 | |
| |
| |
|
Nothing has been more provocative of international ill will than problems springing from, and directly and indirectly related to, the phenomena of caste, class and race. From one point of view, World War 2 was fought to decide the validity of the claims of Hitler’s gang that their “racial” background entitled them to reorganize Europe and the world under the leadership of the “superior” Nazi Aryans. Similarly, the Japanese Jingoists fought the war in order to prove to themselves and to the rest of the world that they had the right to dominate the Asiatic continent as a “super-race”.
Important though the racial differences between the Occident and the Orient may be, the peoples of the world, and especially the American people, might also give greater consideration to problems closer to home. These may not have the dramatic interest that international relations possess, but they come closer to precipitating actual trouble. The most challenging aspects of these racial, religious, and linguistic groups, which constitute “minorities” in the midst of more numerous and dominating populations, have much to do with the underlying hatreds and machinations that furnish the background of the bitter social conflicts of the post-World War 2 years. They remain – tragic though it seems at the beginning of the first post-World War 2 decade – a continued source of trouble. Though frontiers have changed, their alternation far too often has resulted only in the accentuation of the general problem which confronts the world today. And the revolt of the millions of the non-Europeans against the rule of the white man, as especially exemplified in India, indicates that the old formula of domination, utilising the old-fashioned concepts of arrangements benefiting the ruling cliques of a few imperialistic nations, has to be drastically revised.
Obviously, while we are prone to regard the questions of caste, class and race as almost exclusively non-American problems, there is an aspect of these problems which confronts the American people as a challenge to the democratic principles and practices which, we insist, should serve as substantial and living examples to the other peoples as the best ways of life. Yet our difficulties in this field have not been solved and the gigantic Negro problem needs not only to be considered but also solved as America’s burning question par excellence. The need of dealing with them is overwhelmingly pressing. The development of greater knowledge of the world significance of the question becomes of prime importance to domestic and international good will.
The approach to the problem makes the present examination of the issues of caste, class, and race relations most opportune. The point of view- that of an American familiar with actualities yet given the detachment of American scholarship- should commend itself to those who seek enlightenment. The treatment corrects many minor errors of other writers and presents a clear and straightforward picture of its subject. Those who have never found time to go through other books on the topic will learn from it much they never knew.
In other words, this is a lively book with virtues of more ordinary degree. An astonishing amount of research has gone into its making and in its wider implications and the volume opens vistas not yet scanned. At a time of enforced re-evaluation, such as we are at present undergoing, however unconscious, we are of it,, this book is greatly needed not only in our schools but also by all Americans who can bear the unpleasant truth about the world-wide implications of the acute problems of caste, class, and race facing us and the globe.
Great wars are crisis situations which seek to resolve summatory antagonisms between peoples and which always result in more or less accommodation between them and more or less significant internal social changes. There are certain characteristics of war which may be found to be typical in all great national struggles, even as far back as the conquests of the major dynastic pharaohs of Egypt. Indeed, it is possible to think of war as having its basis in some instinctual residue of human nature. These apparently common traits of war, however, do not tell us very much about it as an immediate social problem; they are likely to lead pessimistic generalizations about its inevitability.
Wars are significantly functions of social systems, and it is especially by a study of these systems that we can know something about their peculiar nature and social determinants. Peoples in Western society do not go to war for the same causes as those which actuated the early Hindus; in fact, with the rise of capitalist civilization, the nations of Western society began to go to war on different grounds from those which incited the rulers of medieval society. World War 2 initiated a new era international sensitiveness, because the primary irritants had never existed in the world before. Feudal wars may be thought of as involving typically the personal power and prestige of great landed rulers, capitalist wars as mainly nationalistic conflicts over markets and exploitable resources; but the era centering about World War 2 began the fateful period of political-class wars, or the struggle for dominance of the capitalist world by the democratic masses.
This latest period involves, moreover, the struggle between social systems, one of which is new in the world and thus presents a new basis for the next Great War. Since the pith of the new antagonism is political-class interests, we should expect to find the conflict as perilously domestic as it is international. Thus, World War 2 began and ended, although the war in China continues. Even today the very word Spain is charged with violent emotion; and imminent civil strife in almost every European country concerns immediately the fate of the political-class adjustment within the three major powers of the world. This is not the old relatively static, imperialistic era; it is something new in history.
