Fifteen Interchapters from When Peoples Meet: A Study in Race and Culture Contacts, coedited by Alain Locke and Bernhard Stern (1942)
The increased and increasing knowledge about human cultures which has come to us in modern times has unfortunately not led to any very general improvement in the common understanding of the nature of civilization, or the nature of culture itself. With the broadened scientific perspective on human social history that has been achieved one might logically expect enlightened social understanding and intercultural appreciation and tolerance. But this has not been so. People still read and write history from chronic attitudes of cultural pride and prejudice, and sometimes deliberately, sometimes subconsciously, impose interpretations upon civilization that are steeped in cultural bias and partiality. The social sciences even, which are usually relatively objective on matters of detail, in their large-scale interpretations of social history revert frequently to the traditional cultural provincialisms.
Popular thinking is even more deeply enmeshed in cultural chauvinism and bigotry. Issues of practical conflict and historic rivalry cloud over the broader and clearer panorama which the scientific study of culture is ready to give, and as a result traditional misconceptions of culture and civilization not only persist but flourish. The contemporary welter of group rivalries with the confusion of their clashing factionalisms makes imperative a search for new clues and basic insights on the complex problems of human group relations. These are not new problems, but their aggravated contemporary manifestations urgently focus renewed attention upon them. In response to these increasing tensions, there is increased resort to theorizing about the nature of culture and civilization, but far too much of it is mere rationalization of the claims and counterclaims of various national and racial groups seeking partisan vindication and glory. Special interests and asserted superiorities are thereby reinforced with justifications bearing the outward stamp of scientific objectivity and impartiality. But in reality, as these traditional national and racial partisanships debate their conflicting claims, they further augment cultural intolerance, and irrationality in social thinking grows apace.
In this situation of cultural confusion is one doomed to the dubious choice between obvious and subtly concealed cultural propaganda? Or, in this modem Babel, must one trust solely to the haphazard corrective of expecting one bias to off-set another? At least one other alternative seems possible, and that is to search beneath the complex historical events of human group contacts and relations for more basic and objective common denominators. These should show what characteristically happens when peoples meet, and what interests, attitudes and policies condition their subsequent relations. This source book attempts to offer just such information by means of authoritative descriptions and expert first-hand analyses of some of the more typical situations and instances of cultural contact, cultural conflict, cultural interaction.
Tracing social history in terms of the broad outlines of culture contacts is one of the important modern approaches in the social science field. In addition to the advantage of panoramic perspective, it offers a more objective basis of appraisal for the relative achievements and the relative influence both of the peoples and of the cultures involved. Various cultural biases, all too prevalent in the more conventional historical and sociological viewpoints, are thus avoided and insights into the more basic and universal processes involved in human group relations are achieved. Such is the task and main objective of this book.
To be properly understood, civilization should be studied in the setting of world culture. Many of the current misconceptions in regard to culture and civilization become apparent only after a consistent application of objective viewpoints resulting from the broadest possible comparison of all types of human culture. Contemporary anthropology has made available a considerable amount of fresh and illuminating material, in the light of which many doctrines that have the superficial appearance of scholarship turn out to be sophisticated versions of the fallacies and assumptions more obviously involved in popular and propagandist thinking. Clearly, much of this contemporary doctrine is not consciously biased or avowedly partisan. But a limited viewpoint, even with innocent motivation, induces the same errors of overemphasis and distortion which characterize deliberate partisanship. Naïve and subconscious projections of cultural bias are in fact more insidious and harmful than set prejudice, because less obvious.
Many current views of culture, however, are based on attitudes and interests more sinister than naïve bias and innocent misconception. They are the deliberate coinage of propaganda and rationalization, and circulate dangerously and deceptively in the general currency of ideas and opinion. They turn up repeatedly in the context of much honest-intentioned social thought. The “racial myth,” as it has been aptly called, is a noteworthy case in point. This Trojan horse of our national wars and racial quarrels crops up in its most typical form when masking its career of rationalized partisanship and propaganda under the innocent guise of a science of mankind or a philosophy of history. So insidious can this become that it finally introduces self-deception into our understanding of ourselves. Racialism, indeed, has had its worst effects and has bred its most sinister distortions as a source of general misconception about the nature of civilization and culture.
It is insufficient, however, merely to expose the theoretical fallacies of racialism, which carry the blight of pseudo-science into history and social theory. The practical role of such fallacious doctrines must also be traced, since their deepest significance and explanation lies in their practical objectives and consequences. For through subtly misinterpreting the clash of culture groups as the inevitable clash of their cultures, racialism is used as an effective mechanism of group rivalry. Its doctrines are in reality by-products of historic conflict and rivalry and are rationalizations of such conflict. Their main reason for being is to provide auxiliary weapons in the struggle for group power and dominance, and it is of the greatest importance to see and understand them in this light. Carefully analyzed, their major objectives are seen to be the justification of conflict and exploitation through the disparagement of other group cultures and the promotion of prestige and group morale through self-glorification and claims of superiority. Any careful tracing of racialist theories will reveal this political tactic, as the doctrine is observed to follow the changing alignments of the successive issues of political opposition and struggle. The history of racist theory in Europe for the last century alone presents a contradictory cavalcade of superiority claims and shifting “superior” races;—in turn it has been Latin, Aryan (Old Style), Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon, “Nordic,” European, Caucasian (“white”) and Aryan (New Style),—all competing in obvious theoretical inconsistency and practical self-contradiction.
Racism is only one of the fictions involved in current false perspectives of human history, all of which need to be examined and corrected in a sound and balanced view of human civilization. The prevailing notion of separate, distinctive and ethnically characteristic cultures is another example, and it, too, is shown by broad historical analysis to be contrary to fact. Culture is not related functionally to definite ethnic groups or races, but varies independently. Races change their culture on many historic occasions and various culture advances are made independently by different racial stocks. Each culture, also, upon examination is discovered to be dynamic and constantly changing, with an increasing tendency, on the whole, to become more and more composite, in the sense of incorporating aspects of other cultures with which it comes in contact. Thus, even as the tradition of a characteristic group culture develops, the less true it is apt to be to actual fact, since the older a culture, the more composite it usually is. So it is evident that our theories of culture must be scrutinized carefully, since there are so many possible sources of error. Some have the fault of parochialism, and need the corrective of enlarged historical perspective. Others are pseudo-scientific and need to be squared by wide-scale comparison with the fullest known facts. Still others, most difficult of all, must be submitted to a critical examination of their ulterior motives and the stark exposure of their partisan objectives. Thoroughgoing analysis on such a scale may sustain but few of our contemporary beliefs and theories about culture, but only on the foundation of what remains can any sound view of human civilization be constructed.
One of the first results of this approach to social history is a realization of the close connection between culture contacts and the growth of civilization itself. Cultures may develop complexity through certain internal development and variation, but by far the main source of cultural growth and development seems always to have been through the forces of external contact. Even in relatively early historic periods culture was already composite in many areas, due largely to group contact and cultural interchange. Many internal spurts of cultural development have also been the result of the stimulating “cross-fertilizing” effects of cultural contact. Civilization is largely the accumulative product and residue of this ever-widening process of culture contact, interchange and fusion.
In modern times and under modern conditions, as mechanisms of intercommunication are multiplied and group contacts inevitably increase, cultures tend to become increasingly hybrid and composite. As a result, cultural complexity and variability become the rule rather than the exception. Added to the normal forces of cultural interaction is that particularly active and militant movement of “Europeanization.” European expansion, more extensive in scope than any of its predecessor imperialisms, but less tolerant of cultural diversity, has augmented and speeded up these trends of intercultural contact and interchange to an unprecedented degree. Over great colonial areas, forced or pressure acculturation has become the order of the day, with much rapid and disruptive displacement of other cultures. However, even in this more or less one-sided process, a certain amount of reciprocal influence and interchange has persisted. Modern imperialism has bred, in addition to its half-castes, its hybrid and border-line cultures. A number of complex cultural reactions have resulted, according to the variations in modern colonial contacts and the divergent degrees of cultural level and resistance encountered. But, despite its historical uniquenesses, Europeanization and its moving force of economic imperialism are best understood as an interesting and complex variant of the process which has basically underlain all historic culture contacts; a process which has been the primary cause of the growth of what we know as “civilization.” More significant, then, than its unique features are the factors modern culture contact has in common with the movements of cultural interchange that it has succeeded. Indeed, as will be seen later, a good part of the supposed uniqueness of the modern cultural scene is an illusion and conceit of our present-day cultural pride and egotism.
It is this traditional European view which is responsible for the most basic modern misconception of culture—the false identification of civilization with one particular type of culture. Ruth Benedict’s discussion clearly points this out. What she aptly calls “our assumed monopoly of civilization” explains why our current cultural perspectives are so defective. In this the Western mind has become the victim of its own cultural success. Its type of civilization has experienced unparalleled expansion, attended by the rapid engulfment of other divergent cultures. On the fringes of that expansion, other cultures have been invaded or driven back, to be incorporated or ignored as the case may be. Attitudes of cultural condescension and disparagement are typically involved in either event. Since within the extensive boundaries of this superficially uniform civilization there is poverty of obvious cultural contrast, the sense of the real significance of cultural difference has almost completely lapsed. Such is the culture predicament of the Western world.
Franz Boas, in the next selection, analyzes modern views and theories of culture and civilization from another important critical angle. Again we encounter widely accepted and popular doctrine involving misconceptions of culture fundamentally misleading and unscientific. Though twofold, the doctrine, as Boas points out, has a single deep root in the ethnocentric view of culture. First, it falsely identifies varieties of race with varieties of culture, and in the second place, erroneously deduces racial superiority from cultural superiority, or even from mere cultural complexity or political dominance. Whether advocated in terms of Nordic, Latin, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon or Aryan culture, or the still more generalized concepts of Caucasian, European or “white” civilization—the specific claims make little difference in the substance of the argument, these doctrines of race superiority rest basically upon the false identification of race and culture. To the list should be added that progenitor of modern European superiority claims, the cultural sectarianism of “Christian civilization” as opposed to the non-Christian and “pagan.” The obsession reaches its climax in the identification of the nation with “culture and civilization,” as present-day ethnic nationalism makes only too obvious. But in the latter instance the political character of the concept is completely revealed.
Boas traces the historical factors which have fostered this contemporary creed, with its double-edged assumption of the innate superiority of the race and culture of those who possess more complex and advanced forms of civilization, and of the inferiority of those who do not. The doctrine, he thinks, is particularly a product of the modern colonial era, and thus of Occidental origin, at least in its extreme and characteristic form. Particularly in its aspect of associated color prejudice, it seems peculiarly and intimately associated with modern European colonial expansion. On that basis it furnishes the standard ideology and stock rationalization of economic imperialism. Both the race culture and the race superiority aspects of the doctrine are examined and criticized by Boas, and completely invalidated so far as the case rests on grounds of scientific warrant or historical truthfulness.
It is by now apparent how a combination of particular circumstances, viz., European industrial and colonial expansion, has combined with the age-old tendency to cultural chauvinism to produce these serious modern misconceptions about culture. They, in turn, have led to chronic disparagement and underestimation of racial and culture groups particularly different from our own. Under such circumstances, most cultural divergence is interpreted as cultural inferiority, and the appreciation of cultural interaction and indebtedness becomes almost completely obscured. This merges into one grand over-all misconception, the fallacy of cultural separatism—the belief that in being distinctive cultures are separate and water-tight units of civilization. Historical evidence shows this view to be unfounded; for, much to the contrary, all cultures are composite and most culture elements interchangeable.
No group has proprietary hold on the culture that it originates, and at any moment of its history, most of its own culture will be found to be a composite of culture elements from all the centuries and from the rest of the world. Waterman and Linton, in their selections, document how unsuspectedly composite our own contemporary culture actually is. Their analysis is all the more dramatic because they trace primarily our technological indebtedness to the past and to other cultures—in the very field of what is considered our most characteristic supremacy. Had they chosen to document our institutional concepts or our heritage of ideas the result would have been equally revealing. So many peoples and races have made their contribution to civilization that the ethnocentrist’s view becomes scientifically ridiculous.
The composite character of present-day civilization, however, is exceptional in only a few respects. Other and earlier cultures have been just as definitely composite. Our distinctiveness lies almost solely in the rapidity with which new elements permeate the general practice and in our having so many channels of formalized cultural export and import. As for permanent cultural absorption, we have probably no greater capacity than many earlier periods and types of civilization, many of which were deliberately cosmopolitan. The frequently cited instance of the wholesale adoption of Greek culture by the Romans is really not exceptional. Time after time, through transfusions of conquest, cultural exchanges of all sorts—artistic, literary, technological and institutional—have occurred.
It should also be noted that cultural exchange passes in reciprocal streams from the conquerors to the conquered and from the conquered to the dominant groups. It is not always the dominant stock or the upper classes who are the carriers or importers of culture. Societies have just as frequently received infiltrations of alien culture from the bottom through the absorption of conquered and subject groups. In other cases, the outside influences enter through the elite, who usually have greater access to outside cultures, and are often themselves of foreign derivation. Cultural variation, initiated at any point, radiates considerably and often spreads to general acceptance.
Progress, indeed, in many instances seems proportional to the degree to which a society has a many-sided cultural exposure. Provided it can integrate them, a variety of culture contacts is a favorable situation for any culture. Groups do, of course, differ widely in their susceptibility to cultural change, but none are so conservative as to be completely resistant. Progressive societies, on the other hand, maintain and extend their formal agencies of contact, and thereby both share and contribute to the sum total of civilization.
The realization of the composite character of civilization, however, does not gainsay the fact of the distinctive character of individual cultures. It is a misapplication of this truth to regard it as sanctioning a uniformitarian theory or criterion of culture. Not only is it important to recognize the wide variety in the patterns and types of culture, but also to realize how vital variety and variability are in the growth and development of culture itself. Variation is at the root of cultural change, and cultural diversity is conducive to it. The processes of cultural interchange have fed on cultural diversity, and in milleniums of operation do not seem to have obliterated it. The several types of culture, then, are significant as variant adaptations, each functional in its own setting. Actually or potentially each has a role to play in cultural contact. In the perspective of culture history, a culture that is dormant now may have been crucially active and influential at another historical period, just as one that is creative and dominant now may at some other time have been dormant and uncreative, or in the future, may become so. In the setting of world culture, all peoples and nations have contributed importantly, though often without due credit, to the sum of human civilization, which itself, most broadly viewed, is the product of an extensive collaboration of cultural forces and an age-old interchange of cultures.
The whole history of civilization takes on new aspects from the viewpoint of a scientific tracing of culture and culture history. Not only does an entirely different type of fact stand out as the truly important set of historical events, but there is also a radical reversal of values through which discoveries and inventions become more important than disasters and battles, peoples and varieties of living more interesting than heroes and dynastic successions, and cultural contacts and interchanges more significant than treaties and annexations. A principle of continuity and accumulative development looms up as the link principle of significant history. The cultural pedigree of the newspaper, for example, “imprinted,” as Linton characterizes it, “in characters invented by the early Semites by a process invented in medieval Germany upon a material invented in China,” has many parallels in culture history, any one of which can bring more understanding into our social thinking through its widening of the cultural perspective than pages of orthodox history. The accurately reconstructed story of corn or silk or of iron or porcelain, or, for that matter, of the alphabet or the idea of monotheism contains, along with significant evidence of cultural interaction and indebtedness, deep insights into the nature of civilization.
Much of this culturally important information is unfamiliar and much has yet to be documented, so recent is our appreciation of its value. Particularly unacknowledged are the instances of cultural advance outside the boundaries of European history and civilization. Yet the American Indians, the ancient Chinese, the ancient Africans have all made notable contributions to human culture, some of them in the opinion of anthropologists more original and influential than later historical and much more lauded contributions. Ironically enough in many cases, these much-lauded accomplishments are themselves based on the forgotten and unacknowledged contributions. Still deeper irony ensues when specious claims of cultural superiority are made to rest on cultural developments which, like a good deal of Western technology, involves these bases. The hand-loom, for instance, stands in an ancestral relation to the power-loom which hardly justifies the cultural arrogance of the peoples of the power-loom stage of culture, as they foist the products of their machine age upon cultures still in the hand-loom stage. The civilizing process was at one time flowing in the other direction. This reciprocity, even if separated by centuries, cannot be overlooked or ignored; indeed it is vital to the complete understanding of both the past and the present stages of culture.
The source materials aim to illustrate the vast, and to many, unsuspected scope of the process of intercultural exchange. They also show the basic character of these influences in the making of civilization. It will be a revelation to many readers to learn how far-flung were the trade routes of the ancient world, how deliberate and elaborate the exchanges of culture products were then, and how much the development of our civilization has depended upon the technological and institutional influences of cultures now decadent or vanished. Rostovtzeff shows in the excerpt from Caravan Cities how crucial for succeeding civilizations the early Asiatic civilizations were, and how through the ancient caravan routes, they had developed contacts over distances spanning half the globe.
From fragments of ancient record, Rostovtzeff pieces out an illuminating mosaic of the culture contacts of this very ancient world. The foundations of our composite civilization were really laid by the ancient empires, most of them Oriental. They, too, in their day had their great expansions of far-flung political and economic interests. Nor were they so radically different from modern European expansion as not to have significant analogies. Through the wide-scale contacts of these empires, in the course of the long exchange between the civilizations of the East and those of the West, many of the primary bases of civilization came into the orbit of European culture, such as pottery, the smelting of metals, weaving, brick making, china, paper agriculture, the alphabet—a list too long to be briefly documented. This is the European cultural debt to the Orient, until recently so unacknowledged, and only now being slowly retrieved by the newer, more scientific historical scholarship.
The processes of exchange between Europe and China passed through elaborate caravan relays of interconnecting civilizations: to trace them in detail one must track down the forgotten empires of Cappadocia, Sumer, Ur, Babylon, Syria, Palmyra and the Arab Kingdoms of the 8th Century B.C. In addition on the Mediterranean side there were the better-known culture shuttles of Egypt, Crete, the Phoenician colonies, the Macedonian Empire and Rome. These relays of culture contact were world movements in their day, much more impressive on their economic and cultural side than in their military exploits and political combinations. Throughout the rise and fall of dynasties and military leaders, these constructive processes went on, extending in geographical scope from farthest China to beyond Italy on both shores of the Mediterranean. The time span, too, is impressive, for it runs back at least to the fourth millennium, B.C.
Neither the grand scale nor the antiquity of these interchanges is as significant, however, as the resultant character of the civilizations. For many of these earlier civilizations are now known to have been composite and cosmopolitan to a degree not previously suspected, especially during their peak periods when, in the height of their power, they had ramifying contacts throughout the world of their day. The archeological evidence of exchange and cross-influence is so great that some interpretations credit their brilliance and creativeness to the direct results of cultural cross-fertilization and fusion. Converging streams of culture, often of very diverse and distant varieties, are part of the historical record of many of the more significant of these civilizations; the Cretan, which was Egypto-Grecian, the Hebrew-Canaanite, the Perso-Egyptian, the Athenian, the Punic-Phoenician, the Etrusco-Roman, the Graeco-Roman, the Alexandrine, to mention only the more outstanding. In most of these instances, there was something considerably more than routine contact and cultural borrowing, there was a definite merger of cultures. The hyphenate cultural character of the Moorish-Hispanic civilization, as well as of the Revival of Learning, the Italian Renaissance and the Enlightenment is generally known, but somehow this has not served to drive home the full realization of the probable connection between culture contact and significant and creative cultural advance.
