic genius.

“What are the facts? The fundamental discoveries on which civilization is built are the art of writing, agriculture, the wheel and building in stone. All these appear to have originated in the Near East, among peoples who by no stretch of the imagination could be called Nordic or presumed to have but the faintest admixture of Nordic or proto-Nordic genes.” (We, Europeans, p. 94, 1935).

4 Toynbee, A. J. A Study of History, Vol. I, p. 234. 1934.

5 La Maison de Claudine, p. 99. 1922.

5a Colette, pp. 11, 17, 18. 1927. See also Sex and Race, Vol. I, p. 240. 1941

6 Sex and Sex Worship, pp. 304-06. 1922. I do not see, however, where the intermarriage of relatives would affect the computation of one’s ancestors except in the cases of those who are the product of incest, and that only in the case of where brother weds sister. Even if a man cohabited with his mother and had children by her as the ancient Britons used to do (at least that is what I infer from Caesar when he said that fathers and sons had the same wives), it seems to me something else would enter into the ancestry of the child. And there is no doubt of it when first cousin marries first cousin. The uncle or the aunt of the latter would have wed someone not related to the family, thus creating new combinations of genes. One has, it is true, only eight great-grandparents but we must not forget that behind each one of these stood enough millions of ancestors probably to go around the world several times. Truly, as Einstein has said, the number of one’s ancestors is “astronomical.”

Caesar’s statement on incest among the ancient Britons reads, “Groups of ten or twelve men have wives together in common and particularly brothers along with brothers and fathers with sons.” (Gallic Wars, Bk. V. 14.)