The continuance of an exceedingly viable civilization is here involved. Frequently, in current discussions, it has been asserted that “the next war will end civilization.” The meaning is probably that the next war will end this civilization. Although a recognition of the fact may be distasteful, it is necessary to realise that capitalist civilization received a tremendous shock from World War 1, and, at the same time, the democratic movement was invigorated. World War 2 concluded another capitalist crisis, still worse – so much so, indeed, that in all the world only the system as it now exists in the US can stand unaided upon its own feet. And yet so paradoxical a thing is the intellectual dynamics of capitalism that it is currently believed by some leaders of great political power that only World War 3 could restore the system to a healthy, peaceful existence.
Perhaps, if we can see exactly what a modern political class is and how it functions, we may not be so certain that the passing system can be restored by another world war. The social ferment now at work is as old as capitalism itself – it is inherent in capitalism – therefore violence cannot destroy it. From a beginning so feeble that it could be almost completely disregarded, democracy has now become a formidable threat to the modern system of power relationship. We cannot liquidate this historical fact either by ignoring it or by calling it names, for it is the unavoidable subject of modern domestic and international conflict; it is, indeed, the question of who shall rule the social system, the few or the many. And the predictable decision involves not simply a political coup d’ etat, but rather the substitution of a new social order, a new way of life with distinctly different social ends. Thus the class struggle is not a myth; it is as real as the human lives that are being daily sacrificed all over the world in its interest.
Racial antagonism is part and parcel of this class struggle, because it developed within the capitalist system as one its fundamental traits. It may be demonstrated that racial antagonism, as we know it today, never existed in the world before about 1492; moreover, racial feeling developed concomitantly with the development of our modern social system. Probably one of the most persistent one of the most social illusions of modern times is that we have race prejudice against other people because they are physically different – that prejudice is instinctive. From the point of view of Anglo-Saxon, gentile, well-to-do people, we may hate peoples of other nationalities, hate Jews, hate all coloured peoples, and hate union workers. Yet we can safely say that these are not all an identical social attitude.
Our feeling against, say, the Italians may vanish if they become our allies in war; feeling against the Jews may subside as we begin to discount the importance of religion in determining social phenomena; if Negroes do our work contentedly and help to break strikes for us, we may defend and even treat them amiably; we may see considerable virtue in union workers if they insist that the company union has more merit than the outside organisation. Human beings have the capacity for “social hatred” or antagonism; yet in any given social situation of inter-group antagonism, we do not seek an explanation by referring to this capacity. The social antagonism is as stable and a different as the inciting cause – the interest – behind the antagonism. Human nature itself is probably the most plastic and malleable of all animal nature.
The interest behind racial antagonism is an exploitative interest – the peculiar type of economic exploitation characteristic of capitalist society. To be sure, one might say this cannot be, for one feels an almost irrepressible revulsion in the presence of coloured people, especially Negroes, although one never had any need to exploit them. It is evidently the way they look, their physical difference, which is responsible for one’s attitude. The assumption here must be, however, that one’s own looks are naturally attractive to all people of colour, since it can hardly be shown that any people of colour ever had race prejudice before contact with Western civilization. Race prejudice is not an individual idiosyncrasy; it is a social attribute. Ordinarily the individual is born into it and accepts it unconsciously, like his language, without question. In the Deep South, for instance, it is the custom for the different sexes of the two races to look at each other as if they were asexual objects, yet it would be utter nonsense to say that the difference in colour has eliminated all chances of arousing sexual appetite between them.
Negroes – to consider the United States specifically – must not be allowed to think of themselves as human beings having certain basic rights protected in the formal law. On the whole, they came to America as forced labour, and our slavocracy could not persist without a consistent set of social attitudes which justified the system naturally. Negroes had to be thought of as subsocial and subhuman. To treat a slave as if he were a full-fledged human being would not only be dangerous but also highly inconsistent with the social system.
However, it should not be forgotten that, above all else, the slave was a worker whose labour was exploited in production for profit in a capitalist market. It is this fundamental fact which identifies the Negro problem in the United States with the problem of all workers regardless of colour. We can understand, therefore, the Negro problem only in so far as we understand their position as workers. Moreover, their status as workers has been categorically like that of white workers; indeed, with the crystallisation of social forces, the real position and problems of both Negro and white workers are beginning unmistakably to converge.