Teggart shows conclusively that at the time of the barbarian migrations what happened in the Roman Empire and Western Europe can only be fully explained historically in connection with what was contemporaneously happening in China. On another frontier of culture contact, Dopsch examines the record of the economic and social relations of the Romans with the Germanic tribes. He finds, among other interesting new interpretations, that there was considerable peaceful penetration of the Germans into the Roman economy, not only as mercenaries but in agricultural settlements about the Roman towns. There was sufficient absorption of Roman civilization to account for the successful taking over by the “barbarians” of the Roman institutions and tradition, and eventually their assumption of the political administration of the empire. Here, again, political and military history has failed to give us the true picture through overlooking the cultural exchanges and the economic and technological apprenticeship of the Germans, which, once recognized, account for their assimilation of Roman culture. Even the term “barbarian,” Dopsch discovers, had little or no invidious meaning for the Romans, according to the context of well-documented descriptions and references to the Germans in contemporary Roman writings. The tradition to the contrary seems to have been an added and erroneous interpolation by later historians, projecting the Christian attitude toward the “heathen” into the distinctions of the Romans.
Hudson in Europe and China traces the cultural intercourse between the Far East and Europe over a period of many centuries succeeding the earliest contacts. As he points out, the sustaining contact was the all important silk-trade, which, until the introduction of silk-culture in Europe, was an almost unbroken bond between the two continents. Chinese civilization during much of that long period was flourishing and richly creative, and furnished Europe not only with basic materials, but time and again, with technological skills, scientific inventions, and occasionally even institutional ideas and models. Periodically in the art and literature of medieval and Renaissance Europe, interest in China makes its appearance, reflecting these cultural relations. Such interchange continued as late as the eighteenth century, when there was also a sustained Chinese cultural vogue, affecting influentially the art, literature and philosophy of that period. A little known phase of that comparatively recent influence is called to attention in the Maverick account of The Chinese Influence Upon the Physiocrats. Although affecting primarily a small group of intellectuals, this was by no means a negligible cross-influence, because it became the base of the classical economic theory as well as stimulating much of the rationalistic and Utopian political thought of the same period. Some authorities credit the Chinese influence with having been the dominant inspiration of the physiocrats.
The excerpt from Singer on The Jewish Factor in Medieval Thought brings forward another significant example of constructive and influential cultural interchange. Between the Dispersion and the early thirteenth century, Jewish scholarship had experienced prolonged contact with the Arab and the Byzantine cultures. At the time when the Jews became important culture-carriers for Europe, their own culture had blossomed out in a definite cultural synthesis which was an eclectic fusion of culture strains from the Arabic, Hellenic, Byzantine, Roman and Judaic traditions. They brought into the somewhat sterile culture of medieval Europe more direct contact with repressed aspects of the Graeco-Roman tradition, from which both the Aristotelian period of Scholasticism and the classical elements of the Revival of Learning were derived.
Turning in another direction, Westerman traces other little known European cultural contacts—those with Africa. Particularly illuminating is his comparison between the Islamic and the Christian contacts with the African pagan societies, although the contrast between the older and the modern European contacts is also analyzed. The diversity of its native cultures, the number of cultural invasions it has sustained, and the sharp divergence of many of these cultures with the native ones make Africa, in historical review, a laboratory of culture contacts. Since the days of ancient Egypt, successive waves of cultural invasion have swept over this continent. Those from Arabia and Mesopotamia penetrated deeply into the Nile valley for centuries, the Phoenician and Graeco-Roman penetration also reached deeply into the continent from the Mediterranean littoral, and a prolonged infiltration of the Moslem civilization and religion spread into interior Africa in the early medieval period through the trans-Saharan trade routes. Additionally, in the Southeast, from yet undetermined dates, waves of Malay and Melanesian contact came over and established settlements of which the mixed culture of Zanzibar is only a particularly stubborn remnant. All this occurred considerably before the Portuguese voyages of the fifteenth century, which began the European slave trade and was to culminate in the final phases of colonial imperialism partitioning Africa almost completely among the European colonial powers.
Throughout all this, Westerman notes that African cultures have “always manifested an extraordinary stability and power of assimilation,” a fact far from general belief. “Neither the migrations of the Hamites,” he says, “and the political upheavals caused by them, nor the settlements of the Arabs and their devastating slave raids, neither the Indian and Persian immigrants on the east coast, nor even the slave and alcohol trade of Europe have been able fundamentally to change the face of Africa. The Negro has remained and his civilizations have remained; the foreign elements which they have adopted have been so completely absorbed and adapted that today they appear indigenous.” This presents us with the rather unorthodox but significant view of African cultures as highly adaptive and composite prior to the colonial era, and still somewhat so in instances, as we shall later see.
For the correct perspective of its cultural history, then, the present-day chapter of decadent African tribal cultures and enfeebled colonial subjection must be supplemented by these almost forgotten chapters of vigorous cultural assimilation, marked by flourishing civilizations such as the mixed Moslem-pagan empires of the Melle, Songhay and Timbuctu during the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, and as well, by the pagan West African kingdoms of Ife, Benin, Dahomey. All of these were historically associated with contacts in which the native cultures had favorable conditions of reciprocal interaction and fusion, contrasting sharply with the one-sided and smothering later contacts of European colonial imperialism. Even today Westerman finds cultural reciprocity the main reason for the more successful competition of the Islamic culture and religion in Africa as compared with the Christian-European wave of civilization. The Moslem penetration, with a tradition of greater cultural tolerance, of legalized intermarriage, and of trade policies not disruptive of the native economy, has resulted in the successful Mohammedanization of half the African continent, with considerable cultural influence even beyond this extensive area of direct proselytization. “Islam,” as Westerman says, “forged closer links between itself and the African peoples.” Whereas, European contacts in Africa, with belligerent emphasis on the differences in cultural levels, a passion, until very recently at least, for the wholesale reconstruction of native cultures both on the part of governmental and missionary policy, and trade and labor policies directly disruptive of the native economy, have resulted on the one hand in superficial and precariously unstable Christianization and in economic and cultural disintegration on the other. The history of African culture contacts thus seems to indicate that cultural contact on a more or less equilateral basis is productive of results far more stable and constructive than those produced by the characteristically unilateral contacts and policies of European imperialism. Where Islam practiced such a one-sided policy, as it did in the African slave trade, beyond the boundaries of its converts, it, too, had similar blighting effects upon the native tribes and their way of life.
Herskovits continues this narrative of the complex cultural associations of the African with other continental cultures, and concludes that in the light of its long cultural history, Africa must be considered as “an integral part of the Old World cultural province,” mutually conditioning and being conditioned by European and Asiatic cultures till its prostration under the Western colonial system. From the time the ancient Egyptians were in contact with Africa’s indigenous inland cultures, intermittent contacts are traceable between Africa and Asia Minor and between Africa and Southern Europe, particularly Spain. This resulted not only in the well-known presence of the blacks in these comparatively distant centers, but in traceable but scarcely recognized cultural Africanisms. Herskovits thinks these are particularly clear in folklore, but are discernible along several other institutional lines.
He then turns to the evidence of more extensive African cultural influence in the New World through the transplanted African in North America, the West Indies and South America. Here incontestable data is available of a sustained and important influence, particularly in musical idioms, folklore and superstition, speech, dance and a few fragmentary institutional customs. These all stem so directly from the parent West African civilization as to give clear evidence of their origin. In this case also, these Africanisms, though everywhere rather distinctive, have exerted their fullest and most creative influence in areas of cultural lenience and reciprocity. Slavery shattered the native institutional inheritance of the American Negro, so that only elements like music and folklore had any chance of survival. These, however, did survive notably, but as is not generally recognized, survived in their purest intensity not in the United States, where there was cultural suppression, but in countries like Brazil, several of the Central American countries, in some of the provinces of Mexico and in the French and Spanish West Indies, where, even though there was slavery, there was more cultural tolerance. Apart from the question of culture survivals, Herskovits finds that even under the onus and stigma of slavery, a reciprocal interchange of tradition has taken place between black and white in the New World, and that though the heavier stream has been the assimilation by the Negroes of the white man’s civilization, counter-influences of some importance and value have flowed from the Negro side into the composite American culture.
As a final example of the universality of cultural interchange, comes the Wissler article on The Influence of the Aboriginal Indian Culture on American Life. Here apparently on the colonial frontier there was enacted one of the most significant yet rarely recognized instances of the inevitable give-and-take of all sustained contacts between peoples. In this case the absorption of elements of Indian culture by the white settler-colonists was so complete as to have been entirely forgotten in the course of a generation or so. Indeed many do not know that the North American Indian culture has been so crucially influential, and that some of the elements of American culture boasted of as distinctively American are due to cultural exchange with the Indian. Wissler points out how the Indian was a link in the commercial exploitation of the natural resources and natural wealth of the American continent, an economic process without which the early colonial economy could never have taken root, later to flourish. “The Indian,” says Wissler, “taught the American colonist to survive in what for him was a ‘wilderness,’ gave to the woodsman and the pioneering frontiersman a number of strategic skills and tools, traditional and useful yet, but crucial at that period.” In addition to this important apparatus of frontier skill and technology, the “American farmer took over the whole maize culture of the Indian with the exception of its ceremonial and social elements.” So that not just merely a temporary technique of subsistence but also the agricultural base of the extensive mid-West economy was derived from Indian sources and contact. Contrasted with the typical and biased history text-book account of early colonial contacts with the Indian, one can see vividly the enlightening significance of the more objective and scientific account of these race and culture group relations.
So from the new scientific evidences of culture contacts, between all varieties and levels of culture, and from every quarter of the globe, comes convincing testimony of the universality and constructive role of cultural interchange.
The fifteenth century “voyages of discovery,” so-called, were in some respects voyages of self-discovery. They mark the beginning of the dominant expansion of the European type of culture as contrasted with the more reciprocal cultural contact and interchange that, even as late as the Crusades, characterized previous periods. This change in the general character and trend of culture contacts really marks more clearly than any other single feature the great divide between modernity and the historic past. Since this time, Western civilization has extended its influence more widely than any previous culture and has sought to spread that culture over the whole globe. As Hudson points out, this movement is the product of sea power, though it has also gained much of its almost irresistible momentum from the accruing might of Western technological skill and organized science. Behind it also is the push of the machine and mass production, requiring the capture of ever-enlarging markets. Thus in a movement crowned for a long while with apparently overwhelming success, Europe ventured, along with unprecedented political and economic expansion, cultural dominance.
The pressures and objectives of this Europeanization movement are new, at least in their combination, which accounts in large part for its particular momentum. Characteristic of it above all, however, is a highly organized, self-confident and aggressive ideology. A panoramic survey of Europeanization is vital to the story of culture contacts in modern times. Europeanization is described by George Young as follows: “The term Europeanization is intended to express the effects on Asiatic, American and African cultures and civilizations of permeation by the peculiar social system set up in modern Europe as a consequence of the classical Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the industrial revolution. It may he expressed politically by imposing the idea of democracy, in the sense of parliamentary and party government, or of sovereignty, in the sense of suppression or subordination of all governmental organs to the sovereign state, or of nationality, by creating a semi-religious solidarity in support of that sovereignty. It may be expressed economically by imposing ideas of individualistic capitalism, competition and control on communities enjoying more elaborate and equitable, but less productive and progressive communal civilizations; or industrially by substituting the factory and foundry for the hand loom and home craft. It may also be expressed in education by convincing other continents of the advisability of acquiring attainments in European science to their material or even moral advantage, or by exposing the discipline of tribal tradition and training to dissipation by the gospel of the missionary, the goods of the trader and the good intentions of the administrator.” But of all these aspects the core is economic penetration coupled wherever possible with political control, in short,—economic imperialism.
The history of this imperialism shows that it arose historically out of governmental co-operation and finally government co-option of the trading companies,—the famous Dutch, English East Indies and West Indies and West African companies, the latter of which took over the organization of the African slave trade. Commenting on the surprising success of this movement over all possible rivals, Hudson points out that behind the extensive trading activities of the rival civilizations there was “no driving force of politically powerful commercialism, no persistent state support for overseas expansion, no active naval ambition to promote innovations in shipbuilding and tactics.”
European imperialism has been supported by, or rather has generated a particularly advantageous official philosophy, a colonial-mindedness, assuming very typically the attitude of cultural superiority, which, like the religious fanaticism of the early Moslems, has greatly facilitated the success of the expansion. It is this predominant and now chronic attitude which has stood in the way of much reciprocity of cultural exchange between European and non-European peoples. European culture contacts for this whole period, therefore, have been typically characterized by unequal rather than reciprocal cultural influence upon the other countries and races which were contacted. Thus its increased mobility, which Shapiro points out, has not increased its cultural permeability, for cultural arrogance does not favor cultural exchange. Even in the ruthlessness of ancient military conquest and empire, other societies left the door open to considerable cultural exchange. Modern policy and attitude shuts this door, and leaves only a few indirect openings for the counter-influence of divergent cultures, through the chinks of fashion, exotic curiosity and occasional movements of literary, artistic and intellectual interest. Especially have the Western artists and writers, and latterly the Occidental scientists dissociated themselves from the “official” European attitudes toward alien cultures, and often within the narrower circle of their influence have reversed the official position about the content and values of native cultures,—Oriental, Polynesian, African and Indian. From them, and an occasional enlightened missionary source, the little tradition of intercultural liberalism remaining has stemmed.
Separate strands in this great modern expansion were independent and differently motivated, especially in its earlier phases when pioneering conquest, religious proselytizing and settlement migration were also dominant motives. However, they all converged eventually in an alliance with the economic and political interests at the heart of the movement, and as Hudson comments wryly, “the divine right of trade was not to be denied.” An analysis of these economic factors will come later (Part II).
For the moment, the cultural effects of this historic movement will be considered. They were most varied in specific detail, as might be expected, not only as caused by differences of state, religious and individual enterprise, but as characteristically different in some respects according to the national policy and tradition. But whether Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, German or French, missionary or secular, there were certain common denominators. Chief among them was this general characteristic of producing rapid cultural disruption or displacement rather than smoother cultural fusions, thus bringing into existence border-line varieties of incompletely assimilated hybrid cultures. This was due in large part, no doubt, to the rapidity of the penetration. Yet some results depended upon cultural policy and attitude. The Latin regimes,—Spanish, Portuguese and French, although quite as ruthless politically and economically as any imperialist colonial system, seem to have exhibited considerable tolerance for cultural difference, and thus to have produced appreciable hybridization of the two cultures. Indeed they are almost everywhere characterized by a considerable degree of interpenetration of the colonizing and the aboriginal culture. The Anglo-Saxon tradition of imperialism, British that is, with somewhat parallel attitudes on the part of the former German colonial regime, has, on the contrary, the conviction of cultural incompatibility and persistently holds on, often with overt prejudice, to its own cultural tradition. This exclusiveness gives a hard cast to the culture contacts and until recently with the policy of “Indirect Rule,” has keyed all educational and missionary effort to the avowed displacement of divergent cultures.
The typical effect of colonial imperialism, then, is an array either of subordinated or broken non-European cultures, dependent upon the degree of cultural resistance locally encountered. Upon the more primitive groups the impact of a highly organized civilization like that of any of the European nations or of America, which is patterned similarly, is naturally disastrous. Margaret Mead calls striking attention to this as one of the peculiar and alarming phenomena of our time. Colonial authorities are themselves becoming concerned with the problem, as one affecting both their policies of administration and their returns on the colonial investment. Little is known reliably as yet about the basic factors and the typical trends of such situations. As the Mead article points out, it is far from being a mere academic problem for the anthropologist, for the fate and fortune of millions is involved. Assuming the inevitability of the spread of Western technology and science, apart even from the continuance of imperialism, there is here a grave problem of cultural adjustment, which needs careful study and more scientifically guided policy. For merely humane motives cannot solve or save the situation, as the comparative failure of missionary activity to do so quite clearly shows. Cultural diffusion must be made more subject to the initiative of the various peoples and more carefully safeguarded from the point of view of the morally and politically responsible dominant peoples. Colonial reform is a matter of some decades of serious discussion and half-serious experimentation, but as yet the problem has hardly been objectively defined. Doubtless, as this excerpt suggests, the cultural anthropologist, as one able to see and study the problem through the medium of the affected culture, should have an important word to say as to colonial cultural policies, now that European civilization is reaching the self-critical stage on this issue for the first time in the long history of its breathless expansion.
Many competent observers do not concede it as necessary that the impact of what we call civilization upon primitive cultures should be so uniformly destructive. Pitt-Rivers, in his article on “The Effect on Native Races of Contact with European Civilization,” summarizes the alternatives for widely dissimilar forms of culture confronting powerful culture bearers as the choice of dying out, being driven back or driven under. This description, true to fact in the majority of cases to be sure, is generalized too exclusively on the pattern of colonial imperialism. European forms of culture, however, do involve in prolonged contact, the extinction or profound modification of weaker cultures. Pitt-Rivers then lists eight possibilities of group interaction in the contacts of divergent cultures: extermination and cultural elimination, cross-breeding of a stock that can assimilate, partial cultural assimilation with persisting ethnic continuity, assimilation by physical amalgamation, survival as localized, encysted cultures, cultural survival by passive resistance, anomalous survival with loss of culture and subjugation and finally reverse absorption of the culture invader. The results of culture contact are thus variable enough to be unpredictable.
This is just what concrete history reveals to be the case. There is also the further contingency of the revival, even after long intervals, of cultures that seem to have been completely overlaid. A primitive culture in contact with one that is complex and advanced has slim chance of surviving in any integral way. But even the pressure acculturation of modern imperialism has its exceptions and unexpected developments. In one area, as in many islands of Polynesia, the contact may lead to disastrous depopulation, while in another, as in British India, increased food supply, sanitation, and the control of famine and epidemics may lead to accumulative over-population. In South or Central America, the Indian culture may resistantly survive while in North America, a related branch of the same culture retreats and dies out. In one case, as with the Plains Indians, the aboriginal culture may survive more vigorously in its mixture with the settler civilization than on its own segregated reservations; in another case, it may survive in shrunken, encysted intensity, clinging on in stubborn exclusiveness like the Hottentot and Bushman cultures in South Africa, or the Surinam “bush culture:”—that fugitive but surviving African culture of the hinterland of Dutch and British Guiana that has been reported by Herskovits.
One group, like the American Indian, may, on the whole, spurn the white man’s culture, but another, the Negro, with domestic slavery as a different contacting base, may adopt it to the almost complete exclusion of his own. In the Rand, under the industrial system of the South African gold mines, the Bantu tribes may undergo swift and demoralizing detribalization, while in West Africa, the peasant proprietor system of cocoa planting or the “indirect rule” policy of the Nigerian Protectorate may hold intact and even intensify the tribalism of native institutions. An ethnic group under one set of circumstances may participate freely in the blending process of intermarriage, almost to the point of losing its distinctive identity as with the Chinese in Hawaii or the “vanishing Indian,” whom anthropologists tell us survives appreciably in blood admixture with the American population generally, but especially in admixture with the American Negro. The Negro himself, however, subject to considerable physical change through white miscegenation, has had his ethnic identity re-enforced by social prejudice and in certain areas even by legal restriction. All varieties of the mulatto, even those almost indistinguishably white, are accordingly thrown back upon the minority race group by a rigid and arbitrary policy of racial identification. Thus, in addition to the factors of more objective character,—race, culture type, political and economic forces, secondary factors of group attitude and social policy seriously condition the outcome in many situations of cultural contact. These in the last analysis seem to be the factors that account for what is often found historically,—quite dissimilar results from otherwise essentially parallel situations.
