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IS THE NEGRO INFERIOR?

All flesh is not the same flesh;

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Star differeth from star in glory.

I. Cor. xv. 39, 41

In the foregoing discussion, it did not seem well to interrupt the current of thought by any proof of the assumed inferiority of the Negro, or of the degeneracy induced by the intermixture of types too widely diverse.

Yet these assumptions are, indeed, the two hinges of the whole controversy. Once conceded the racial inferiority of the Black and the half-way nature of the half-breed, and the general contention of the South is proved, her general attitude justified. It is not strange, then, that the doughtiest champions of equality, in their very latest deliverances, find no choice left them but to deny that the Negro is an inferior or a backward race.

Such, by way of high example, are two world-renowned metropolitan journals, whose general excellence and powerful influence for good in our civic life cannot be disputed, but whose intense straining for Justice and Equity in the present has utterly blinded them no less to obvious facts and principles of science than to the highest and holiest rights of humanity in the future. The one, in speaking of racial "inferiors," incloses the word in contemptuous guillemets and declares that when Mr. Darwin says: "Some of them—for instance, the negro and the European—are so distinct that, if specimens had been brought to a naturalist without any further information, they would undoubtedly have been considered by him as good and true species," he "raises no question of superior or inferior;" and it adds, "Nature knows no forward or backward races, fauna or flora"—an oracle whose real meaning can only be guessed at.

The other is more specific. It maintains: "Physically, the negro is equal to the Caucasian. He is as tall and as strong. He has all the physical basis and all the brain capacity necessary for the development of intellectual power. … No evidence has yet been adduced which proves that the Negro is physically, intellectually, essentially, necessarily an inferior race." … "The assumption that the Caucasian is an essentially superior race … is provincial, unintelligent and unchristian."

When we first meet with such denials, we are almost dumbfounded; we rub our eyes and exclaim with Truthful James: