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THE WHY AND WHEREFORE OF VOLUME THREE OF SEX AND RACE

The question of why white and black do mate in spite of all opposition, or to be more precise, why certain white people should mate with black people, has intrigued me as far back as I can remember.

I grew up in a part of the world where there was not one color line, but several, none of which, however, was anything as near as rigid, perhaps, I had better say as violent, as in the United States.

At the very top of the social ladder were the European-born whites, principally British. There were no others like them in that island-world. Oh, felt the native white and near-whites, if we were only like them, born in England! The fact that such or such was born in England invested him with an aura little short of royalty. Even the black man who had been to England, if only as a sailor, was regarded as is a Mohammedan who has been to Mecca.

Next to the European were the native-born whites, some of whom were as fair as Europeans, but who, I later discovered, to my astonishment, had sometimes a colored grandmother still living. The European whites, because of the manner in which they were catered to by the native whites naturally looked down upon the latter, even when the native white was as fair. There was, for instance, the difference of accent. English accent, like English birth, also came first. Among my friends was a tall and very handsome native white man—I believe unmixed—golden-haired and blonde as any North European; one day when I said to an Englishman that this friend of mine was just as white as he, he replied with a touch of scorn, “Yes, until you hear him talk.”

As regards the mixed population, island society was, on the whole, graded, according to the degree of pigment in the skin, which meant that the unmixed black was, except in rare instances, at the foot of the ladder.

Even a slightly lesser degree of pigment constituted some touch of “nobility.” Once when a woman, rather dark, called another woman slightly fairer than herself by her first name, instead of “Mrs.” the latter placed her hand beside that of the darker woman and said indignantly, “How dare you? Look? Me and you not the same color.”

Such being the pride of race and color, I was extraordinarily struck by one thing, and that is, how some of the European whites, “the lords of creation,” sought out the unmixed black woman, a type that most of the mulattoes would not touch. Sometimes one would run across the Europeans, mostly English and German, cohabiting with the black women in the fields, or in their huts, soiled and dirty as they were. In fact, some of the older mulatto families, who, for no valid reason considered themselves superior to both the European whites and the blacks, regarded this cohabitation as just another proof of the supposed inferiority of both groups. Why, I kept asking myself, this glaring social contradiction.

In one district settled principally by Germans, I would see some of these well-fed, rosy-cheeked white men consorting with the coal-black women and having children by them. The mulatto women seemed to have had very little attraction for them. There was even an occasional marriage of a European to a black woman. I recall the case of a Scotch doctor, the leading social figure in one town, who had a Barbadian wife of ebony blackness.

The same was in a measure true of some of the European white women. Some of them had black husbands to whom they had been married while the husbands were studying in Europe. Marriages between the native white women and the light mulatto and quadroon men were not rare; but those between the native white women, as well as the light mulatto women, with black men were very much so.

Later, I lived in a garrison town where certain of the wives of the white non-commissioned officers went to hotels with the black soldiers of the garrison, all of which, as I said, puzzled me immensely. Why, I wanted to know, had these people who had been placed on a pedestal, should get off it, of their own free will, to associate with a people considered so “low” as the blacks.

Had I seen the blacks trying to reach the white men and women I could have understood it; but the blacks, on the whole, did not seem anxious to mate even with the mulatto women. Some black men told me that the mere thought of going with a white woman gave them a creepy feeling.

When I came to the United States my astonishment was, if anything, greater. There where the color-line was much stronger and where it was not so much the white man, as the white woman, who was put on a pedestal, I found some of the “deified” creatures mixing with coal-black men, whom, they sometimes preferred to mulattoes. Even in the South, where the very air seemed to exude the “sanctity” of the white woman, I saw white women and black men, meeting “under cover.” What’s more, when I read American history, I found that this sort of thing had gone on even when the black man was a slave.

Later, when I went to Europe, my astonishment continued, though it took a different turn. While there was no color prejudice anywhere on the Continent—there was some in England, but nothing like that of the United States—I wondered why should certain white men and women, some of whom had had little or no contact with black people, showed almost no visible aversion to them. I recall once going to a very fine French restaurant with an unmixed African, who was studying law in London, and the proprietor, who happened to be a good friend of mine, seated the African on a side-seat next to a white girl of dazzling appearance, and evidently of the upper-class. He had not been there a minute before she engaged him in conversation and seemed fascinated with him.

A case with which 1 was well acquainted was that of a European girl of multi-millionaire parentage, a blue-blood of the blue-bloods moving in the highest social circle, who had to my positive knowledge four American Negro intimates, and from reports there were others.

Whenever I saw a black man on the Continent—and the Africans were usually much darker than the Aframericans—he was almost invariably with a white woman, who was sometimes an ash-blonde. Much the same was true of the black women; they were nearly always with white men. Except during the Paris Intercolonial Exposition in 1931, when some Africans brought their wives, it was a rare thing to see a couple that was not mixed.

And not only in life but in literature I found many astonishing things of the way in which white people sought out the blacks. One passage that struck me more than the ordinary was one I quoted in Volume One where Dr. Shufeldt said that he knew a German of very fine education and good family who said he preferred a black woman to the finest white woman he had ever known and that he had not been backward in having what he wanted.

Another passage that impressed me even more—a recent one, however, —I found in Stuart Cloete’s Congo Song where a “strong, indefatigable, Aryan German, almost a god,” who heils Hitler and accepts his doctrine that Negroes are “half-apes,” has a great passion for black women. “He wanted Maria’s insatiable black flesh. He needed a woman—a black woman. The richness of that black ivory beneath him.”¹

Most remarkable of all the revelations of this passion that I found in literature—remarkable because it gave me a deeper understanding of what I had seen so much in real life—were three letters published in John Cameron Grant’s The Ethiopian in which a white woman reveals her innermost desires for mating with a Negro of simon-pure blackness. (She had advertised for such a lover in the daily press).