The directions of cultural interaction are thus not arbitrarily set, or at least not completely so. Group attitudes and policies can and do make a difference. This, so far as the future contacts of peoples are concerned, is the promising and hopeful factor. As Firth points out, the very fact that cultures constantly change provokes further differentiation and consequent cultural variation. Distinctive human types and cultures seem likely to exist always in a world dominated by cultural exchange and fusion. For even when certain mechanical aspects of what may be distinguished as material civilization spread, as did modern nineteenth and twentieth century science and technology, only superficial uniformity is established. While breaking down certain established folk-ways, these superimposed culture elements must always fit into the particular pattern of the local culture, and do not, when culturally transplanted, invariably carry identical cultural values. Within many Western nations, with a common civilization and governmental and institutional set-up, distinctive cultural traditions persist and function vitally and usefully in the lives of their subgroups. Many varieties of this situation exist, as for example, local folk-cultures, national minorities, race minorities, language minorities. All of these form the basis of what may be generalized as the minority situation, which introduces into intra-group life almost all of the problems to which the external relations of larger culture groups are subject. They stem, in fact, from the same sources, attitudes and policies, and involve, on another scale, the same issues of intercultural exchange or intercultural conflict, as the case may be. They will be considered in greater detail later (Part IV), but they have much to gain from the application of the general principles derived from an analysis of the contacts and conflicts of major culture groups. Often, indeed, the minority issues reflect and echo the national and international problems. Their objective analysis confirms the general principles that Firth summarizes as “the one generalization of importance which emerges from the studies of culture contact and culture change,”—the truth that “on the whole the people of a community tend to respond best to stimuli which have some relation to their traditional values and forms of organization.” This premium upon the value of native cultures, even as bases for cultural change and transformation, points to a strong and constructive criterion in observing cultural contact and interaction.
An interesting case of this cultural pluralism, based on the relatively successful fusion of two diverse cultures is reported by Redfield. In Yucatan, Redfield found an interesting cultural situation which he describes as “a stairway leading from modern civilization down into a primitive mode of living characteristic of the past.” From the coastal towns where a modern urban culture dominates, Redfield traces the gradations of intermixed Spanish and Indian culture back to the relative dominance of aboriginal culture in the hinterland. In the villages especially, Redfield found interesting cases of Spanish-Indian culture fusions, functioning congruously. He cites, as a particular instance, two altars set up, one to the “Most Beautiful Lord” and the other to the gods of the rain and the cornfield, with their respective pagan and Christian rituals almost intact. The towns he found to be more disorganized and culturally less congruous. In the city, greater variety and the dominance of the European patterns had given the culture shallower roots and organization; there was considerable sense of conflict and caste division between those who followed the Spanish and those who followed the Indian patterns of life. The total picture, however, represented typically the tendency of cultures to blend or at least to interpenetrate, especially where there was less colonial disdain of the native culture. In these areas, the aboriginal culture was still hardy and functionally sound, and had influenced the conquerors markedly. The native culture, however tenacious in fields like folk belief, religion and social habit, had wilted, as might be expected, when confronted with technological improvements and the economic organization of the invading culture, a common enough story in every chapter of contact with Western civilization. A common civilization tolerantly supporting a variety of cultures is at least not an impossibility; and can readily take shape where intercultural tolerance permits. This possibility of cultural pluralism is an important lesson for the Western world to learn, since in spite of its traditional cultural illusions, this is a world where no one general form of culture has a clear or permanent majority.
Part of our difficulty, Teggart argues, comes from the fact that our comprehension of group relations is as provincial and intellectually unsound as our political practice of group relations is unfair and inconsistent. He hints broadly at some causal connection between the two. Certainly, he concludes, we can never understand the past adequately or reliably from the angle of narrow provincialisms, whether they be national, racial or cultural. The process view of history, as he calls it,—by which we learn “not merely what has happened, but how and why,” requires, he insists, a world-scale base. Thus the lessons from the scientific analysis of culture, from an analysis of the practical issues of colonial and culture contacts, and from history itself, properly gauged, converge in their more modern trends to give enlightening conceptions of cultural relativity and reciprocity. They point to a reformed theory and practice of group relations in terms of clarified conceptions of our own respective places in the total picture of human civilization.
Culture conflict, although often associated with cultural difference, does not arise from differences of culture, but from the conflict of group interests. It has accordingly a political not a natural history, for it is of historical origin and manufacture. Typical of its operation, however, is the assignment of some cultural divergence, often relatively accidental or innocuous in itself, as the origin, cause, or symbol of the group issue and its associated conflict. Difference, in this way, is so readily convertible into antagonism and hostility, that many think the dislike of the unlike is the basis and origin of culture conflict. That seems sometimes to be true, but under circumstances where unlikeness conjures up fear. The normal reaction of dislike without fear is aversion, whereas the attitudes back of culture conflict are more the products of the desire to dominate rather than the wish to withdraw, of the will to power rather than the wish to exclude.
Relative status and advantage are, then, the core of the culture conflict situation in all of its varieties, whether the struggle be between groups within a society or between societies as competing units. Given such a situation, cultural difference, through becoming associated with status of dominance and subordination, becomes a cleavage plane of culture conflict. Superiority becomes associated arbitrarily with dominance and subordination gets itself stigmatized as inferiority—and the distinction of the “majority” and the “minority” has crystallized.
The potency of the majority is not numbers but power. Often the “majority” is in reality a powerfully situated minority, acting either with the direct force of power or the indirect force of authority. The latter makes prestige or the tradition of dominance almost as important as actual overt political, legal or economic power. For prestige, as the heritage of power, is so closely associated with it as often to enable dominance to prolong its control considerably after the lapse of the original capacity to dominate by overt force. In the interims of open struggle, majorities really govern by prestige, and so the pursuit of prestige becomes one of the chief objectives of power groups. Power, prestige and caste become the majority ideals, and in these reinforcements of power cultural differentials take on the significance that more or less permanently associates them with status and converts them into symbols of superiority or inferiority. Within and without a society, they mark off the boundaries of privilege, and to be on the wrong side of these cleavages means minority status in one degree or another.
There is usually considerable difference, however, between the power politics of a dominant class, caste or elite in relation to the subordinate classes and minorities within a given society and the more obvious and ruthless rule and exclusion practiced upon a subordinate nation or people outside the social system of the ruling power. And yet, upon occasion, just as much ruthlessness and exclusion can be visited upon an internal minority and cultural differentials just as rigidly insisted upon. Normally, internal minorities are granted certain concessions of partial inclusion and cultural participation. A majority frequently obtains sanctions for power by giving them a shared participation in the prestige of some national or racial tradition, though frequently this confers little besides vicarious satisfaction. By such symbolic identification, the majority power group acquires a wide and influential sanction in the name of the state or the church, the race or the civilization, through which as “defenders of the faith,” “carriers of civilization,” or “guardians of the race,” they acquire acceptance and support both of their leadership and of their policies. In such ways interests and programs have become historically associated with causes of culture and civilization although in origin they may have represented only the interests and initiatives of relatively few. Nothing is more effective as rationalizing instruments for power politics than the traditional symbols of the group culture or civilization, which usually evoke the unquestioned mass support that comes from any inveterate sense of group solidarity.
Whenever historic groups are threatened from the outside, they immediately minimize all internal distinctions, and minority discriminations are held in abeyance. This crisis-patriotism is recognizably different from the normal variety. Under imperialistic regimes, it is extended at such times even to the subject peoples, who, like the internal minorities, are then brought closer in shared affiliations of the nationalist or cultural bonds of solidarity. Such hectic courting and inclusion of minority groups is in marked and often ironic contrast to the more normal “divide and rule” policy and tradition of dominant groups, to which they are apt to revert under conditions of assured dominance and control.
Such in the main is the majority profile. It is not an attractive picture, but realistically it does represent on the whole the ways of the majority, their general technique of dominance, their characteristic historic behavior.
MacCartney sketches in his article the historical forces that have produced the tradition of the European political majority. Its power politics derives primarily from military conquest, organizing and re-organizing itself in the structure of the political state as this or that subject group is added to or lost from its orbit of power. In all the elaborate historical succession of political combination and recombination, MacCartney thinks, essentially the same principles of majority organization hold, though on widely different scale and pattern. The core foundation, whether large or small, nation or empire, is the majority-minority situation, in which subordinate groups are organized and incorporated into some unit whose solidarity is dictated by the majority and patterned after their tradition of culture.
Constantly at the heart of this system of ruling power is the problem of maintaining unity, on the one hand, and subordination on the other. The subject groups tend to assimilate and in course of time, usually do. This confronts the ruling group with what MacCartney styles the “rival national philosophies of assimilation and segregation.” In Europe, from the time of the Romans on, various regimes have confronted this problem. As the subject peoples have constantly shifted in their alignments with the ruling groups, the patterns of political structure have changed. Though always ruled, the subordinate groups are sometimes subjects merely, at other times, subject minorities. As subject minorities, they confront, in addition to some political system by which they are subordinated, some national solidarity from which they are excluded.
The latter depends upon some cultural difference or tradition of cultural difference that has assumed social and historical importance. The Middle Ages, MacCartney observes, “pursued no conscious policy toward national minorities either of differentiation or of assimilation, being essentially universal and regarding the question with a tolerance born of indifference.” But when, for example, France must be officially maintained as a Catholic country in the struggle against Protestantism, the French Huguenots become a national religious minority, or similarly when the English are settling Ireland, the Irish suddenly become a national racial minority, so much so that to “prevent the settlers from merging into the Irish, intermarriage, and the use of their language, laws or dress were forbidden.”
Since the Renaissance, the national state based on the identification of the culture of the majority with the state, has gradually developed in Europe and brought culture difference openly into the area of power politics. Significantly enough from almost the same century, European imperialism, that other political entity which uses culture difference as an instrument of policy, was in the making. The minority issues of today are the dual heritage of this historical movement toward the national state and the extension of national culture and institutions to empire. So that today culture is the “strongest stimulant to national feeling” and cultural difference the most characteristic basis of cleavage for all minority groups, internal or external.
Especially as an expanding Europe reached out to conquest and settlement in the New World and in other continents, hitherto inexperienced varieties of peoples and culture provided a fertile ground for the development of culture bias and its erection into a justification of ruthless dominance and exploitation. Sample historic cases of this relentless investment of new areas of dominance, as portrayed in the excerpts from Darwin, Means, Vesta, MacCrone and Frederici, reveal tragic but not untypical illustration of these expansion conquests which laid down the keel of modern empire. Ruthless and almost incredible cruelty and deception characterized many of them. Cultural difference was utilized to justify the complete repudiation of any ethical code. Whether in South or Central or North America, Polynesia, West, South or East Africa, or Asia, ruthless and inhuman tactics of subjugation prevailed. Counter-rationalizations—atrocity concepts of the “brutal and treacherous savage,” “the wild Indians,” “the perfidious enemy and infidel,” “the benighted and conscienceless pagan,” were used to cover over the terrorization and decimation of conquered peoples, so that it might receive support and sanction. The early annals of these invading movements, objectively studied, show that the atrocity characterizations applied more aptly to the conquerors than the conquered.
With pacification and subjection this initial ruthlessness subsides, but then principally because some of the subject groups must be preserved in the interest of the phase that succeeds conquest—economic exploitation. Untractable groups continue to receive harsh measures. The double code persists throughout, in that minority interests are considered only in so far as they are compatible with dominant interests. Repressive measures are reserved for any crisis in the relations of the groups, and restrictive measures govern the normal status quo. But any threat or disturbance to that status quo, and tactics of suppression immediately follow—punitive expeditions, pogrom terrorization, succeeded by fresh restrictive curbing and legislation, like disfranchisement, Ghetto or reservation segregation, the South African “color-bar” and native “passes” and curfew.
MacCrone gives a clear portrait of the European “frontier” psychology, as it confronts on the far borders of imperial encroachment the strange environment and stranger peoples. His profile of the South African frontiersman facing the Zulu, Hottentot and Bushmen parallels illuminatingly Stanley Vestal’s analysis of the American immigrant farmer facing the Plains Indians. Much of their harshness and cruelty is the by-product of fear and some of their intolerance is due to the sparse hold which they have on their own culture. Nevertheless behind them is the political machinery of empire and the national state, and they conceive themselves to be the chosen representatives of the dominant race and civilization, act in their name and with their sanction. They also relay back to the dominant groups their crudely distorted picture of the aboriginal civilization. Ignorance and cultural intolerance culminate in stereotypes quite agreeable to those who wish to dispossess the natives.
Vestal calls attention to the fact that it hardly becomes the settler, who took what the Indian possessed, to call him a thief, nor, considering how often he broke his own word and treaties, to brand the Indian as treacherous. But by the perverse logic of conquest, what is a virtue with the conqueror becomes a vice for the minority. The Indian, for example, was called a nomad, although he only wandered seasonally in a well-grooved cycle adapted to his living necessities. It was the white settler who was more formidably nomadic, a prospecting adventurer, projected from a secondary base in the East, where he had paused only a generation or so after an adventurous leap across the Atlantic.
Friederici gives an even closer analysis of the repercussions of frontier contacts from a point of view of cultural influence. He traces the history of scalping, trite libel of the Indian and popular symbol of Indian barbarism. Scalping is shown to have entered its most formidable phase through the introduction of the steel and iron scalping knife, which became one of the most profitable barter items of the frontier trade. The trade in firearms, horses and intoxicants, moreover, was mainly responsible for the terror of the Indian raider, and intensified the traits for which the Plains Indians were blamed and nearly exterminated. But, as Friederici also documents, the white colonists took over the complex of scalping, systematized it, and by systems of legally enacted scalp bounties turned it into a formidable new method of repression and terrorization. This neglected chapter of colonial history throws a searching light on frontier morality, which set the key and stereotypes and precedents for colonial native-white relations. It is a tradition, which, however modified and moderated, has never been fully outgrown. Similar motives and tactics characterize economic imperialism, which in some respects is merely the organized second phase of what begins in frontier conquest.
Modern imperialism is the heir of the conquest invasions of the European nations and of the exploration and frontier settlement of their nationals. From its sixteenth century beginnings to the present, it has gradually become the most considerable politico-economic movement of its supporting groups. They construe it as a part of their national welfare as it is so vital an extension of their political and economic interests. As MacCrone points out, there have been two traditions in this expansion, one idealistic and the other realistic, the one, stemming from the crusader, the explorer and the missionary priest, and the other, from the trader and settler. A fundamental conflict has prevailed between the practical interests and political objectives of the power politics involved, on the one hand, and on the other, the idealistic motivations of propagating the faith, exploring the unknown, and civilizing the heathen and primitive peoples. The mercenary motives have become increasingly dominant, due to the connection between the European industrial system and the progressive organization of colonial markets and the source supplies of raw materials. Trade rivalries have combined with national rivalries to bring imperialism to a stage where it is an organized system of power politics, carrying over some of the worst features of the frontier phase into more elaborate economic programs of exploitation.
The excerpts from MacCrone, Scholes and Toynbee in addition to showing an interesting series of contrasts and comparisons between the various branches and phases of European imperialist expansion, offer convincing proof of its basic common character in spite of all superficial variation. Imperialism’s forms and official policies are modified, of course, by marked differences in the cultural setup of its sphere of invasion. Its rationalizations and emphases also vary from time to time and from one national tradition to another. But, as MacCrone writes, “whatever the form of European expansion, the nature of the contacts between the European and the non-European tended to be, from the beginning, of a violent and aggressive kind.” In spite of the contrasts Scholes notes between the Spanish and the British colonial regimes in America, he too agrees that “the fate of the Maya was essentially the same as that of other aboriginal populations which have been brought into contact with a more advanced civilization.”
Scholes corroborates the judgment that from as early a date as the sixteenth century there has been conflict between the economic and the ecclesiastical and humanitarian motives of empire, and that gradually the economic motives gained complete ascendancy. Religious scruples against slavery, especially the enslavement of fellow-Christians, the zeal for proselytizing, all gave way to the priority of the interests of trade, economic expansion and political control. In the Spanish-Portuguese zone of influence that Scholes reports upon, zeal for the missionary propagation of Christianity retarded and for a time countered the worst features of the slave trade, which went on unchecked in the Protestant zones of influence in North America and the British West Indies. Finally African slavery was taken up by the Spanish to obviate the enslavement of the Indians, for whose conversion there was at the time a well-organized campaign. But Negro slave labor was insufficient, and the economic needs of the conquerors eventually dictated a system of forced labor for the Indians, for which the tribal Indian chieftains were forced to serve as intermediaries. This, with land peonage, became the equivalent in the Spanish colonies for the chattel slavery of their Northern neighbors.
Scholes’s article also illuminates the way in which difference between the aboriginal cultures of the southern and the northern American Indian tribes caused marked difference in the adaptations and reactions of the invading civilizations. The semi-nomadic character of the North American Indian cultures enabled the British to deal with these tribes as block units and force them back, in the main, outside the colonial system. Their economy was not particularly suited to useful incorporation. On the other hand, the strong agricultural economy and rootage of the South and Central American Indians, with its greater resistance, forced their incorporation as an integral part of the colonial society. There was, accordingly, greater fusion of the two cultures in this area than in the North. Similarly with the people themselves, there was freer intermixture both with the whites and with the African Negroes, who were later introduced, and the half-caste attained at least an intermediate status. In the North, however, with slavery and sharper lines of race prejudice, there was, in spite of much miscegenation, rigid social exclusion that extended to the mulatto as well as to the full-bloods, so that there was less cultural interchange and fewer elements of the native cultures survived. Contemporary society in these areas still reflects this cultural divergence, but the stamp of political dominance and the effects of economic exploitation are marked upon both regions and their subordinated minorities.
In Africa, imperialistic penetration has been even more dominated by direct and overt motives of gain. Not only was this due to the slave trade, in which wholesale traffic in human beings was put on a par with the trade in gold, ivory and other commodities, but to the fact that the really effective colonial penetration of Africa is the work of the mature and latest phase of economic imperialism. As late as 1877, only one-tenth of the vast continent of Africa was under white domination, but by 1925, nine-tenths had been formally partitioned among the leading European nations,—Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Portugal and Spain. African groups have thus met the full force of the last phase of overseas capitalistic expansion, and suffered the triple pressure of the search for raw materials and for markets, the search for settlement lands, and the increased demand for native labor necessary for all of these self-seeking enterprises. Cultural disintegration has been accelerated by the rapidity of this encroachment, and intensified by the employment of the more recent technological developments of European civilization. Physical and cultural resistance has been reduced to a minimum, and as the competition among the several nations grew, native life and resources were subject to directly proportional strain. All this has made the modern partition of Africa the most typical instance of economic imperialism, in which its political, economic and cultural motives and policies have become most evident.
Woolf generalizes them, not merely as they relate to Africa but to the whole non-European or non-industrialized world. The current forms of imperialism rest, he shows, on a far-flung industrial economy linked to the political power of a modern state. This tacit alliance of the capitalist, the trader, the manufacturer, the financier, the government and the colonial administration is the elaborate politico-economic system that has slowly been built up on the foundations of the early European culture expansions.
Direct participation of the national state in economic imperialism has not only brought about this coalition of political and economic interests, but has given the enterprise an aggressive character which economic expansion alone may never have acquired. The simultaneous pursuit of common ends by competitive national states has given imperialism also a formidable international character, along with which has gone a characteristic ideology more or less standardized and reinforced by them all. There has been a wholesale identification of the “cause of civilization” with any and all phases of European-non-European conflicts of interest, which has emphasized racial and cultural bias. But on the other hand, national rivalry has several times threatened large sections of the imperialist structure, and largely because of the political involvement, these eventualities are still inherent in the system and still threaten it far more than any counter-resistance of the subject groups can possibly do.
