THE RISING TIDE OF RACIAL TENSION
Hankins, Frank H.
The Rising Tide Of Racial Tension By FRANK H. HANKINS THERE is abundant evidence that racial sentiments have become more rather than less inflamed by the war. One might have supposed, did he not...
...At the same time an intellectually honest ffiscussion of race matters must ran the risk that any fconcessions will be seized upon by the bigots...
...The world has a billion more people than it had in 1850, a half-billion more than it had in 1900, but the world itself is no larger...
...It is thus all too clear that the dry tinder of racialist ^motions lies all about us only awaiting some tiny spark $o start a real conflagration...
...Then there has been the fracas in New York over the anti-bias bill...
...Complexity Of Modern Life Meanwhile the social order has become so complex that the average man does not understand it...
...We have recently witnessed race riots in widely scattered cities, heard much of race discrimination in both civilian and military activities, read about the hoodlums who attacked the Harvard Jewish student and others who painted swastikas on Boston synagogues, and listened to the rising whisperings of Main street...
...Francis Delaisi reports that the dark-haired, round-headed, brown-eyed children of central France sing lustily a patriotic song about "our ancestors" the flaxen-haired, long-headed, blue-eyed "Gauls...
...However, one may hazard the guess that this law, jpassed Feb...
...he cannot adjust to it in contentment because his life routines are being constantly upset by rapid cultural changes...
...Though the editor explained that "neither they nor we are ready for it yet," the paper was deprived of its freedom by the college authorities...
...It warrants the conclusion that such prejudices will be with us for & long time to come...
...and the same...
...Does not America have a "manifest destiny" ? Does it not have a Constitution written under divine inspiration ? Do not a thousand preachers pray every Sunday that this people chosen by God may faithfully carry out the mission to which it has been divinely called...
...the comitatus is that form of social body in which he finds his most poignant" experiences...
...This is an expression of the individual and hence group will to life and power and essential to individual confidence and courage amidst the vicissitudes of life...
...and Herbert Spencer saw in it a dynamic factor in cultural evolution...
...Denunciation, expres-$k>ns of righteous indignation, the pious reiteration of fe sense of moral superiority, false statements for good purposes, and other forms of propaganda have no place In an inquiry into causal relations and we shall try to ftvoid them...
...There are many other illustrations of this devastating degradation of the man who does not "belong": the half-castes of the Orient, the marginal man, and the social outcasts of every clime...
...Likewise there is a sense of pride in one's group, so that group sentiment from family pride through race egotism to patriotism becomes a sort of pooled egotism...
...There are the reverberations of the ban on the student paper at William and Mary College following an editorial asserting that Negroes should be allowed to go to the same colleges as whites, **go to our classes, join the same clubs, be our room-inates, and marry among us...
...In the first place, we may note that the idyllic days of the 19th Century ended over a generation ago...
...Let us see if we can find ifcny reasons for this situation...
...This is a more or less religious conversion...
...One can readily see that this is put forward less by attachment to principle than to the fact that Jewish and Negro votes count heavily in elections, ([hat, however, is the way laws are changed in a democracy...
...If one searches for historical backgrounds for this fact he will find that race, tribe, and sacred group were among primitives and indeed among most historical peoples one...
...28 and signed in March by Gov...
...One might have supposed, did he not know mankind better, that a war in the name of democracy and human decency, against a nation that has flaunted its theory of racial superiority before the world and thus sought to justify the most shocking brutalities of modern times, would have almost automatically wrought in us sentiments of the noblest humanism...
...all others are "monkey men," "cousins of the apes," or possessed of evil spirits...
...The second psychological fact is the tendency of all social groups to think of themselves as biologically different...
...Obstacle To Peace ' Another item is the refusal of the Bermuda Assembly |o extend the suffrage to Negroes in this British possession...
...The historical fact is that men have always carried on the struggle for existence in groups...
...This fact is that the need of social rapport and personal identification with a power greater than oneself creates a feeling of innate likeness among persons who are obviously different...
...Sir Arthur Keith found in this same struggle the basic factor in human biological evolution...
...The days of free land, wide open spaces, and hence free migration were experienced by only a fraction of those now living...
...Dewey will pot only keep the race issue much alive, but that it will jbe no more effective in preventing discrimination than public opinion warrants...