As a race primarily of exploited and exploitable workers, then we may predict certain trends of the Negro population. In the future, Negroes will probably become more highly urbanised than any other native-born population group in the country. Although they were originally the principal source of “cheap, docile labour,” best suited to plantation production, with the coming of freedom and greater knowledge of the labour market we should expect them to seek to sell their labour – practically the only significant economic resource they have – in the best markets. The best labour markets are ordinarily found in the cities; therefore, Negroes have been moving in on the cities. Today Negroes in the United States are less urbanised than native white people, but Negro urbanisation has been increasing at a much faster rate that that of whites. In 1910, 27.3 per cent of the Negroes lived in cities, but in 1940 the percentage increased to 48.6. For the same two periods the figures for native whites were 43.6 and 55.1, respectively.
Quite frequently during World War 2, President Roosevelt declared there should be no “master race” in the world as the Germans claimed to be, and the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, stated explicitly that one principal purpose of the war was to eliminate fascism wherever found in the world. Both the “master race” ideology and fascism, however, are social attributes of a particular social system. They may not be eliminated by international war. It would seem quite obvious that countries like Great Britain and the United States, whose ruling classes are in fact master races, may not be ready to eliminate this reality in the world. The master-race idea and fascism can be purged from the social system only by a change in the system itself; and, for great powers, this is ordinarily a domestic undertaking.
If this is true, then, America has a desperate problem on its hands. Probably in no other country of the world are the philosophies and practices of racial mastery so openly and tenaciously held to as in the South. In this case the south is not a backward country of the United States; it is, in fact, to a very considerable extent, at the very head of the diplomatic and political destiny of the nation. It seems, therefore, that as the nations prepare again for war, the nature of the social systems that are actually in question should be as clearly understood as possible. Perhaps it is time that the people, who finally pay the cost of war in lives and wealth, should be ready to examine the crucial subject at issue
The term “ETHNIC” (Race, nation) may be employed generically to refer to social relations among distinct peoples. Accordingly, an ethnic may be defined as a people living competitively in relationship of superordination or subordination with respect to some other people or peoples within one state, country, or economic area. Two or more ethnics constitute an ethnic system or regime; and, naturally, one ethnic must always imply another. In other words, we may think of ethnic as always forming part of a system.
Ethnic systems classified:-
According to the culture of the ethnics:
Degrees of cultural advancement (simple or complex).
Type variation, e.g., Occidental or Oriental.
3. Pattern, e.g., variation in language, religion, nationality, or other ways of living.
According to physical distinguishability:
Race, e.g., black, brown, red, white, etc.
2. Mixed bloods.
Thus, difference among ethnics may centre about variations in culture, such as those claimed by British, Afrikaner, and Jews of South Africa; or it may rest upon distinguishability, such as that of whites, East Indians, Bantu, and Cape Colored of the same area. When the ethnics are of the same race – that is to say, when there is no significant physical characteristics accepted by the ethnics as marks of distinction – their process of adjustment is usually designated nationality or “minority-group” problems. When, on the other hand, the ethnics recognise each other physically and use their physical distinction as a basis for the rationale of their interrelationships, their process of adjustment is usually termed race relations or race problems.
Cultural or national ethnics and racial ethnics are alike in that they are both power groups. They stand culturally or racially as potential or actual antagonists. The degree of the interethnic conflict can be explained only by the social history of the given relationship; and neither race nor culture seems in itself to be an index of the stability of the antagonism. The status relationship of both cultural and racial ethnics may persist with great rigidity for long periods of time or it may be short-lived. The opposition between the English and the Irish and between the Jews and Catholics in Spain are instances of rather long-time cultural antagonisms. The Mohammedans (a misnomer for Muslims) and the Hindus in India present a situation in which the formerly subordinated Hindus are apparently about to take the place of their old Mohammedan masters, but the centuries-old hostility persists. Both culture and race prejudices are dynamic group attitudes varying in intensity according to the specific historical situation of the peoples involved.
It is evident that the term “race relations” may include all situations of contact between peoples of different races, and for all time. One objection to the use of this term is that there is no universally accepted definition of race. A race may be thought of as simply any group of people that is generally believed to be, and generally accepted as, a race in any given area of ethnic competition. Thus, if a man looks white, although, say in America, he is everywhere called a Negro, he is, then, a Negro American. If, on the other hand, a man of identical physical appearance is recognized everywhere in Cuba as a white man, then he is a white Cuban.
We may think of race relations, therefore, as that behaviour which develops among peoples who are aware of each other’s actual or imputed physical differences. Moreover, by race relations we do not mean all social contacts between persons of different “races,” but only those contacts the social characteristics of which are determined by a consciousness of “racial” difference.