George Young’s article treats particularly these actual and potential repercussions of imperialist tactics. Especially in its maneuvers for markets and spheres of influence, European policy has been less successful in the case of the more organized non-European nations, as also in its auxiliary extensions of non-political Europeanization. Resentment of its superiority pretensions have particularly characterized the second-generation reactions of educated non-Europeans, and Asiatic groups generally. Inconsistencies between professed code and practice have begun to weaken the once overwhelming prestige of the European political system and culture. More threatening still is the imitative imperialism of other non-European nations,—Japan particularly, which threatens from the double angle of competition and of challenge to the European cultural supremacy. All this would seem to indicate that imperialism is approaching a period of unprecedented stress, even to the point, some think, of prospective liquidation.
For primitive cultures, in fact for non-industrial societies of all levels of cultural development, the impacts of modern imperialism have been unusually severe and disruptive. Neither the age-old drain of military plunder and tribute, nor the trade in precious metals, products and raw materials, even when carried on in exploiting barter, nor even the consistent raiding of the slave trade appears to have disorganized these native societies half so much as the superficially less rapacious contacts of the present-day colonial system. One reason already noted is the intrusion of new culture patterns with overwhelming prestige and penetrating force. But by far the major force of the colonial impact today is that of the economic system. The modern colonial system calls for elaborately organized economic contacts, with secondary bases thrust deep into the zones of native life. Where this is not the case, there is systematic transplanting of considerable sections of the native population into the orbit of European civilization as laborers.
While mere penetration of the products of Western machine production can bring about considerable cultural disintegration, particularly a decay of native craft arts and skills, it is the labor aspect of modern industrialism which most seriously disrupts native society and culture. In a modern imperialist system subject peoples are geared both to the export market and through the channels of labor to the ever-expanding production system of Europe. Forced trading and forced labor both involve forced acculturation, which ties in the economic factors with the increase in culture conflict.
Monica Hunter details very carefully some of this economically induced culture conflict and breakdown in a typical colonial area—South Africa. “The clash,” she says, “is primarily economic. There is a struggle for land and a conflict of interests over labor.” There is cultural disintegration, then, no matter what the character of the colonial economy whether under the export of the labor supply outside the tribal life as in the gold, copper and diamond mining industries of the Rand or in the importation of native servant labor into the white settlements, or in the organization of agricultural production through European type fanning or plantations.
Much of this occurs through lack of any consideration for the native systems, which in some cases could be reorganized to effective fulfillment of the European needs. But that would require more patience and scientific study and more respect for native life than could be expected of an economically dominated system. Yet in this very respect Miss Hunter observes a degree of tribal disorganization which threatens even the economic interests involved beyond those immediately dependent on the native labor. But consideration of the possibilities of the native consumption market, which would develop if native culture were prospering instead of retrogressing, seems almost below the horizon of the typical colonial point of view. Yet in order that the native group may have enough vitality to function in their role of enforced service to the European economy, they must have cultural support and development in exchange for their helpfulness in the colonial system. The effects of colonial contacts on native cultures will determine not only the fate of the natives but also the ultimate success of the original objectives of the colonial economy itself. This interdependence of economic results upon cultural policies and their effects is just beginning to be realized. Destruction or serious disorganization of the native cultures eventually means the undermining of the base of the colonial system.
In the island possessions of the British in Polynesia, Pitt-Rivers discovers the same correlation of economic exploitation with cultural disruption. He finds detribalization taking place rapidly under both of the two labor systems in vogue, so that as far as this area is concerned neither the free labor nor the indenture policy has proved satisfactory from the point of view of native interests. Voluntary contract opens the unsophisticated native to the beguilement and deception of the labor “recruiter,” usually leads to a prolonged term in plantation service or the native labor compound, where in addition to hardship and unnatural living, he becomes alienated from tribal life. On the return to the native villages, the detribalized native serves to disorganize the life of natives not yet required in the colonial economic system, thus undermining native society. One of the most serious features is the displacement of the native idea of working on a communal rather than an individual basis, a shift which sometimes subverts their whole social system.
Detribalization as an experience is shock enough, but in situations where cultural and racial prejudices block any progressive incorporation of the transformed native into a European scheme of life, the aftermath is gravely serious. This, however, is just what happens in spite of professions of tutelage and training for a new civilization. At the present stage, missionary programs are ineffectual because they too are committed for the most part to the majority mores and their values. Indeed, detribalization under the good intentions of the missionary can be just as damaging to native morale and social adjustment. Pitt-Rivers cites the false association of European clothing with morality as a sample of this warped cultural perspective and its effect on native life. A vicious circle of maladjustments is started, beginning in a breakdown of native moral values, leading through bewilderment and imitative prudery to no constructive new morality, and ending, ironically enough, in little but profit to the European clothes merchant.
On the land and wages questions, the economic odds against the native are similarly bad. Special low rates of pay for native labor are rationalized on the supposition that the native scale of needs is much lower. This policy lacks consistency, for under typical circumstances the native system of living is broken down, and changed areas and modes of living substituted. Under such conditions the differentials doom the native to living not in an isolated, unassimilated native sphere, but to the status of an exploited dependent in a submerged stratum of the European economy. As to the land, where a European settlement policy is pursued, and the great majority of the colonies maintain that—the native communities are dispossessed of their habitual areas of living. The cultural disorganization is magnified immeasurably, particularly because large areas are required for many of these primitive cultures. In South Africa, the encroachment of the European settlement and mining districts restricts the native population to living within one-fifth of their previous scope. This is a weighty factor in the cultural breakdown, and is, as well, one of the primary causes of the trek of the native laborers to the industrial and white settlement centers. On these scores, the economic indictment of colonial imperialism is unchallengeable.
The selection from Dover continues the economic analysis along historical lines, going into very interesting parallels of national prejudice stemming from political rivalry and conflict of economic interests. He cites the practices and codes of the British in Ireland during the period of settlement and the struggle for landholding control at that time. Dover here suggests that economic interests are the actual controlling base of most historic group prejudice and hostility. With respect to imperialism, he finds the economic factor so characteristic that he regards situations of national and racial antipathy practically identical, and thinks close historical analysis will substantiate that conclusion. Dover practically gives as his definition of prejudice an active group antipathy generated by a conflict of economic group interests and persisting or subsiding according to its group profitableness.
In an interesting memorandum on the variability of movements of group antagonism in America, that is—organized anti-foreign or anti-minority campaigns, Donald Young finds them correlated with periods of depression and sharpened economic rivalry. His figures tentatively suggest a “direct correlation between the peaks of nativist spirit in America and the valleys of economic difficulty.” Certainly, in an instance previously cited—the change of attitude toward the Chinese in the West—one can definitely see such an economic connection, when prior to the exclusion phase, Chinese immigration was encouraged and even subsidized. Extremist nationalism and anti-foreign prejudice are shown by Young to have had relatively greater vogue during every successive period of depression and hard times since the mid-nineteenth century. Certain at least it is that, wherever diverse groups have become involved in economic rivalry, whatever cultural differentials may happen to be involved have been used to symbolize the issues and rationalize the struggle. Such racial factors are well-known features of many labor disputes, and operate frequently to prolong and aggravate the issues.
Charles Johnson, in discussing Race Relations and Social Change, comes to the conclusion that the economic base is the neglected factor in the analysis of the race problem. In spite of the strong tradition of distinctive difference, the racial situation, analyzed objectively, has so many common denominators with class and other group conflict situations, that little distinctive difference seems to remain. In this perspective, only degrees of intensity and complexity seem to distinguish both the attitudes and the historical factors of race conflict from those of some other group antagonisms. As a case in point, when in the early colonial economy the white indentured servant class occupied about the same status as the Negro, similar restrictions, legal and customary, were in vogue for both. The early codes made little distinction between them; and there was such considerable intermarriage that special legislation was called for. It was the divergent economic fortunes of the white manual worker and the Negroes, who for several generations were indentured servants rather than chattel slaves, which brought to the one improved status and closer social acceptance and carried the other to a position of serf and chattel, with marked stigma and social aversion.
Certainly there is noticeable in the fluctuation both of discriminatory treatment and intensification of group hostility a significant parallelism between periods of economic rivalry and of racial tension. The series of race riots around 1919 came significantly at the height of the Negro’s forward surge into new centers and channels of industrial labor, and occurred, in centers like Chicago and East St. Louis, where the labor incursion and rivalry had been particularly intense.
The Johnson article puts forward the interesting contention that today many of the traditional problems and issues of race relations are resolving themselves into class and economic issues. The more realistically the racial situation is analyzed the more this linkage with the economic situation stands out. Certain it is, at least, that the hub of the majority treatment of the Negro minority is a policy of extreme and open economic discrimination. These differentials in employment, wages, types of employment, chances of advancement are the effective instruments of the reactionary racial policy. Without question, the economic policy, more than the political or even the social, bears the brunt of the American race conflict in the technique of majority dominance. Johnson concludes that “further changes in race relations in America will depend not only upon fundamental domestic economic readjustments, but also to some extent upon world economics.”
All societies have their patterns of social cleavage, and each is characteristic. Many of these group cleavages are functional, and mark off the working subgroups of the society in question. But although associated with the organic structure of the society, many of them represent distinctions in the invidious sense of the word, and reflect lines of social stress and conflict. The group may take them up into some comprehensive organized unity, but beneath the surface of this rather formal solidarity, these separatisms persist and color the social attitudes and relations of their respective members. In the practical round of everyday living they bulk large and importantly, especially when they are separatisms associated with some sense of cultural difference, actual or even historical. The naturalized citizen, for example, assured of full legal and constitutional equality, may yet have an apologetic uneasy citizenship because of being received with some majority reservation as a newcomer or as not quite belonging. Every minority group member particularly knows some sectarian line, all the more real in actual group living for being founded on traditional difference or distinction of custom or unwritten law.
Minority distinctions are invariably negative and restrictive. They range through a wide gamut from relatively trivial and tolerable distinctions to grave, handicapping and almost intolerable discrimination. Despite such infinite variety, group conflict cleavage has certain significant common factors and possibly common motives and objectives. The social distinctions of caste, class, race and sect, and even those of sex, seem to have interesting common denominators. The reactions and devices of religious sectarianism have very close analogies with those of racial prejudice and persecution, and many of the usages of caste repeat themselves with shadings of degree in class and minority hostility and discrimination.
In historical origin, many of these distinctions of group separatism were functional. But as the society matures, they become traditional and stereotyped. The tradition then operates to stratify the group, and limit individuals and sub-groups by well-defined and often very arbitrary codes and conventions. These prescribe minutely intra-group status and through the custom and etiquette of group relations, limit the occupations, social scope, privileges and association of the subordinate groups. All who do not belong to the privileged or ranking groups are affected seriously by these prescriptions, which as far as their lives are concerned, become proscriptions. Meanwhile, the privileged group or collective set of privileged groups constitute the “majority,” which, irrespective of its numbers, dominates. These proscriptions and restrictions apply not only to the basic social relations of the various groups, but extend through social ritual and etiquette to the secondary cultural aspects of life, to social standing, prestige, to the privileges of social affiliation and cultural participation. The sense of belonging or of sharing the culture is, after all, one of the primary bases of social solidarity. Exclusion from it, even in the presence of other partial integrations, represents a status of definitely restrictive and negative social character. Individuals and groups may suffer acutely in terms of lack of status and its imputed disparagements, even when otherwise fairly successfully accommodated to the social environment.
Cultural discrimination of this sort is peculiarly arbitrary, in that, being traditional, it frequently ignores acquired status, withholds recognition as determined by the normal criteria of the society, and operates with a stringency that tolerates little or no exceptions. Such discriminations, however, vary considerably in degree, from the extreme of outcast ostracism and pariah exclusion to the comparatively milder and more superficial exclusions of class and cultural snobbery. Some minority status is even self-imposed, but unless it can counter-assert superiority, in the presence of the dominant majority tradition, it still connotes some shade of not belonging, some degree of subordinate status.
As these types of social cleavage are studied intensively, it becomes increasingly clear that there are common denominators running through them. The term caste is frequently used, out of its original and strictly historical meaning, to denominate the basic character of all these restrictive social and cultural exclusions. There is warrant for this extended usage, since many of the group distinctions are as arbitrary and restrictive as primitive caste was, and all associate social stigma with restricted privilege and association. The taboos and code traditions of colonial and of American race prejudice, for example, so closely approximate caste in extreme practice that they need only the addition of “untouchability” to be identical. In spite of considerable miscegenation, prohibited intermarriage is officially maintained, and the taboos of restricted association, relaxed only to suit the majority interests and convenience, as in labor and personal service relations, amount in practice to “social untouchability.” The fanatical exclusions of anti-Semitism, with its Ghettos and “identification badges,” is in many respects, similar. Comparable also is the code of the colonial officer, whose political caste status puts insuperable barriers between him and all “natives.” Ironically enough, many a maharajah, looking down through centuries of caste tradition on subordinate layers of Hindu society, now finds himself the victim of superimposed political caste, with the minister resident or colonial “adviser” its obdurate symbol. This cannot be construed as mere political restriction and hierarchy as prevails between rulers of varying rank, for accompanying it is the arbitrary dictation of the governing group mores and etiquette as a symbol of cultural superiority superseding the traditional native etiquette. Both in intra-group and inter-group relations, caste is a very considerable modern phenomenon.
Gallagher, analyzing the American racial variety, concludes that race prejudice, like class and caste prejudice, is merely one variety in a general species and also comes to the conclusion that race prejudice is a particularly virulent variety of cultural prejudice. As a result, race becomes significant not as a biological description or ethnic identification, but primarily as a symbol of group conflict between cultures or between culture groups within a culture. He finds that its real significance lies in the employment of the concept of race as “a culture symbol of group conflict and group organization.” This is not to ignore the distinctive differences between class and race or between the concrete variety of this or that type of minority situation, but to point out the significant similarities and overlappings. Rationalizations of cultural group prejudice exhibit the same analogies. The latter, in fact, shift base periodically between religious, cultural and racial grounds of distinction and discrimination, as, for example, the medieval stress on the Jew as a religious sect and the modern distorted emphasis on the Jewish difference as racial.
Gallagher then proceeds to a specific analysis of American racial prejudice. The historical origin of American color prejudice lies in the slave system. Its present-day traditions are the modified prolongation of the slave codes. Gallagher demonstrates clearly, however, that the perpetuation of race caste in the South is due to the South’s economy, with its continued exploitation of a cheap labor supply rather than due to the mere weight of the historical tradition. The cultural and other differentials are maintained, then, for only slightly altered objectives. The status quo of subordination and its accrued vested interests support the tradition and code. Economic conflict supports attitudes of antipathy rather than friendliness, and the racial distinctions persist as protective and rationalizing devices for the majority interests and status.
Gallagher also shows how a tradition, derived historically from the ante-bellum regime and the interests of the planter class,—a relatively small and now almost defunct group, has become the dominant social tradition of the “solid” South. This occurred through the strategic inclusion of large sections of the white population in the emotional satisfactions of superior caste status, whether they shared the actual social status and economic privilege of the slavocracy or not. The vicarious satisfactions of the poor whites, with a small share in the benefits of restricted labor competition, have been used to create a specious solidarity of interests based on the perpetuation of the discriminations of color caste. Yet these allied interests are not in fact identical. Close observation of racial attitudes and practice reveals variation in these attitudes as between one class and another on both sides of the color line. Although a steady alignment and policy of majority-minority relations has been maintained, this variance of attitude from class to class within the society is a symptom of split motives and interests, and forecasts the possibility of a break in the traditional alignment should group interests among the whites divide sufficiently.
But in the present situation it is regarded as almost axiomatic that the “white man’s floor is the Negro’s ceiling,” that certain symbols of superiority and inferiority should be maintained strictly, in order to preserve the status quo and keep the system intact, and that caste should obliterate class lines and all other distinctions to place “all Negroes below all whites.” This is insisted upon, although economic class lines would put all upper-class Negroes and some of the middle-class Negroes higher in economic status than most of the lower-class whites. These paradoxical attitudes and policies, in addition to obstructing many lines of social change and cultural advance, add to the emotional stress of the majority-minority conflict, and are in large part responsible for the irrationalities and fanaticism in the majority psychology.
The etiquette code of race relations as it functions today in a typical Southern community confirms the judgment that a vigorous caste system based on color operates in this section. What to the outsider would seem to be trivialities of social intercourse,—such as minutiae about handshaking, modes of salutation, use of the “front door,” eating together and the like, are so uncompromisingly prescribed by the unwritten rules of the race relations code that they have the force and character of genuine “taboos.” In this way what has been traditionally characteristic of relative racial status is bulwarked against any possibility of change by this elaborate conventionalized paraphernalia of superiority-inferiority symbols. No matter how trivial, these symbols are invested with the force and loyalty of the whole social system, and the least infraction is met with the total resistance of the entire majority. Thus the prescribed social etiquette assumes practical importance beyond its superficial ceremonial meaning, for it reinforces the majority policy of dominance as expressed more realistically in economic exploitation, disfranchisement, group intimidation and social ostracism.
Psychologically, especially in the minds of the majority, this order of things is accepted as almost inevitable and beyond question. The stereotyped distinctions stand like frontiers, across which much interracial commerce and intercourse must flow, but which are reserved for any eventuality of conflict of group interests as intrenched positions of exclusion and defense. In the shadow of this hostile tradition, what Romanzo Adams reports as “the unorthodox race doctrine of Hawaii” would seem quite unattainable, and untenable if it were. Yet another pattern and tradition of group contact in a multi-racial situation operates, as he shows, to secure the almost complete absence of race prejudice and sustained social tolerance and cultural reciprocity. In addition to the absence of serious group antagonism and friction, Adams reports that the “code of racial equality makes it possible for men of superior character and ability to attain to positions of power and dignity and to exercise authority, without limitation as to race.” Race in that sort of social context is merely what it is to the scientist, a specific inheritance of family stock. It exists under such circumstances to be recognized but not to make a difference, as a basis of preferred loyalties not of prescribed limitations.
Toynbee’s selection reports further historical instances where a strong tradition of solidarity has neutralized the negative sense of racial difference. He shows, first, how the strong proselytizing interest of late medieval Christianity gave effective religious sanction to the ignoring of race difference. In this era, embassies were received at European courts from the pagan African kingdoms, important political relations were maintained with Ethiopia, and the one of three magi was traditionally represented as Negro. Toynbee considers the more liberal racial attitude of the Latin peoples and their comparative freedom from race prejudice to be an historical carry-over of this earlier Christian cosmopolitanism, with the substitution, in the case of the French tradition, of a commonality of institutions and culture for the old commonality of religion. These historical data show that, whereas religion can in some cases be the most stubborn and divisive of all the organized social interests, it can also in other instances be a strong force in the opposite direction. In Moslem tradition and practice, the excerpt goes on to show, the bonds of religious solidarity take precedence over racial difference in all cultural and social relations, even to the point of unrestricted intermarriage. In this case religious cleavage and its loyalties cut squarely across racial and other cultural cleavages and resolve them.