...Leaving aside the case of Bermuda, does one hear of far-reaching plans for the education of the subject peoples of the British Empire in the arts of self-govern-jnent...
...he cannot, therefore, work out his own life destiny as he reasonably well could in the world of our fathers...
...Howard Odum's Race and Rumors of Race, Lillian (Smith's Strange Fruit, and Hodding Carter's Winds of Fear all point to rising tensions in the South...
...Can anyone fail to be Surprised at the soft repugnance with which news of Ihe merciless slaughter of Jews by Germans and Ru-gnanians has been received throughout the English-Bpeaking world...
...they conceive of themselves in terms of the traits of the groups with which they feel identity...
...Moreover, since the world is now rather more full of people than a generation ago, and since in consequence group rivalries may well be intensified, this analysis warrants the guess that racial antagonisms will not be less in the future than in the recent past...
...We" only are truly men...
...This is both the basis and the derivative of the above historical fact...
...I find in this morning's New York Times several additional illustrations...
...Now all this may seem remote from our problem until one relates it to one basic historical fact and 3 psychological facts...
...it is in fact much smaller in terms of human relations...
...There has been no important historical group that did not have a feeling of special racial superiority coupled with a mystical sense of rendezvous with a destiny divinely shaped...
...Have we not accustomed ourselves to calling the Japanese "monkey men" ? Did not a Congressman within a few days actually advocate the sterilization of all alien Japanese in this fcountry, thus espousing one of the most inhuman of all |?azi policies...
...Men everywhere find such identification essential to the sense of selfhood...
...This is indeed too jttbvious...
...It is not designed to combat the intellectual follies of race prejudices but to explain them in part...
...Walter (White's A Rising Wind accuses the Army of spreading Southern prejudices among the GI Joes from all parts of the country...
...Finally there is an item reporting a conference at Irhich various speakers asserted that rising racial tensions both at home and abroad constitute the greatest single obstacle to permanent peace...
...certain it is that he often displays the hunting-pack psychology...
...No human beings are more forlorn or pitiful than the detribalized...
...It is not surprising to one who understands this subtle alchemy of human psychology that the Nazis were able to convince vast numbers of German youth, caught in the impressionable years of their adolescence, that no matter how much they differed externally, they all shared the inner essence of the master race...
...History is written so largely in terms of group struggles that Gumplowicz found the key to history in Der Rassenkampf...
...The foregoing analysis of racialism leaves to one side the technicalities of physical anthropology and centers attention on human collective behavior...
...On the contrary, not only has the war enabled us to discover in ourselves similar racialist attitudes, but it has actually aroused latent elements of racial egotism and hate in our midst...
...The first psychological fact is the identification of the individual with his social groups, ranging all the way from family and club to race and nation...
...Here is a colony, predominantly Negro in population, ruled by the most masterful of all master races Since the Romans—the "race" that prides itself on Jjeing the progenitor of parliamentary government and the mother stock of the only peoples who have been able $D make democratic institutions work since the days $f the Roman Republic...
...The third psychological fact is something of a psychological miracle but quite essential to an understanding of the halucinations accomplished by race myths and fanaticism...
...and Virginius Dabney, well known editor Of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, reported that the ©pinion in the upper South was that the editorial had done more harm than good to race relations...
...they lose the will to live and their reproductive powers seem nearly to vanish...
...Man has been called the descendant of a wolf-ape...
...but it refuses the basic right ftf such institutions to the majority in a tiny colony...
...Without going back to the wars of the tribes, one may cite the struggles of Greek and barbarian, Celt and Saxon, German and Latin, and countless others...
...even New England has given repeated evidences of intense opposition to any and all Japanese...
...If so, one may be sure that imperialism is running out as an economic bonanza...
...Nevertheless he has the same needs for material comforts, only more so, while his sense of security in their continuous satisfaction is constantly threatened and his sense of communal fellowship and solidarity has been destroyed by the cold impersonalism of urban industrialism...
...Men create gods and then make themselves the special objects of divine solicitude...
...Is it not commonly assumed that the Germans are all pad and that this badness is somehow racial and ineradicable ? Are we not preparing a peace that rests on the assumption of racial superiority and the right of the victors to dominate...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 15