In the first letter, she says in part, “This longing has conquered me for a very long period. I have never known a man of your race and I feel an irresistible yearning to be possessed by a colored man. Knowing no one could introduce me, or cause me to know any Negroes, I made up my mind to advertise.

“When I did so I was not thinking of the strength of the black, although I have heard that many such men were so largely developed that they could have no intimacy with French women. I should not like you to think that this is what I am seeking. No, it is rather the reverse. Pardon me my slightly brutal expressions, but what I desire, what I wish to find is the following voluptuous pleasure, as yet unknown to me. I should like to place myself in the arms of a black man—intensely black—but not for a day or a night but for an infinity of nights devoted to love….”

Another letter reads in part, “I have desired for a long time to know a very black man. I often get laughed at about it for I am very communicative. I used to say when I was with close friends: ‘Oh, how I should like to sleep with a nigger.’ One day the husband of one of my friends said to me in front of the assembled company, ‘Well, I will black myself all over and come and see you.’ I answered him, ‘No, for I desire the complete illusion. I want to see a real handsome black man stark naked.’ ”

The third letter reads in part, “I must appear very strange to you. Here is a woman of Paris, where there are so many good-looking fellows, longing for a blackamoor. You must think that I cannot find any of my own tint to have the idea of loving deep black men….

“It would be very difficult for me to explain to you whence comes my passion for your race, especially when it is a rooted idea and not the caprice of a night.” In this same letter she adds later, “As much as I long for a man of your colour now, so much did I detest them about five or six years ago. At that moment I believe that if a Negro had tried to kiss me, I should have been ill through fright, and today I long to be able to satisfy this passion, too long restrained, at my ease.”

The letter continues in part, “I only desire that you open your black arms ready to receive me, and press me to you. Tell me the day and the hour you will expect me and I will come at once thrilling all over with emotion and throw myself in your embrace. … I will abandon myself to you, you in me. Come then, and take possession of my body. Press me in your dusky embrace …”²

Several writers in dealing with this passion have called it mere “lust.” But I asked myself why interracial “lust?” If mere sex satisfaction were the motive then these white persons could have found any number of their own “race” and with probably less trouble.

The significance of this kind of “lust” appeared even stronger to me when I discovered that it extended even to the homosexual relations, that there were white sex perverts of both sexes who preferred blacks to whites. I also learnt that in institutions as prisons and reformatories where the sexes are segregated, but the “races” aren’t, that this attraction of the white by the black also existed. For instance, J. L. Moreno, writing of the State Training Schools for Girls at Hudson, New York, says, “One form of attraction came to our attention, which, as far as we know, has never been analyzed. This is the sexual attraction of white girls to colored girls. … It is the white girl who almost invariably takes the initiative and courts the colored girl.” I shall have more to say on what Dr. Moreno says of this subject as well on what I, myself, have observed.

In dealing with this sexual attraction few scientists have been bold enough and frank enough to discuss it openly, or even to admit its existence, and these are chiefly Europeans as Havelock Ellis, Iwan Bloch, Owen Berkeley-Hill, Ian D. MacCrone, or Latin-Americans as Gilberto-Freyre. In this respect I wish to make special mention of MacCrone’s Race Attitudes in South Africa. This scientist, who is professor of psychology in the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, had the depth, the courage and the understanding to treat the matter as it is. In fact I found in his writings so many of the conclusions that I had come to myself over the years that I was both astonished and delighted.

He says, for instance, “Evidence of a more serious nature can be brought forward to show that the black does exercise a potent sexual attraction upon the white.” He tells how Negroes of both sexes were brought in numbers into the ancient Roman empire for the sexual satisfaction of white people; of how they were brought from Egypt to France during Napoleon’s conquest of that land for the same purpose; and of the American whites in Harlem, and adds, “The sexual attraction of the black for the white does exist and is a factor which deserves consideration….

“What is the source of this attraction both for white men and for white women and what effect does it have upon the attitude of the white men and women?” I shall give more in its proper place.

Interested also in knowing the universal cause—the deep inner why of happenings—I sought further and found two writers, one of the last century, and one of today, who gave satisfying answers. The first is Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who although he did not have the advantage of the researches of Darwin, Huxley, Wallace, and later scientists, saw so deeply into life that he was able to blaze out new paths for those who were to follow. What Schopenhauer has to say in a generalized way on the tendency of fair people to mate with dark opened up wide vistas of understanding for me. I shall give what he had to say on this in its proper place, also.

The second writer is J. R. Marett, professor of anthropology, Oxford University, England, in whose work “Race, Sex, and Environment,” I found a reason so logical that I do not know where to find a better.

Finally, let me say that I do not mean to say that the majority of white people wish to mate with Negroes, or that the majority of Negroes are seeking white people. I am merely trying to give the reason why those who wish to do so. Please remember also that my curiosity on this subject over more than forty years had led me into many likely and unlikely places, thereby permitting me to see somewhat more than the average individual. There is much more under the surface than those who live conventional lives and think conventional thoughts imagine. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

NOTE: For more extended research on racial intermixture as well as more recent happenings in that field see my “NATURE KNOWS NO COLOR-LINE” In which are reproductions of hundreds of coats-of-arms of noble European families including royalty in which are unmixed Negroes, evidently the ancestors of these families.

1 p. 300. 1943

2 p. viii-xii. 1935. The irony of this affair is that it was not a Negro, but a white man who answered her advertisement, and passed himself off as black, thus, her longings were not satisfied.