Golding’s account of the religious persecution of the Jew is an illustration of religion in the other role. The religious prejudices of medieval Europe were intense, and precipitated against the Jews a century-long campaign of religious and social persecution, culminating here in mass expulsions, there, in exploitation and Ghetto restrictions. The Ghetto laws, with their residential segregation, prohibitions of intermarriage, political and legal disabilities, ostracism, symbolic insult and periodic terrorization, as described in Golding, are very comparable to much that is reported in Gallagher and MacCrone of the pattern of racial prejudice against the Negro. The rationalizations used follow also the same patterns. The Jew is blamed for his cultural difference, but blocked in all attempts to assimilate. He is adjudged inferior, but carefully and elaborately disarmed for effective competition. He is urged into exclusive group organization but denied its normal privilege of freedom from external regulation and intrusion. In medieval times, religious difference was used to justify these practices, but when religion no longer had a forceful appeal as a ground of rationalization, the sectarianism became “racial” as in contemporary German anti-Semitism. The Jew now comes to be considered a member of an inferior culture group instead of an offending religious sect. He is accused of being an unfair competitor economically and professionally, of being a parasitic element in the body politic, and an alien strain in the culture. The techniques of restriction and persecution remain substantially the same. The political and economic motivation of contemporary persecution gives special directions and emphases to the persecution, as might be expected, in line with these interests.
But medieval anti-Semitism, with all its religious assertions, was also insistent upon economic and political disabilities,—drastic restriction of occupations, periodic confiscation of wealth, exclusion from full citizenship and from positions of leadership and honor. Whether the division of group interests starts historically in religious difference or in politico-economic rivalry or in colonial contact and imperialistic domination, eventually the full complement of caste cleavage and persecution comes into play, if the issues of the conflict become sufficiently acute.
There are differences, of course, between these social situations and their severally different alignments of interests and grounds of conflict. Particularly are there differences to be noted between the controls of caste, class and dominant groups who share a social order with their subordinates and the controls exercised over peoples as in imperialism, overseas or continental, where the dominant power maintains an external and more arbitrarily coercive relation to the ruled. Yet even this general difference has considerable exception. Even as internal situations, intra-group sectarian issues may become as acute as any major extra-group conflict, as the Jewish question, in some instances, or the “race problem” in the United States or the “native question” of colonial South Africa. Yet a large-scale divergence, which is crucial and critical elsewhere, can be so altered by a policy of assimilation or by attitudes of reciprocity as to become less acute than many internal minority issues. Cases of this are the racial fraternalisms of certain French associations, particularly in the Old Colonies, or the cultural situation in several South American countries, particularly Brazil, and the close welding of a variety of races, nationalities and cultures in the religious solidarity of Islam.
MacCrone, reporting on religious and racial issues in the Union of South Africa, details a contrasted situation even within its borders. In the early Cape Colony, he finds, there was a subordination of racial to religious cleavage. At that time conversion to Christianity conferred freedom from slavery and social acceptance of natives and mixed-bloods to the extent of legalized intermarriage. The Cape Colony “colored” population is part product of this regime. On the South African frontier, however, the identification of race with religious difference made “pagan,” “black” and “non-Christian” synonymous and lumped racial and religious prejudice into a particularly stubborn cleavage line. Under stress of that frontier antagonism, it was for a time legally forbidden to attempt to christianize the natives. There was a comparable brief interval, incidentally, when such a dilemma confronted the slave masters in the United States, and then the christianizing of the slaves was hotly debated. On the South African frontier cultural intolerance has been acute for generations, and this is partly to be accounted for by the intense religious sectarianism which characterized this frontier farmer culture, and to the fanatical use of religious difference to justify the dispossessing of the pagan natives. Color prejudice under these conditions became particularly intense.
The unusual severity of racial cleavage is largely accounted for by the high degree of visibility of skin color as a very obvious sign of group membership. It facilitates the drawing of the lines of demarcation when racial groups are involved in opposition or conflict. But although there is a constant projection of the conflict to the plane of “racial competition,” the real issues are never solely those of race difference. Historically the prevailing forms of color prejudice have acquired their particular invidiousness from the background of slavery and its stigma, and from colonial contacts with very diverse cultures attendant upon the slave trade and later, imperialistic European expansion. Color difference has thus acquired historically an association with primitiveness and low cultural accomplishment, as well as with inferior economic and subordinate political status. Once so associated, dominant groups maintain culture differences and the tradition of them to facilitate their dominance. To do so, they must perpetuate in arbitrary symbols and fictitious stereotypes distinctions and generalizations about whole peoples and races, which in some cases have been factual in the past, but which assimilation and acculturation have tended to break down. Attitudes and doctrines of caste are formidable resistance mechanisms in the path of such changes, but ordinarily they only succeed in delaying, not preventing the changes due to social interaction and cultural contact.
Any handy distinction, aside from color, however, can be singled out as a symbolic basis for group discrimination and antagonism, other distinctive physical features, dress, folkways and manners, and language. One of the most paradoxical but also most inveterate, is sex. Here, where there is neither difference of culture, ethnic stock or interest relations, culture differentials have been traditionally maintained that make women one of the most seriously conditioned of all “minorities.” An inheritance perhaps from the patriarchal form of social organization, the status of women has been arbitrarily and restrictively defined for centuries. Only in the last century did a woman’s rights’ movement discover the full extent or the full implications of the tradition. At that time, in spite of slow improvement over generations, the legal, economic and social equality of woman,—if social equality be construed as parity of personal liberty of action and a single standard of values, was far from attainment, and has not been fully attained as yet after a generation or so of hotly contested reform. Stern gives a retrospective review of the movements and forces that have propelled the changing status of women and the trends toward full emancipation. He concludes that the cause of women’s rights is vitally linked to the causes of other disadvantaged minorities, and has often moved forward and backward with other phases of social reform and reaction.
It is interesting to note in passing how deceptive is the apparent exemption from affront in the case of the sex minority. Much of the intolerance and prejudice of sex dominance gets itself expressed by indirection, sometimes under the guise of banter and humor. However in situations of serious competition, ruthless majority attitudes and doctrine have often been promulgated. Indeed an interesting parallelism can be shown between the stock arguments put forward for feminine inferiority and those asserting racial inferiority. With slight reservations, it is the same position basically;—the insistence on the innate difference of capability, of the necessity for protection and guidance because of inherent irresponsibility and dependent nature, the presence of “special” aptitudes interfering with such traits as would warrant open competition and rivalry in majority reserved spheres,—in sum, all the clichés of a strong and intrenched cultural prejudice.
Language is another differential of importance in a review of group discrimination and culture conflict. No more accurate than the other arbitrary symbols, language is one of the most frequently used devices both for symbolizing and propagating cultural solidarity and in reverse use, for symbolizing group exclusion and hostility. Later, it will be seen as the crux of many of the present-day minority problems in Europe. For the moment, its general use as a cultural differential is under consideration. Elin Anderson gives in her study a careful clinical picture of this type of cultural cleavage in a New England city. Wisely, she does not connect the attitudes of the cultural minorities she found there immediately with their historic backgrounds in the Old World Europe. For in spite of an unquestionable carryover of some of the loyalties and the historic quarrels of Europe into minority situations in the United States, the core of most of these antagonisms can be traced to local interests and factors: She finds that the “old settlers” in this community form the nucleus of a group who have assumed self-appointed status and responsibility as a local “majority.” They are the “charter members,” the “real Americans,” and the newcomers in order of succession become the lesser breeds, the influx, the snubbed minorities. A local aristocracy has thus set up a framework of minor caste distinctions and invented a new set of rationalizations from the available traditions of national and racial traits and ascribed characters. Language figures prominently; they distinguish socially between one accent and another. Religious difference also figures substantially, the Catholic-Protestant divide most particularly. Back of both, however, it is pointed out, are economic stratifications and distinctions between the owneremployer class and the others.
Since the center studied is by no means a minority storm-center, and not even particularly intolerant, there is all the more reason to regard the analysis as diagnostic. The answers of those who belong to the minority groups clearly indicated that it is not they who reflect the most un-American or undemocratic attitudes, but rather those of the majority who persist in stereotyping other ethnic groups and misinterpreting cultural difference. This, because there is no basic cultural difference involved: the frame of the minority life is culturally that of the majority in this and most American communities. What few differences there were, were in process of rapid resolution through cultural assimilation.
Even this process of minority assimilation is often complicated by the intrusions of majority intolerance. The Cassidy excerpt points out the second-generation immigrant problem and its tragic cleavages between the cultural loyalties of two generations. This conflict, like the similar dilemmas of the racial half-caste, are of course the reflex of majority prejudice, and are by-products of the struggle for status in terms of its false but very real and arbitrary values. Minority experience sometimes compensates eventually for this inner division against itself; however, the basic corrective can and should be an enlightened majority tolerance.
The most serious fact about all these invidious cultural distinctions, throughout all their variety, is their conservative lag behind the trends of cultural change. Modern imperialism, for instance, while committed theoretically to conservative doctrines of race and culture, is from economic necessity committed to opposite trends in its practical effects. The wide extension of its range of contacts, its mechanical intrusion of its own forms of culture both through economic penetration and agencies of cultural communication create, along with unusual cultural disruption, accelerated trends toward cultural assimilation and standardization. By humanitarian movements also, Western civilization is paradoxically leveling off its own cultural differences and making its traditional cultural distinctions increasingly contrary to fact. Out of conflicting policies of penetration and exclusion, of assimilation and separatism stem certain peculiar dilemmas, which confront contemporary civilization with peculiar force. These are the subject of consideration in the next two sections, which deal respectively with majority and minority policies and attitudes.
Once the majority has acquired its status through power, the problems of its maintenance arise. Auxiliary weapons are more useful for that, with overt power and force held in reserve for the emergency. Prestige has already been shown to be one of the main devices of power, but behind that, even, there is need of tradition and rationalizations. These are the cultural and ideological weapons, and they take on larger significance the more inclusive the orbit of majority power becomes. For the large units of power are the great nations, the empires and their adjuncts. World-scale religions also come into the picture at this point. They all capitalize their form of culture and tend to identify it with civilization itself.
No branch of civilization is as adept in such majority ways as the European; it has a chronic habit, as Toynbee remarks, of egotistically identifying itself with human civilization. European civilization has had, it is true, both a remarkable development and a remarkable expansion. Its cultural success has been beyond precedent, for it has achieved a political and cultural dominance far out of proportion to the number of its adherents. It is without doubt a great world civilization, but as Toynbee points out, it is not the only world civilization of our day. Even though its agencies of economic imperialism extend into the areas of its rivals, they, rather than European civilization still dominate these areas culturally, and in the long run cultural dominance has its importance. These other grandscale cultures—Byzantine, Islamic, Hindu and Far-Eastern, control at least the minds and loyalties of their hundreds of millions, and are far from being decadent or dormant. Several of them, after having been somewhat under the spell of the idea of European ascendancy, are challenging that ascendancy either in resentment or competitive and imitative assertion. This is the situation, little thought of by many partisans of European dominance, which moves Toynbee to characterize the Western civilization’s tradition of itself as, on the whole, an illusion of dominance.
The expansion of European civilization has occurred largely by reason of its political and economic organization. On that and other specific scores, its superiority is to be conceded. But it is the claim of general superiority that is found to be unwarranted by any fair and objective history of human culture. Like all world civilizations, its cultural base resulted from the historical fusion of many cultures, with heavy borrowing of many of its culture elements from non-European sources. Such step-ladder theories of culture as conceal these facts, Toynbee shows, have been outmoded in other fields and need to be in any sane and scientific view of culture. So in the first place, the criterion of these grandiose claims, ignoring the great collateral branches of civilization, is untenable and in the second place, granting that even, the true story of human civilization does not substantiate the claim. The ethnocentric version of civilization is more untenable even than the equivalent national superiority claims. Moreover, this historian thinks that the stage has been reached where the European pretensions are provoking more resentment than assent, and ironically in the parable of the Chinese Emperor Ch’ien Lung’s arrogant letter to George III of England counsels the West against false pride of civilization.
On both national and racial frontiers, the majority devices of dominance assume analogous tactics, with similar creeds of superiority and the over-idealization of their values. Since majority group interests and policy are basically so similar, it is not surprising to discover that majority rationalizations have so much in common. Back of them all is the prevalent tendency to personify social groups and dramatize ideologically social issues and conflicts. This calls for contrasted dichotomies of group traits and characters to symbolize the issues involved. Whether sect or nation or ethnic groups are concerned, these contrasts polarize, in sharpened contrasts, favorable and unfavorable characterizations. Around these stereotypes of rivalry and conflict, elaborate historical rationalizations are built, the most elaborate of which are ethnic or racial myths. Nationality Symbols belong to the same tradition and often indulge in similar fictions. These stereotypes as ascribed to minorities do not arise from any realistic characterization of alien or opposed groups, but from reversed contrasts of the traditional virtues and supposed superiorities of the groups who invent and use them. Detailed analysis of any of them will reveal that they are far too conventional to be concretely descriptive, and of too various a character to be characteristic.
Majority groups, of course, have no monopoly on such stereotypes. Minorities indulge in them also. But wherever they are associated with actual dominance, they have formidable force and wider currency and acceptance. They can be analyzed in any of the rival national myths either of yesterday or today; yet they display their mechanisms and motives most clearly in the more extreme characterizations of the racialists. This is illustrated by Copeland in his interesting analysis of the majority use of the Negro as what he calls a “contrast conception.” The long-sustained issue in the South between the two races has led, he construes, to “a distinct delineation of each in contrast to the other.” The social separation is reflected in the concepts and beliefs white people came to hold about the “opposite race.” Popular thinking, through this use of the Negro as a foil for the white race, has created a concept of him as a “counter-race.” This exhibits not only the psychological mainspring of Southern race prejudice, but the dominant motivation, at least so far as their working symbols of superiority and inferiority go, of most group prejudices,—sectarian, racial, national and cultural. Without such concepts of contrast there could be no dramatization of the social conflict in idealistic terms. Its statement in realistic terms, particularly from the majority viewpoint, would lead to unstrategic disillusionment. The South has thus created “two sociological races”—“white” and “black,” in irrevocable conflict with each other except under a situation of control. This belief about the relative merits of the races gives an ultimate sanction to the status quo, and at the same time provides a basis for white caste cohesion.
The same psychological tactic, on another scale, is to be seen in the use of social symbols and majority stereotypes in the literary, artistic and stage characterizations of minorities. Not only do literature, art and drama particularly, reflect the social tradition in these matters, they serve in an important way to sharpen these symbols and to propagandize them. Adams shows how minority stage caricatures, in addition to diverting popular interest from concern over the serious social problems of minorities to the enjoyment of the comic aspects of their lives, serve to reinforce majority notions of superiority by propagandizing postulated minority non-conformity. On the American stage, the stock Irishman, the comic German or “Dutchman,” the minstrel characterizations of the Jew and the Negro have been superficial and irresponsible, and have led to derogatory stereotypes that have become more deeply rooted in the public mind by reason of the offguard approach of recreational fun and unsuspected farce. It is noteworthy that these types often reach a peak in periods of antipathy and group hostility; at all times their enormous popularity is due to their indirect flattery of the conformist majority. They are thus influential adjuncts of the group feuds, and propagate their antipathies. Resulting from ethnocentric majority attitudes, they lay a base for formidable minority depreciation and name-calling, which the more serious social conflicts readily utilize.
The sociological roots of minority stereotypes and caricatures in the light of the majority-minority situation and its issues are analyzed by Sterling Brown in his study of the Negro character as seen by white authors. He shows that the favorite Negro stereotypes are not in all cases innocent or hasty generalizations, but that many are subtle rationalizations and deliberate majority propaganda. The myth of the contented slave was invented, in spite of the historical record of many slave insurrections and periods of great insecurity in certain sections because of them, to justify enslavement and placate the conscience of the slaveholder. Its greatest currency in literature and public opinion, oddly enough, was during the Reconstruction period when the myth was used deliberately as a rationalization of the lost cause of the Confederacy and an attempt, partly successful, to undermine the pro-Negro sentiment of that period. The stereotype of the “wretched freeman” is to be regarded also as a pro-slavery device at the height of the period of the fugitive slave, designed to stem the tide of slave desertions and buttress the paternalistic Southern fiction of the Negro’s helplessness and need for protection. The still current tradition of the comic Negro, Brown shows to serve the same function of majority flattery and of conscience appeasement, and he proves it to be a typical majority device by tracing a close parallel in the English tradition of the comic Irishman, built up originally at the time of Ireland’s greatest persecution. The stereotypes of the tragic mulatto, the brute Negro, and the slightly more subtle recent stereotype of the exotic primitive are all shown to be primary reflections of majority “racism,” indirectly flattering the superiority complex of the dominant group and perpetuating the tradition of wholesale and inescapable “natural” inferiority or peculiarity on the part of the black minority.
In exalting the virtues of the majority, these stereotypes sometimes go beyond minimizing the minority by projecting fictitious faults and even slanders upon them. In situations of tension, when supremacy is threatened, such legends and attributions become bogeys of violent fear, hostility and hate. Golding shows how in the case of the Jew this reaction has gone to the length of deliberate libel and calumny. The “ritual murder” myths of anti-Semitism, the “rapist” bogey of extreme anti-Negro prejudice, the clichés of the “atrocious Hun,” the “Yellow Peril” and the like, exhibit the extremities of majority attitudes when they reach the proportions of a psychosis. Throughout history it has been the sad fate of many minorities to serve the role of scapegoat through the use of such majority rationalizations of past exploitation and present persecution.
“Twentieth Century Ghetto,” detailing the documentary history of the latest of these minority mass persecution campaigns, leaves no doubt about the lengths to which majority intolerance and persecution can go even under modern conditions. The medieval age has probably been libeled in the use of the term “medieval” to denote such stages of intolerant hate and violence and such degrees of fanatical cruelty. For the documents prove that the traditional extremities of persecution can be transposed to modern techniques and multiplied in their swiftness of execution and scale of operation. The implications of acquiescence on the part of so many of the “majority,” permitting the inner core of leadership to function so on its behalf and with something more than a passive role of bowing itself to superior force, is commentary on the previous receptivity and conditioning of the public mind built up by intolerance years before the actual crises come. Here at any rate, if we take the clinical point of view, is a classical though extreme case of majority behavior, available for study in all its concrete detail and immediacy.
In certain extreme situations, the majority reactions actually do develop into a social psychosis, with definite states of social fear and hysteria and accompanying delusions of “race peril.” Demagogic manipulation of group feeling can induce such states, as is evidenced by the history of many “hate campaigns,” among them the “Popery riots,” the Ku Klux campaign of the mid-seventies and its modern revivals, the Polish “pogroms,” and scores of other localized race riots and lynchings and attacks upon minorities. Here one sees merely the climactic explosions of accumulated tensions and antipathies with deep historical roots and long periods of gestation. They are the acute flares of relatively chronic rivalries and animosities. MacCrone traces, for example, the social history of an intense and chronic racial hatred in South Africa, and shows its base to be simply an inveterate habit of disregard for any but majority interests. This disregard grows by social indoctrination into a fetish of superiority which brooks no question, and ranges through a gamut of superiority, dislike, hostility, contempt, and fear. “Kaffir” finally becomes the symbol for everything undesirable and evil, is so used as a derogatory adjective, generating an attitude ready for any situation of tension or crisis to translate itself into exaggerated feelings of group fear and anxiety. The preponderance of numbers of the native population enhances this, and then, “the white man projects his own hostility on to the black man and comes to fear that hostility as a threat directed against himself.” Any clash or even any sign of resentment or progress on the part of the native is interpreted emotionally as a situation of race peril from “a rising tide of color” or as a threat to “white supremacy” or of “being swamped by the blacks.” Restive signs in the masses or a warrantable demand of advancing sections of the subject population for more recognition or less restriction, or even single incidents of crime can then under such circumstances precipitate general social hysteria, campaigns of repressive legislation, spasms of mob violence and persecution. Supplementary delusions then arise in the perspective in which any movement of the minority is viewed, and reactions which would normally be received sympathetically or at least without alarm, become abnormally impudent and threatening. Minority and majority by this time have become involved in mutual recrimination, and relays of rationalization and counter-rationalization ensue. The stage has been set for the resumption of open conflict relations in a cycle of reactions which the majority dominance has unwittingly generated against itself.
For all their ruthless procedure and extravagant pretensions, majorities are not altogether unaware of the repercussions of their regimes. From time to time they face the situation realistically, sometimes at minority insistence, and make concessions. As governments, they also support auxiliary agencies of placation and remedial aid that work in behalf of the damaged minority life and interests. All of which shows an awareness of the dilemmas of the situation and some recognition of the moral responsibility involved in dominance.
Imperialist regimes particularly face such situations, for a peculiarly violent and disruptive type of relationship develops, as has been observed, when the life of a society is regulated from the outside, particularly when a new civilization is superimposed. In the first stages of improvised penetration and exploitation, wide-scale damage was done to these cultures. Missionary and governmental agencies have begun to realize the extent of this damage, and for mixed motives, some humanitarian and others selfish, have sought to slacken the force of the direct displacement of native cultures and the complete undermining of minority morale. In some instances, governments have attempted to rebuild a foundation of native customs and sanctions for cultural reconstruction. A more liberal and more scientific approach to the whole problem has combined with the bitter experience of the comparative failure of force acculturation to bring about the realization that many of the native cultures represented seasoned adaptations to their environment, and may be better suited to it than is the superimposed civilization. In some quarters, missionary and others, there was deep disillusionment with the superficiality of native Christianity; in many instances the enforcement of the Christian codes had accomplished the reverse of their intentions by uprooting native moral sanctions and not effectively replacing them. European clothing had augmented disease and, as was indicated by Pitt-Rivers, had complicated sex morality. European manufactured goods had broken down native crafts and skills. In terms even of European values and interests, the negative results were increasing.
At this stage, but only rather recently, there commenced certain reversals of governmental policies, such as the French extension of the assimilation program to her newer African dependencies, a reform colonial administration in the Belgian Congo, the “indirect rule” program of native co-operation devised for the British administration in Nigeria but since extended to a few other colonies, and most characteristic of all—the Mandates policy and system. The latter definitely professed tutelage and trusteeship as the dominant aims of colonial government, though with no compulsive machinery beyond annual reports to a League of Nations’ Mandates Commission. The new policy of the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs for the tribal rehabilitation of the North American Indians still on the reservations is a late but promising offshoot of this same movement. Reform missionary policy also now seeks to study native pagan cultures and to build a program of Christianization based on the favorable elements of native law and custom. These are indications of enlightenment in the direction of European-non-European group relations.
Yet they are comparatively recent and on a small scale, when the total extent of colonial contacts is considered. Previously there was no attempt whatsoever at the preservation or even the correct evaluation of alien cultures and native institutions. Mere divergence was taken to mean inferiority and undesirability. That tradition of total cultural superiority still remains as a standard tradition and policy to which the movements mentioned are regarded as experimental exceptions. With this professed humanitarianism of a “mission of civilization” and for the advancement of lower cultures on the one hand, and with practical objectives of continued dominance and economic profit on the other, imperialist regimes are confronted with an almost unresolvable dilemma in their cultural policies. They, therefore, vacillate between a program of assimilation and one of cultural separatism.
Hutt’s article discusses this dilemma as it applies in South Africa. The average white South African thinks the Bantu native is either unfit for a share in the life of modern civilization or capable only of participation on its lowest economic level as an unskilled agricultural or industrial laborer. But Hutt shows that the natives are gaining a foothold in the economy of the invader’s culture. He documents the development of the Africans as skilled workers, generally, and as successful traders and peasant land producers in West Africa and other sections where the economic system and the sparse settlement of the whites permits. In South Africa itself, the prolonged even though restricted contact with the patterns of European life has resulted in partial cultural transformation. The necessity for the use of native labor, Hutt believes, dictates increased contact and augmented acculturation. Even a restricted system of native education has already brought large sections of the native population to a level that can be favorably compared with the Voortrekkers—the pioneer settler-farmer forebears of the white population. But that modicum of progress has already produced opposition from the typical colonial, who faces the alternatives with distrust and conservative dissatisfaction.
Intermarriage, and its more frequent substitute—miscegenation, raise what is probably the most acute of the dilemmas of European-native relations. The half-caste seems to be an inevitable and formidable phenomenon in the large-scale contact of diverse races and cultures. There can be no doubt about the origin of this social dilemma: the European makes the half-caste and then by his attitude of racial exclusion, makes the half-caste problem. For the half-caste’s hybrid character and his paradoxical status come not from his mixed blood but from his divided social heredity. In spite of his potential role as a carrier of culture and an intermediary of culture fusion and exchange, the half-caste is usually caught in the no-man’s land between conflicting cultures and opposing groups.
Although there is always this common denominator problem to the social situation of the mixed blood population, there is no solid front of majority cultural policy. The very diversity of policy in this respect reveals the dilemma the white man confronts, if he is to maintain his traditional policy of caste superiority. In some situations, concessions are made, granting the half-caste intermediate status as a group more privileged than the full-blood native. But this semi-recognition results ultimately in a situation painful to the half-caste, since he is denied complete identification with the whites although he has assimilated much of their tradition and values, and is, by the very fact of his buffer-class position, resented by the subordinate group. As Dover points out, he tends to form a distinct and rather isolated social group, with increasingly unsatisfied ambitions and no fixed loyalties. Under the conditions Dover is observing—the situation of the Eurasian half-castes, his conclusion is that their lot, after a generation or two, is gradual submergence with the bulk native group. He notes, though, that this has not always been so, even in British India, where the majority prejudice has been unrelenting. In Indo-China the Eurasian’s predicament is not so hard; for there the liberal French policy of intermarriage has brought measurable cultural recognition to the assimilated Franco-Annamite. Between this and the rigid British exclusion of the half-caste is the somewhat intermediate situation produced by the semi-lenience of the Dutch in their areas of colonial control—the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch, however, maintain special schools for Indo-Europeans; so over most of the Eurasian zone, the half-caste lives as a marginal group, paying the price of European racialism. It should be noted in passing that in the considerable areas of Islamic society, the half-caste does not constitute a social problem, and never has, for his humanity is at par under their more tolerant system.
The other horn of the half-caste dilemma is represented by the policy of lumping the half-caste with his native group ancestry. This more militant exclusiveness throws the half-caste back on the suppressed group, to become, at first, a disgruntled and uncompensated outcast, but eventually in the course of cultural accommodation, the yeast of the forward advance of the entire native group in its cultural counter-offensive. The consciousness of his affinity with the privileged group and his resentment of his social treatment give the half-caste this inevitable militancy after he has once recovered from his initial cultural disorientation. These two divergent policies represent, in the main, the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon policies of race, the one pivoting its prejudice on its own form of culture and advocating assimilation, the other standing fast on separatism and advocating in its social organization, bi-racial institutions. These two traditions reflect themselves respectively in the contrast of the race codes of South and Central America with that of the United States. According to their historical cultural affiliations with the Latin or the Anglo-Saxon traditions, the various islands of the West Indies are similarly sharply divided in their racial attitudes.
Stonequist, who reviews the position and cultural role of the mulatto in the United States, where the Anglo-Saxon precedents have been rigidly, almost fanatically followed, finds that even under the handicap of exclusion from cultural privilege, the mulatto group has functioned typically as a “marginal Man,” bridging the cultural gap between the majority and the minority groups. Historically, because of his more favored frontage on the majority culture, the mulatto, he finds, has played a constructive role in Negro group advance. In its strict exclusion policy, the majority has hurled a boomerang, so to speak, against their cultural barrier, having chosen to confront the minority without a buffer class. Pierson, on the Negro in Brazil, reports on the mulatto under the Latin system. Here, after a few generations, during which the half-caste group got separated quite far in advance of the underprivileged blacks, the general policy of assimilation has spared society in general any “race problem” as such. The blacks, even though still concentrated more heavily in the low-pay economic groups, have not experienced racial stigma and cultural restriction beyond their class handicap. They, therefore, do not constitute a self-conscious minority, and individual blacks have at all times risen to positions of merit and public recognition, according to individualized circumstances. Brazil’s racial policies, indeed, set a model in the pattern of race relations.
These broad comparisons of the mulatto under differing racial policies, both agree on certain fundamental points. They show that race mixture is an inevitable consequence of the contact of races, that it occurs in spite of severe legal prohibitions and social ostracism, and that the half-caste, despite transitional cultural difficulty and maladjustment, plays, on the whole, a positive constructive role in the cultural situation. Either he serves to liberalize the situation by relaxing the racial tension, which ultimately benefits the full-blood population, or he is instrumental in leadership which facilitates the cultural advance of the handicapped racial minority. Under both circumstances, the half-caste is a focal point of cultural interchange. As a culture type, he is only regarded as negative and undesirable by the culture “purists,” whose position, we shall see in the next section, is not sustained either in progressive scientific theory or by careful sociological observation. Ironically enough, the purist tradition is the one theoretically maintained most usually by those segments of the majority who stand self-contradicted in practice by the facts of miscegenation.
Racial and other group intermixture is not as exceptional as it is generally thought to be. Though cultural exogamy is seldom welcomed, even when legally permitted, it does occur frequently. Contrary to the current belief that group attitudes have remained constant against it, Stern’s historical sketch of intermarriage and its legal sanctions, shows it to have fluctuated considerably from period to period. Intermarriage has often been historically interdicted between groups that now intermarry freely; occasionally the trends reverse and prohibition takes the place of previously favorable sanction. The basis of the barrier tradition changes repeatedly, at one time following religious, at others racial, or other sectarian lines. Race mixture also occurs with frequency across legal and other customary barriers of proscribed intermarriage. Finally, though still a contentious intercultural issue, intermarriage is itself decidedly on the increase because of the widespread contacts and secularization of modern forms of culture.
The primary prejudice operating in these situations is cultural, and Stern finds it to have its highest incidence in relatively solid, homogeneous social groups. Its primary factors of change, then, are those tending to break up the solidified type of community. Modern economic and political trends, tending to do just this, are normally solvents of the provincialism on which cultural prejudice thrives. Apart from marital relations, there are several serious aspects of cultural prejudice operating in the social rather than the political sphere. The problem of the immigrant is the most important of these. Indeed immigration, especially in a country like the United States, that has experienced so much of it and from such a wide variety of ethnic and national sources, is bound to supply a crop of intercultural problems.
There is, in the first instance, the question of majority regulation of immigration access to the society, then that of the reception that the migrant himself receives, and finally the later problem of cultural assimilation and its dilemmas. Several of these issues are more appropriately treated in their contemporary aspects (Part V); but here the factor of majority control needs passing consideration. Hourwich submits this factor to a searching analysis. He shows how a majority bias has developed historically in the American descendants of immigrants against the late-comers. About this cultural prejudice there has grown up a justifying legend that the type of old immigrant was superior to the more recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Hourwich cites contemporary descriptions of the old immigrants and what their condition and cultural level was both before and considerably after their coming to America. The record smashes the legend, and gives no backing to the still popular view that the early immigrants were “accessions of strength” and those of today “accessions of weakness.” America’s city slums have seen a succession of tenants in order of immigration precedence; it has been an ethnic parade of one foreign minority group after the other, struggling in a squalor and penury for which American conditions have been co-responsible for an economic foothold in the new land. American nativism is in large part, therefore, unwarranted culture prejudice, and puts the native-born with a distant immigrant background in the position of historical inconsistency. His unawareness of this is, perhaps, one of the factors that, properly corrected, might possibly liberalize the current generation’s mounting prejudice against the contemporary immigrant. In the light of the past history of America and of its basic tradition of being a democratic haven of the ambitious and the oppressed, the growth of this exclusionist attitude confronts the country with a dilemma that may induce a serious crisis with regard to its fundamental institutional policy.
The meeting and mixing of peoples has almost completely eliminated the independent, isolated group, but the number of minorities has been multiplied as originally separate groups have become incorporated in some larger national or colonial unit. The larger national units into which minority groups are incorporated politically and economically do not completely absorb them culturally and socially. Many are converted into repressed and excluded groups, living in the shadow of the dominant majority. Out of this situation the minority problem arises in all its increasing acuteness of culture clash and conflict. Minority group consciousness, although it may have originated in cultural distinctiveness, becomes increasingly a product of enforced relations to a majority treatment and policy. A minority group, irrespective of size or constituency, is thus best characterized as a social group whose solidarity is primarily determined by external pressure, which forces it to live in terms of opposition and ostracism.
With group status the crux of the minority position, the minority situation becomes nevertheless highly complex and variable. In the perspective of history, groups are seen subject to extreme and sometimes sudden change of status, passing from majority to minority status or the reverse, and sometimes assuming, even while in minority status, typical majority attitudes toward other minority groups. It is this subtlety and variability that makes general analysis of minority issues difficult. Yet only from comprehensive analysis can the basic factors of the minority situation be reached. With all their superficially baffling differences and complexities, minority situations do have essentially the same basic common factors and similar reactions and predicaments.
Minority and majority attitudes are intimately connected, so that the minority profile is more or less the complement of the majority profile. To explain minority behavior and attitude one has to scrutinize majority attitudes and policies as well. From this point of view, for example, the Negro “problem,” as has been aptly said, becomes “a problem of the white mind.” Minorities, of course, initiate attitudes and policies of their own, but even here, more often than not, the explanatory factors are to be found on the majority side, with the minority reaction a paired effect.
Certain groups, living in isolated and self-imposed group independence, are very special cases of the minority situation. The position of certain small “ethnic communities,” particularly religious sect colonies, approximates that of an independent minority. They live in terms of distinctive difference and a preferred orthodoxy which separates them from their fellow communities. But in origin very often they go back to some historical majority-minority conflict, and have acquired their exclusive and sometimes fanatical separatism, in trying to escape the threat, remembered from the past or dreaded for the future, of majority discrimination and persecution. The American colonial scene, and the Canadian, as Dawson’s article will show, was full of such nonconformist minorities and their refugee settlements. Most of them were destined to an ultimate minority lot through absorption back into larger communities.
Caroline Ware throws light on general minority behavior in her study of ethnic communities, of which she finds a large variety—religious settlements, trading communities or foreign settlements, settler colonies, refugee colonies, yet unabsorbed immigrant colonies, and racial, language and cultural minorities. Different as these are from one another, they are all subject to the common lot of cultural separatism and militantly contrasted status. The effective factors of conflict and hostility are not so much the cultural divergence itself, as it is the sense of difference and exclusion. The status and attitude of a minority group thus depends primarily on the reception it receives and the sort of barriers that are raised against it by the larger or more established or dominant community. Race, nationality, language and religion can all be sharp and serious issues of difference and hostility. Yet none of them need be. The Swiss confederation, for example, has reconciled language and national traditions still hostile to one another in other situations. The truce of races in the Moslem religion or under the French tradition has already been pointed out. There is also the comparative truce of religious animosity in the contemporary alignment of Catholics and Protestants as compared with their earlier open feuds.
Issues which seem, however, to have been resolved may turn out to be dormant merely, with fresh outbreaks of rivalry and hostility from time to time. Many of these issues have become intensified under conditions of the modern nationalist state, where, as Ware points out, minority groups can retain or assert their self-determinant identity only against the drive of the dominant majorities for a uniform culture and a single loyalty. The nation-state, by making this demand for an all-inclusive, paramount loyalty has sharpened the minority situation into one of the most critical issues of our time.
It is only in frontier situations that ethnic communities have any real chance for independent self-determined living. In Dawson’s description of Western Canada, with its Doukhobor, Mennonite, German Catholic and other sectarian communities, one can achieve a realization of the colonial United States, with its Huguenot, Baptist, Quaker, German Pietist, Moravian, Mennonite refugees and the more recent Mormon and other sectarian settlements. Even in the vast, sparsely settled Canadian West, Dawson finds their separatism breaking down with the passing of frontier conditions and the intrusion of the railroad, the highway, urbanization, nationally organized education and the radio. The trend of a highly organized urban civilization is against their persistence, and they appear as relics of an age of separatism surviving in an age of fusion. As their physical separatism vanishes, their rigid cultural differentials dissolve in the process with only remnants remaining. Group settlements which seemed in irreconcilable conflict with the world and sought to exclude it by every known device have in one or two generations had to renounce rigid separation, although they may hold loyally to parts of their tradition. Their problem then becomes the same as that of the more definitely subordinated minorities and their minority traditions. They all seem destined to live in terms of a common civilization, with historical cultural differentials taking secondary place. The minority problem resolves itself more and more, then, into the alternative of whether these cultural differences of race, national tradition, language and religion are to be reconciled in practical reciprocity and mutual respect or maintained as barriers of proscription, prejudice and group hatred. Both Ware and Dawson agree on the inevitable assimilation of ethnic communities, and an integrated economic order and common material civilization as the prevailing trend in modern society.
The full predicament of the minority situation emerges in the case of minority groups subject to forced separatism while living in close juxtaposition or even subordinated incorporation with the majority group. Such is typical of both the Jewish and the Negro minorities, both of them subject to intense and sustained cultural proscription and prejudice. Wirth analyzes the force of cultural exclusion and group animosity upon the Jew, with particular reference to the Jew who does not identify himself with the Jewish orthodox community. Under some majority policies, different segments of the Jewish minority have been subject to different treatment; under others, as in the present Nazi persecution, practically the same disabilities and proscriptions have been meted out to all. Wirth points out how arbitrary and undiscriminating these majority prejudices are, and the particular handicap which they place upon the minority group that aspires to cultural assimilation and conformity. The Jew under these circumstances is made acutely conscious of difference, labeled arbitrarily with a group status, traits and attitudes not necessarily his as an individual. Such coercive group identification is bound, at first, to associate negative values with his group or racial consciousness. The experience of the Negro and members of other racial minorities is very similar. In the case of the Negro, the attitude is more acute by reason of the ease of his social identification, and the added irony that in the American situation, he has no separate religion and little racial tradition surviving into which to retreat. Under such majority persecution, morbidity, supersensitiveness, and an initial projection of resentment to one’s own minority are understandable reactions. So, too, is that phenomenon common to highly restricted minorities, “passing” or concealment of group identity when possible and advantageous.
Individuals differ, according to temperament, in the degree of these minority group reactions; with some, positive hatred and aversion for his own group may predominate; with others, intensified loyalty and externalized projection of the animosity reaction back to the majority. Negative reactions develop ranging all the way from an oppression psychosis of hopelessness and despair, with all sorts of escapist mechanisms, to bitter cynicism and counter-hatred. Enhanced minority consciousness and a hectically reinforced group solidarity are inevitable developments in due course of time. Wirth points out how the culturally snubbed Jew has often become the apostle of nationalism and racial consciousness, and shows the extent to which anti-Semitism has been responsible for the development of Zionism. There are close analogies in other minority experience, particularly the Negro; Garveyism, as one example. Excessive factionalism, recurrent panaceas of solution, ultra-racialism often ensue, and a sensitive, at times fanatical minority group patriotism is generated.
All of these extremes and aberrations in minority behavior trace directly to majority treatment, although often as not, they are charged against the minority by the majority extremists. But in spite of all the pull and counter-tensions of conformity and non-conformist reactions, the average minority group manages somehow to adjust its life to the imposed social handicaps and paradoxes. In many cases they adopt conformity for advantage and recognition, while building, on the other hand, their separate tradition for compensation to enhance minority morale and solidarity. Morale is continuously necessary, for even after the cruder phases of majority segregation and persecution subside, later generations of minority groups have to meet the ordeals of ostracism and cultural disdain. In societies where prejudice prevails, members of minority groups are forced to accept mass rather than individual appraisal, and to learn to expect mass condemnation from a society that, as Wirth puts it, “imposes collective responsibility from without.”
Such is the typical predicament when an intense racial or religious prejudice motivates the majority. The initial effects tend, naturally enough, to stagnation of hope and effort or attempts on the part of individuals to escape the minority lot. But the secondary effect is a challenge to fight the handicap of the situation. Minority progress, even though it may reap fresh prejudice from its success and its threat of rivalry, pivots on the motive to disprove the majority libel and to demonstrate the abilities and possibilities of the minority group. This enters in as a strong component in the individual ambition of many minority-conscious individuals. The dominance of this type of motivation is significant of the second, more positive phase in the group history of minorities.
Frazier, in a panoramic review of the Negro family, traces the American Negro minority experience in what amounts to two parallel stages of minority demoralization and minority compensation and reconstruction. In the Negro’s case, in addition to the complete loss of his traditional patterns of culture and family life, there was the almost complete demoralization which slavery wrought, complicated by extensive concubinage and miscegenation. The gradual achievement of majority patterns and standards of family life, therefore, represents a double accomplishment, assimilation of an alien majority culture and recovery from deep social disorganization under majority suppression. The close incorporation of the institution of domestic slavery facilitated this process in one respect, but hampered it greatly in the other. The Negro still finds majority imposed obstacles, social and economic, blocking the path to complete cultural conformity. But he has made no reservation in his program of complete assimilation, and the results are remarkable in respect to the cultural gap that has been successfully bridged and the short space of time during which the adjustments have been made.
The advance, as Frazier shows, has had to be made at disproportionate cost. At every stage the minority predicament has complicated the already difficult process of adjustment, since the process of culture assimilation required values of conformity and procedures of imitation, while the majority prejudice imposed separatism and differential standards. The present degree of conformity is retarded only by the resistances to complete social and economic integration which still persist. Yet the majority has set in motion forces which it cannot completely halt. The dominant forces now affecting the Negro family organization, and increasingly operating on the Negro masses, are those of rapid urbanization. These have brought an inevitable toll of economic maladjustment and discrimination, but also an acceleration of cultural assimilation, that in the judgment of the author, seems to overbalance the social costs, and promise much closer integration of the black minority.
Allen details a little known and partially successful effort on the part of the Negro during Reconstruction days toward constructive assimilation. For a short decade or so after the enfranchisement of the Southern Negroes, black and white members of the Southern state legislatures participated together in such a movement. In spite of statements to the contrary, the numerical ratios of Negroes and whites in these legislatures show that there was no real threat of Negro domination. What eventually wrecked the system and brought back disfranchisement of the bulk of the Negro population after a reign of Ku Klux terrorism was an intolerance of anything approaching equality. The enactments of these legislatures were not confiscatory or vindictive and much of the legislation was in the general interest. Progressive measures issued from many of these bodies, often at Negro initiative—among them, attempts to break up the large agricultural landholdings (but with proposed compensation), the abolition of property rights for voting, the establishment of civil rights’ bills, and most important of all provisions, the establishment for the first time in the South of free public education of any kind. There was here a temporary coalition of minority interests—those of the recently freed Negroes and of the upland or poor-white farmers, which together constituted the real numerical majority of the South. This coalition, hardly aware of itself and its potential power, was attacked by a propagandist white “majority” movement which speciously raised the “Negro domination” bogey, called these heavily mixed bodies “black Parliaments” and labeled this progressive agrarian and educational program “Negro rule” and “black dominance.” The success of this propaganda in gaining the support of the poor whites is another indication of the operation of traditional majority racialism and its popular appeals. With the lapse of the political and civil rights guarantees granted by these legislatures, the Negro minority slipped back almost to its old status in the South, from which there has as yet been no mass recovery, but only the hard gains of individual achievement and progress.
Foreman tells of a comparable unsuccessful struggle of the Seminole Indians to make an adjustment in the framework of the majority culture. These tribes over a period of decades made continuous effort to incorporate the white man’s political, economic and educational institutions. They were only to be thwarted by majority mismanagement and persecution, the record shows, and not from any inability to reconcile the newer with their traditional culture. It was this type of mismanagement that led to the messianic Ghost Dance religion which swept through the Indian tribes of the country, the philosophy of which is illuminated by the interview with the Indian chief, described by McGillicuddy. The minority group, on the whole, is inclined to be set in the groove of imitativeness by the very process of assimilation; and this was probably more general among the Indian tribes than is recognized, certainly where the white majority civilization gained prestige in their view, and before the type of bitter disillusionment set in which this incident records. A good portion of Indian intransigence was really a matter of cynical disillusionment and withdrawal in the face of obvious hostility and deception.
Monica Hunter reports on a primitive minority people, the South African Bantu, who, in some of their tribal branches have chosen the alternative of withdrawal, but in others have been incorporated into the dominant social system. She records acute and cynical disillusionment of the latter group with the majority motives and policy. Only the power of the majority regime seems to be respected; it has lost almost completely its prestige and sway over the minds of the thinking elements of the minority. The attitude of the educated Bantu is marked by bitter resentment, with group attempts, here and there, at counter-assertion and aggressive nationalist organization. Where such extreme repression prevails, as in South Africa, even the merest beginnings of native nationalist programs and organization is deeply significant and all the more so when, as is cited, a conference based on a minority coalition of native Bantu, half-caste “Colored” and Indian (Hindu) groups is in active organization.
W. O. Brown similarly reports on what he calls “an immature racialism” in South Africa, among the native population which according to its growth within a single decade, will “ultimately grow into a matured race consciousness.” For several generations after the military subjugation of the Zulus, there was almost complete submissiveness on the part of the leaderless and heavily exploited South African natives. Their condition, though not nominal slavery, approximated that under the American slaveocracy, with local variations of forced labor, agricultural and domestic peonage and similar subordinations. Brown reports, as does Hunter, that while the white man still has power and status, he is rapidly losing prestige among the natives in this area. There has gone along with this the rapid rise of race consciousness, the emergence of labor and nationalist organizations among natives, and the sporadic outbreak of protest and aggressive movements, the latter pivoted on racialist programs. Some of these movements are ephemeral and escapist, but others are marked by dawning realism and practicality. The rising tide of racialism seems to find expression on many fronts, religious, economic and political, and as a symptom of minority counter-assertion is far from being negligible.
Repressive policies of labor contracts and taxation and wholesale detribalization have operated to give impetus to native solidarity. Tribal, caste and cultural lines which originally would have put barriers in the way of common interests and co-operation have been swept aside, leaving wider scope for more inclusive organization. So even in the depressed minority situation of South Africa, reactions show nascent minority developments which are but the early phases of that mature type of minority counter-assertion of which Indian Nationalism today is a classical example. Indian nationalism, likewise, started from the contrary and unreconciled pressures of majority policies, particularly because the path of the English educated Indian is blocked through denial of the advantages of full cultural participation. In line with such inevitabilities, Brown states it as his opinion that in time Bantu racial consciousness will be sufficiently strong to constitute a serious challenge to the majority policy and program as soon as a knowledge of more developed movements and their tactics of organization reach the receptive soil of native resentment and reaction.
Majority repression of minorities is only securely successful so long as it succeeds in having the minority accept itself in the dictated terms of the imposed subordination. As soon as there is a beginning of the re-definition of self-determined group objectives on the part of the minority, a second phase of relationships has really begun, even though it may take a considerable while to take root and develop. This counter-assertive phase of minority life is the consideration of Chapter 12.
Investigating characteristic American Negro reactions in a town in the far South, Dollard shows how under the surface of a seemingly passive accommodation, resentment and a potentially aggressive protest can be in process of formation. He finds that the typical traditional attitudes of acquiescence and subservience are deceptively assumed by quite a few, and that while caste etiquette is deferred to, it is done so with increasing reservations. Where once the Negro took over the white man’s estimate of himself as true, he now has at least grave doubts of that inferiority except by virtue of force and arbitrary control. Blocked in political behavior and overt revolt, Negro behavior uses many subterfuges of passive resistance and covert protest, not yet translated openly into the sphere of action, but nevertheless in process of psychological gestation. Internal minority organization is weak in this instance, as might be expected under so repressive a regime. But according to the sample cited by Dollard, which happens to be in the deep South representing almost the nadir of the racial situation, the Negro minority is unmistakably passing over into an incipient phase of counterassertion. Powdermaker, who studied the same community, shows further that, while the older generation still accepts the regime at face value, the succeeding generations are more skeptical and, in feeling, at least, more militant. She found that the differences in Negro attitudes is closely correlated with the age generations, and that among the youngest group, irrespective of class and educational status, attitudes of resentment, challenge and disillusionment are markedly present.
The Negro’s case, then, as Gallagher points out, is distinctly transitional, with open possibilities both for forward movement and for serious future clash with the entrenched mores of caste. He finds that more considerable gains have been made without resistance on the artistic and cultural flank, with less progress on the frontal racial alignments of economic and political participation. However, to the extent that artistic and cultural recognition yield status concessions and bolster minority morale, such gains are regarded as favorable, provided they do not prove mere concessions rather than clearances of caste conventions. Prior to the eventual challenge of the primary positions of caste privilege, such cultural salients strengthen minority morale and generate an internal momentum of progressive self-assertion.
Generalizing on this type of minority experience, Elkin’s paper states upon the basis of his observations of the reactions of primitive peoples to the white man’s culture, a three stage cycle of minority reaction, generally true for this type of culture contact and conflict. The first stage is one of tentative and experimental contacts with the alien culture, with ready adoption of certain of its utilities and acceptance, usually, of missionary and educational guidance. With increasing detribalization and exploitation, general disillusionment is generated, followed by a stage of helpless inferiority and substantial doubt about the values of the native’s own culture. According to Elkin, the hold on the aboriginal culture is not completely lost in this reaction of distrust and bewilderment, as the third stage of the reaction reveals. For this stage pivots on a return to the old culture as, after a generation or so, a positive phase of group or racial consciousness succeeds the period of helplessness and inferiority feeling before the onslaughts of the more powerful civilization. The first symptoms of the last phase are movements for the revival of the old culture. In Mexico, Australia, in India, South and West Africa, and with certain North American Indian groups, such a series of reactions is traceable. The cycle varies both in time and intensity, but seems in general to follow approximately the same general course. The return of the minority to its own culture is rarely a mere retreat back to the old conservatism and former provinciality of culture. Occasionally it may be so rationalized, but this is a protest reaction mainly. In actuality, the cultural revival is a grafting of adopted elements of the invader’s culture upon traditions and symbols of the old. The cultural potentialities of such modified cultural nationalism are more sound and promising than the occasional more narrowly conceived nationalisms of minorities, who react so violently to the majority pattern that they imitate it in reverse. The Garvey movement was an instance of the latter sort.
It is very necessary to note that, in spite of the general truth of such a cycle of minority reactions, specific situations provide a number of exceptions to the rule. Linton’s article calls attention to the wide variability of group attitudes and cultural results, depending upon the concrete factors involved, particularly as due to the selective reactions of economic factors in the culture contact. The widely contrasted results shown by his account of the course of the acculturation process with different American Indian groups parallels familiar discussion of the same sort of contrast in India as between the Hindus and the Moslems. Facing the same situation of minority adjustment to English dominance and education of the European type, these two segments of the Indian population have reacted very differently, or at least at very different rates in their progress toward counter-assertiveness, although the trends of contemporary Indian nationalism may be regarded as a symptom of a growing convergence of the Hindu and Moslem protest of English and European hegemony.
Race consciousness on the part of minorities is an inevitable and pardonable reaction to majority persecution and disparagement. It is after all, however, potential minority racialism, and thus by no means exempt from the errors and extremisms of majority racialism. In certain versions, it has been an echo or imitation of the majority attitudes, expressed in counter-symbols and reversed claims, but motivated by the same rationalizations. To the self-determination formula of Pan-Ethiopianism: “Africa for the Africans,” for instance, Garvey added the concept of a “Black Empire,” very obviously an imitative imperialism. W. O. Brown in The Nature of Race Consciousness calls attention to these counter-traits in tracing the conversion of minority race consciousness from self-pity to positive racialist pride and self-assertion. Group achievements in this compensatory stage tend to become grossly magnified, counterclaims of superiority and of chosen mission often follow. Relatively helpful as compensations for shattered morale and damaged self-respect, these attitudes have potentialities, which sometimes mature, for the counterpersecution of others. The majority “scapegoat reaction” also runs in some minority history as well, and in lieu of opportunity to punish their oppressors, minorities, upon gaining power, sometimes victimize and persecute other groups.
Historically almost every large-scale majority racialism has had a minority group analogue. Zionism is manifestly a reaction to anti-Semitism; Pan-Islamism is as much a political answer to Christianity’s alliance with European imperialism as it is a parallel religious sectarianism. Pan-Asiatic programs and movements are basically provoked reactions to a chronically aggressive Europe, and Pan-Ethiopianism is directly a counterassertion to colonial imperialism. In all this, there is close patterning after the majorities along both political and theoretical lines. The propagandist reconstruction of the minority tradition, predicating superiority claims and the invention of prestige myths and rationalizations involves the same fallacies and contradictions that were found characteristic of the behavior of majority groups.
The minority thus has its psycho-pathology also: a case in point being that described by Guy Johnson in his study of a mixed Indian-White-Negro group. These folk, the “Croatans” in North Carolina, predominantly Indian in blood, but without trace of Indian culture, are in an anomalous minority position. In their limited situation, they compensate by accenting their superiority to the neighboring Negroes, and are particularly sensitive about being mistaken for Negroes. The latter resentment is all the more acute because there is considerable admixture of Negro blood in the group. Thus the prejudice pressure has arrayed one minority group against another. On the slightest of claims to the Indian tradition, the author finds, the Croatans compensate in terms of their own exaggerated Indian genealogy and local myths. The same ethnic combination which here exhibits unstable and morbid social relationships, in Brazil, where a tradition of racial and cultural tolerance prevails, shows just the opposite results; a compatible society with considerable cultural fusion and reciprocal respect; evidence, one might conclude, that sounder majority attitudes provoke sounder minority reactions.
Reid’s study of the Negro West Indian immigrant in the United States shows this minority within a minority to have produced two very interesting types of reaction in West Indian contacts with the native-born Negroes. Difference of cultural background, combined with commonalty of race, has conspired in this case to rather complicated minority interactions. Initially the native Negro group responded with considerable hostility to the culturally strange newcomers in their midst. The reaction was partly American hundred per-centism, refracted from the Negro’s share of typical American intolerance. But there was also, in part, that not infrequent minority compensation of finding an outlet for repressed minority resentment and pique by reacting negatively to another minority. To precipitate this intraracial hostility, there was a certain amount of economic competition and conflict between the two groups, which got itself expressed in a cultural form of prejudice which turned the typical majority stereotypes against the West Indian Negro.
Gradually, however, there has developed mutual accommodation between the native and foreign-born Negroes, based primarily on a common cause of resistance to race prejudice, which has equally affected both. The West Indians, less accustomed to prejudice, at least of the American type, have been on the whole vigorously assertive and have thus often been in the vanguard of this movement. This leadership and its common appeal to an inclusive racialism has slowly welded both groups into a close working solidarity. Again, the Garvey movement, led by a West Indian and with a large West Indian contingent, was responsible for a considerable impetus toward a more unified racial front. The dominant factor, however, in this was the common proscription of all on the basis of color, in the absence of which the two segments of the Negro peoples would doubtless not have fused or co-operated for several more generations.
The mainspring of Indian nationalism, likewise, is a strong bond of counterassertive reaction to British dominance and subordination of multi-racial India. Before the growth of this sentiment and its organization by the Indian Nationalist Congress, India had no sense either of nationality or of common racial interest. Shridarani records how there was slowly forged the common front which the several Indian sects and peoples are coming to accept as their one hope of liberation from political domination, economic exploitation and cultural disparagement. Indian nationalism has had to bridge inveterate feuds and hostilities, most serious of all the Hindu-Moslem antagonism, and, in addition, the social separatism of the caste system. That in so culturally diversified a land an anti-British movement with so much of a following could have been organized in some thirty years’ time is one of the signal examples of the resurgent wave of the contemporary countermovement against European dominance. The force of European prestige, in its heyday, was enormous; India, with its tradition and numbers, should otherwise have been able to assert at least an effective passive resistance. But after generations of almost complete prostration before the might of Britain, it was reserved for a minority leader who had learned his first tactics in a minority struggle in South Africa, to formulate the campaigns of cultural revival, passive resistance and non-co-operation (civil disobedience) which have generated the momentum of the most formidable counterassertive movement of the present day.
On the cultural front, Indian nationalism calls for reassertion of native Indian tradition, customs and culture values. That is as vital to the movement as its political objectives. In fact this cultural program first dramatized the movement on any large scale. This crucial role of a cultural program in a minority movement is demonstrable from many quarters and in the case of many people’s movements, national and racial. The connection and role of the revival of minority cultures will be discussed more fully under the section on national minorities (Part V). Here it is sufficient to see the effect on minority motivation and feeling of solidarity induced by the positive pride in a common cultural tradition or movement of cultural self-expression. Such movements have become increasing adjuncts of minority counterassertion, and have been influential in implementing the various campaigns of self-determination.
Majority pressure and persecution thus make over eventually the group attitudes and behavior of the various minority peoples, often to the undoing of the status quo of majority dominance.
Modern intercommunication and the world-mindedness which it has generated are usually thought of as forces tending to break down cultural isolation, consequently as foes of provincialism and culture conflict. But, on the whole, as Kohn points out in “The Present Scene,” they have intensified culture conflict and further complicated intercultural relations by enlarging the scope of this conflict and complicating its character. The campaigns for political dominance and for cultural supremacy have thus broadened the areas of old feuds and, with new weapons of competition and propaganda, this has brought increasing tension into intercultural relations on the national, international and colonial scene. Problems and policies of minority adjustment have thereby become one of the crucial issues of our time. Comparatively few communities have resolved their minority situations to the point of stable social equilibrium, not to mention the attainment of social harmony and of social justice. Discontent and disequilibrium are so acutely present in many societies as to bring definite challenge to the entire social order. In view of the natural sequel of counter-resistance to such situations in the politically established order, few serious students today doubt that the solution of minority problems and the satisfaction of even a modicum of minority demands and interests involves less than a profound reconstruction of the social order, and some think it involves even an overturn of the dominant orders.
Kohn points out how the rationalizations of Europeanization and its own internal cultural values have been gradually adopted by the oppressed and dominated minority groups throughout the world, with pressure for concessions from the dominant groups in terms of their own principles and professed values. The growing self-consciousness of backward races surges upward in claims of self-determination and self-rule. Non-European cultures and repressed minorities seize upon such justifications as the “civilizing mission” of European civilization and all the formulas and creeds of democracy professed by the dominant orders to implement their struggle for minority assertion and its mounting claims. These principles cannot very well be repudiated in majority group theory or profession—however they may be disregarded in practice. Only a few dominant states have dared realistically to make such formal repudiation; but this is perhaps the most serious aspect and the most threatening implication of totalitarian state theory. Western civilization seems yet unready, generally speaking, for such wholesale unmasking of its practical politics, and repudiation of its social norms and cultural professions. Thus the dilemma of the present time and scene.
In contemporary Western civilization there are two sets of forces operating on an expanded and accelerated scale. One set is geared to increased technological and cultural interchange and is developing increased economic inter-dependence and cultural interpenetration. Along with this, however, has gone an extension and intensification of the divisive forces of imperialism, ethnic nationalism and the accompanying rationalizations of this struggle and clash of interests in cultural separatism and sectarianism. The modern world holds a precarious balance between these two sets of forces, one of which must achieve or be given preponderance to determine the future fate and character of Western civilization.
Dominant as they yet are, both imperialism and ethnic nationalism—root sources, as has been seen, of these divisive cultural forces, face not only serious challenge but the prospect of self-contradiction. This comes about because imperialism is forced to extend its own type of civilization, while yet practicing ethnic supremacy and alien group subordination based on cultural discrimination and exclusion. Ethnic nationalism, on its part, aspires also to large-scale political units, which become by that very process increasingly multi-racial. The continued expansion of these systems, then, makes them become more and more involved in inner contradiction, and they confront, sooner or later, the boomerang effects of their own inconsistent policies.
Economic factors, being as primary and dominant as they are or seem to be, would seem to cast the die in favor of the eventual ascendancy of fusionist trends and certainly the expansion of the industrial scientific culture beyond its sphere of origin. The divisive and separatist forces seem thus to be set against the probable predominating current, even though, for the time being, they loom large in terms of the acute contemporary culture conflicts. Many or most of these problems of contemporary civilization pivot on the issues of minority rights and aspirations as against imperialistic dominance, on the one hand, and, on the other, against the cultural uniformitarianism and ethnic intolerance of the typical modern national state.
This section takes such issues of contemporary intercultural relations under consideration first, as the problem of minorities under imperialism, then, the problem of minorities in Europe under the national state, and finally, in terms of the minority problems of America and the way they affect both the conceptions and practice of American democracy.
On the stage of colonial imperialism, the rights and interests of subject peoples has become the central issue of world politics, short only of the nationalistic rivalry over the stakes of imperialism itself. In the presence of serious dominant group rivalry, the minority situations separately or in loose coalition, might conceivably be a decisive set of forces and threaten the whole structure of European imperialism. Woolf hints this, in calling attention to the inevitable effect on subject peoples of the imposition of the patterns, standards and values of European civilization. He argues the impossibility of a permanent reconciliation of the resulting trends with perpetual political and cultural subordination of these groups. There is also a progressive weakening of the economic base of imperialism where there is prolonged disregard of the native social organization, for it involves the consuming power of the colonial markets and thus affects the profit returns on invested capital. Any adjustment of the present-day situation involves the repair of the enormous damage which imperialistic intrusion and dominance have wrought upon native and subject peoples. The exploitation of the earlier stages of the practice of imperialism has been blocked from a double direction, from the gradual increase of resistance from awakening subject peoples, but also by an even more effective economic force—the decreasing economic returns of a system that does not build up, on the part of the larger masses of the colonial native population, standards of living warranting their more extensive participation in a more advanced level of culture.
The situation in British India, according to Woolf, is signal proof that imperialism, should it be successful in imposing Western rule upon Asiatic civilization, will “introduce a violent ferment of reaction that carries the seeds of its own destruction.” India represents in the field of Asiatic imperialism the most developed situation of conflict, because it has suffered less cultural disorganization in the imperialist invasion, and because the ferment of British education was introduced into certain influential sections of the Indian population. Groups of Westernized Hindus were limited in numbers and were at first detached from the masses and the interests of the native cultures. Yet, when denied full participation and privileges under the English system, they became the nucleus for nationalist and anti-imperialist agitation, and fought the imperial regime with its own ideological and political weapons. After an initial phase of denationalization, these educated Indians turned against Western civilization as well as the political system, substituted a revival of native culture and tradition, and consolidated the mass support of the depressed and exploited population, whose grievances they alone could articulate. Opportunities for fuller participation in Western privileges, cultural and material, would have forestalled, Woolf thinks, the conflict of civilizations which is now on in India.
Not all of the contemporary problem in India, however, is of imperialist origin. Parallel with the problem of reconciling Hindu and European civilization is the problem of internal religious difference—the Hindu-Moslem feud and the still older separatisms of the caste system. Ghuyre’s article traces these, but shows that British policy has had deep effect upon both of these internal conflicts. In many ways the policy of cultural non-interference of Britain in India has been predominantly prudential, and in cases of crisis has utilized the traditional feuds and cleavages for a “divide and rule” strategy. Legislative abolition of customary caste differences has not, on the whole, diminished caste lines; Ghuyre maintains that in some respects it has intensified them, since, except for upper caste lines, customary caste usage was loosely administered except with regard to caste etiquette. Urbanization under British rule and the Europeanization of native life by direct and indirect contact have been more potent in breaking down or loosening the rigidity of the caste system. The revolt of large sections of the Indians of all classes and religious faiths against the English and the discovery of common interests in Indian nationalism have created forceful movements for Hindu-Moslem rapprochement and for the dissolution of the caste structure. The culmination of the latter has taken shape in the campaign for lifting the bans of untouchability and the beginning of a movement to incorporate culturally even the pariah classes. Under the spur of the ideas of Indian solidarity, some provinces have legally removed the disabilities of the pariahs, even the most stringent of all their prohibitions, entrance to the Hindu temples. Many leaders of Hindu nationalist aspirations, and officers of the Indian Nationalist Congress see no hope for resurgent Indian nationalism without a speedy dissolution of the caste system and the rapid spread of religious tolerance through Hindu-Moslem co-operation. A process of double assimilation has thus been set in motion by the reactions to the imperialist regime. A double acculturation is remotely in view, that of the greater fusion of separate traditions within the Indian culture itself and of the Asiatic-European elements of culture as well.
Such clash of cultural interests is not merely involved in Anglo-Indian, but in practically all European-Asiatic relations. The policy of “Asia for the Asiatics” is historically a direct repercussion of European intrusion and resentment to its domineering exploitation. In the case of the Japanese, there is direct imitative and competitive rivalry of European imperialism. An awakened Asia confronts Europe with a challenge both to her policies of political aggression and of cultural supremacy. In the international relations with independent Japan and semi-independent China, the culture conflict is showing striking analogies to the movement already traced in the case of India, so far as concerns the reactions toward nationalist cultural revival and the selective adoption of Western technology without the previous deference for its cultural values. In the colonial spheres of Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies, even feebly in Oceanica, belated movements of native nationalism and resistance are emerging. Burma and Siam have also shown unmistakable signs of such reactions.
Ennis traces the dilemmas in this important colonial sphere in his article on French policy in Indo-China. Indo-China has followed the general sequence of the phases of imperialism, but has detailed differences on matters of native policy. The crucial contacts of the French with Indo-China occurred during the dominance of their “assimilation” policy, calculated to extend the French basis of culture as rapidly as possible. Granting humane motives to this policy, Ennis shows that in practical results it was as disintegrative in its effect upon native Annamite society as was the British policy of direct cultural disparagement. Rationalized by certain French policy makers as a compliment to the Indo-Chinese, in practical operation it engendered depreciation of the native culture and its tradition. The assimilated natives were not given full recognition nor identical privilege and opportunity with the French colonial settlers and administrators, so that the policy of assimilation has led to resentment and native counterassertion. An Annamite nationalist movement has arisen, which has shown little signs of abatement, even with a reversal of French policy to educational and administrative regard for native tradition and customs. There has occurred, nevertheless, in the French sphere a decided shift from the policy of assimilation and cultural displacement to the policy of “association” or cultural pluralism, paralleling the British adoption of its equivalent, the policy of “Indirect Rule.”
Although less hostile and derogatory, indirect rule has its handicaps, especially when introduced after a period of ruthless penetration. Only a weakened structure of native life remains to be built upon, and there is a heritage of animus and opposition to be overcome. In taking cognizance of native interests, the new policy must stimulate its own antithesis—nativism and eventually native nationalism, which has only a short step to take from cultural to political channels. The French colonial administration, having exhibited less open prejudice and thus having generated less group animosity, even when economically ruthless, hopes to resolve their intercultural problems and difficulties by this policy. Historically the French colonial system has not, on the whole, added cultural insult to political and economic injury. The French utilize the accrued cultural goodwill as an effective appeal and sanction for their increasingly large native colonial army, which they utilize for national as well as imperial defense.
Roberts sketches the rise of a similar colonial policy in Africa. At first, except in the Old Colonies and in privileged departments of Dakar and Senegal, the French colonial policy in Africa was inconsiderate of native cultures and native interests, as were the Belgian, German and British. In rapid succession, the French and then the British effected a change which has substantially co-ordinated their colonial policies. Both moved in the direction of administering their domains through the co-operation of native chiefs and the use of customary tribal sanctions for reinforcing the administration of colonial laws and regulations. Economic interests have increasingly brought about exceptions to the policy’s consistent application, particularly in the Congo mining districts, the South African mining districts, the Kenya East African plantations, in fact, in most areas where the colonial economy calls for the large-scale use of native labor. There have been flagrant displacements of native populations, particularly in Natal, Rhodesia, and Kenya, considerably after the promulgation of the indirect rule program, and in Kenya even after the promulgation of the mandates principle of trusteeship for natural resources and native interests. Regard for native rights and interests seems to depend more on whether it can be reconciled with the selfish motives of sustained profit and more effective economic collaboration than it does upon idealistic professions of principle. The obligation of tutelage is of lesser consequence, whether professed by the colonial administration or the missionaries, in the latter case, because missions typically concede the official colonial policy and aim merely at palliative effect and remedial cultural services.
The net results of the French policy of “association,” of the Lugard policy of “indirect rule,” and of the mandates regime of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations have only meant a slight mitigation of the initial ruthlessness of the colonial regimes in Africa, the Near East and Polynesia. There has been no eradication of the dominant forces and motives originally involved. These new policies have merely smoothed the rougher edges of colonial contacts, removed some of the more flagrant cultural disparagements, and checked or postponed complete cultural disorganization among the weaker native subject peoples. “Each in his own civilization” has not been a workable formula because of the necessary interpenetration of native and European life, under conditions where the European factors had preassured dominance.
From observations in the Union of South Africa, and checked on the far frontiers of native-European contact on the native reservations, Schapera concludes that the Bantu tribes, for example, have been brought “permanently within the orbit of Western civilization.” However slow and resisted, there will be, he believes, an eventual interchange of civilization with diminishing cultural demarcations between native and white with each succeeding generation. Bantu self-consciousness and incipient native nationalism are beginning to reinforce certain elements of the native culture, and yet at the same time, are facilitating the assimilation of European culture by the younger natives. This means that in the process of becoming more Europeanized, by virtue of the new self-conscious minority attitudes, the Bantu are not losing completely their hold on their own culture. On the native side, promising culture fusions are to be observed, combining European customs with their own. This is true particularly, Schapera reports, in the religious and ceremonial life. Acculturation of this type has been difficult in the face of the almost overwhelming procedures and attitudes of the dominant European elements. But in missionary and other efforts, which depend for their success on the goodwill and co-operation of the natives, native customs and values are acquiring a small chance to reassert themselves and play a role in cultural change. … Schapera also is led to believe from his observations that enough potential influence exists in the native culture to warrant the prediction of what he styles “an eventual common South African civilization shared by Bantu and European alike.”
Schapera also calls attention to the little observed and comparatively recent changes in missionary policy, especially their attitudes toward native, non-Christian cultures. Coercive measures, which can so easily dominate political colonial administration, cannot prevail so readily in a sphere like religion. The missions have exercised their coercive influence mainly through the mission schools. Now with the slow growth of state programs and the secular supervision of native education, that hold is breaking, and missionary programs are more dependent than ever on native reactions of acceptance. Missionary activity, having felt considerably the setbacks of passive resistance from the pagan cultures, and being confronted with the disillusioned nationalism of important sections of the native population, has been forced to modify its approaches very decidedly in the last decade or so. This began with the tactical divorce of remedial medical and educational work from doctrinal missionarism, and finally led to an active co-operation with chieftains still holding to the native traditions. The influence of the cultural pluralism policy of colonial reforms has led in a few cases to missionary compromises with native traditions and customs which they felt could be safely incorporated within the frame of Christianity. While not considerable enough, as yet, to be called anything but experimental, such new missionary policy and programs are significant signs of a reorientation of European cultural policies and attitudes in colonial relationships. These are streaks of light merely on a colonial horizon that in the main is still ominously dark with intercultural misunderstanding and friction.
The minority problems of Europe focus on the development and policies of the national state. The identification of the cultural tradition, institutions and often the language of a dominant majority group with the political unity and entity of the “nation” has caused serious minority repression and oppression. The grave cultural and political conflict of the minorities has thus arisen in Europe. Although most acute in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the existence of minorities with divergent cultural and ethnic strains, imbedded in the political nations, is almost universal throughout Europe. Few nations are without a national minority problem. They have been sporadically acute in Britain, with the Irish question and to a lesser degree, with the Scotch and Welsh, in Belgium as between the French, Walloon and Flemish populations, and in Germany on both the south and the east. But the storm centers of the minority issue have been the Central European residue of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Poland, Western Russia and the Balkans.
In this maze of interpenetrating and overlapping areas of mixed populations, the exigencies of political statehood have produced unstable political and cultural alignments, which have tended to get out of balance increasingly with every successive political move in the Balkans and Central Europe. In this area there are at least forty million of such dispersed and politically disunited minority peoples, running from small but ethnically tenacious units of twenty thousand to huge sub-national groups of from one to six millions. For this reason, Central and Eastern Europe and its ethnic tensions has been and remains politically and economically critical for all European civilization.
As MacCartney points out, ethnic and political frontiers seldom coincide, and political nationalism complicates this situation by linking one culture, language and set of majority interests to the political power and prestige of the state. Under this policy, divergent ethnic and cultural groups are then relegated to subordinate status. Their traditional culture has been disparaged or segregated, and a minority grievance movement provoked. Historical political enmities have played their part in these minority-majority antagonisms, but primarily it has been the minority suppression that has kept alive and intensified the issue. The minority groups proceed to take refuge in the common bond of their native language and tradition, and, after an interval of cultural reassertion and nationalism, develop ambitions for political independence or irredentist reunion with some larger political group of like language, tradition and culture. These political ambitions accentuate the clash with the dominant state, and repressive measures and a characteristic minority situation ensue. Cultural survivals and nationalist traditions which were tolerated in the initial stages of minority subordination are, then, rigidly suppressed, often by legal enactment. Deliberate steps are finally taken for the forced denationalization of the belligerent minority.
Sapir analyzes the role of language as an arbitrary symbol of this belligerent type of politically conceived state nationalism. On both sides, it is seized upon as a convenient and obvious mark of cultural difference. The dominant group tries to suppress the minority group language, often by prohibition of its use for official and educational activities, and tries to hinder its revival after suppression. Thus in most of the European minority situations, language has come to play the role of the preferred nationality symbol, and as a result, with cultural hostilities provoked, many common institutional affiliations between the two groups are consequently ignored. The language myth, Sapir correctly shows, has taken its place beside the race myth in the conflict situations of modern times. This was not true, generally, before the modern era, and seems due to the arbitrary tradition heightening the emphasis on language as a symbol of political allegiance and group solidarity in the contemporary world. This tendency to use “culture, language and race as but different facets of a single social unity, which tends in turn to identify with a political national entity” is, as Sapir says, the characteristic modern phenomenon of ethnic nationalism. Language thus becomes an instrument of national policy, and the national language comes to express a constitutional function, the will of the majority culture to dominate through the agency of the nation. The minority problem, under such circumstances, intensifies in direct proportion with the intensification of national feeling.
Many larger nations are, in fact, multi-national states, but refuse to admit it, or to have a policy of nationalism consistent with a multiracial or composite ethnic character. After the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, MacCartney points out, in the attempt to rectify some of the flagrant minority oppressions in Central Europe and the Balkans, the Versailles treaty stressed the political principle of minority self-determination, that is, statehood for considerable minority groups, rather than the principle of cultural reciprocity and the legal and economic protection of minorities within larger national units. The latter, they only tried, with the minority treaties, in the exceptional cases of heavily mixed populations. The emphasis was on the new politically liberated minority states, which in many cases, as Jaszi shows, incorporated other minority groups and started out as new “majorities” to repress their former fellow-sufferers. This situation, aggravated by great shifts of populations and the political use of legitimate minority grievances and ambitions to justify the expansionist ambitions of many of the larger national states, has led to the acutely complicated situation of Europe today.
MacCartney says: “The real root of the trouble lies in the philosophy of the national state as it is practised today in Europe. … Since the whole conception of the national state implies a violation of the principle of equality to the detriment of the minorities, the guarantee of equality might be construed as involving the renunciation by the state of its national character.” The alternatives to this situation are either the multi-national or racial state, with guarantees of legal protection and cultural freedom to minorities, and consequently the abandonment of a politically dominant culture, or the step in the other direction to the mono-racial state. Although the latter seems contrary to current trends in the world relations of culture groups, the totalitarian state theoretically takes just this latter position.
The uniformitarian cultural policy of the fascist state is the logical quintessence of ethnic nationalism. The “one race, one nation, one culture” criterion of contemporary German and Italian totalitarianism represents an extreme development of the modern practice of the sovereign national state, and, however apparently opposed, is based on principles involved in less extreme form in the practice of other nations. The totalitarian state theory insists upon the ethnic character of the state as basic, and thus must insist on the mono-racial formula, to the point of the distortion of all historical facts. The Frick memorandum shows this clearly. Nationalism must be final and paramount, internationalism is condemned and all interests, individual and group, must be subordinated to the unquestioned dominance of political interests. The Nazi regime has preached racialism from the very beginning, as well as the doctrine of specific races as bearers of specific cultures. Language and blood are held to be basic bonds of social unity instead of common institutions, and this leads in their logic to the justification of the expulsion or extermination of all alien minorities. But a nation could only consistently be mono-racial on the basis of ethnic solidarity and a non-expansionist program; and manifestly no large political nation in Europe conforms or can conform to either of these specifications. The practical policies of the nations professing the doctrine are far from a really thorough attempt to reconstruct themselves along these lines, as the Italian incorporation of African colonies and the German conquests of Slavs and demand for the restoration of African colonies only too clearly demonstrates.
The only other alternatives, as MacCartney observes in his discussion of the Minority Treaties and their design to guarantee cultural autonomy to minorities within the boundaries of larger political units, are the gradual absorption of minorities, which is hardly possible, particularly under minority persecution, or the profound alteration of the basis of the state, both in theory and practice. This is possible wherever the political state is not identified with cultural nationality. Switzerland is a federated state based, with considerable success and stability, on such a multi-racial, multi-lingual principle. Bulgaria, under its recent constitution, has included provisions for fully guaranteed cultural autonomy to its considerable minority populations—the Turks and the Jews. The new Turkish Constitution also has minority guarantees, including very explicit guarantees of equal women’s rights.
But the widest departure from the prevailing pattern of ethnic nationalism is the Soviet program for minority cultural autonomy. Here the principle of self-determination has been incorporated into the basic structure of the state, which is considered permanently multi-national on a cultural, religious and institutional basis, and only politically and economically federated. The Webbs present an account of the historical background and working machinery of this drastic solution of a vexing problem. Russia was confronted with a vast array of peoples, who ran a wide gamut of types and forms and levels of civilization. The language situation was also extremely complex. The Tsarist regime had been associated with a policy of cultural restriction and suppression of minorities, particularly the Jews. The principle of federalism and local autonomy was chosen as the basis for the structure of the new Soviet state. Great stimulus was given to local initiative, local sense of pride and participation by the recognition of all native vernaculars, even those unwritten, and the policy of protecting native traditions and customs. The latter were not to be considered merely as quaint survivals or historical folk tradition, but were made the base of the newer programs of popular education and, as cultural traditions, were to undergo modernized developments in education and the arts. The titles of the federated states in most instances bore the name of the local minority and used the minority language as an official language.
It is no exaggeration to state that this policy represents an almost complete divorce of cultural from political nationalism. The Soviet policy and program, because of this, goes definitely beyond even the most liberal solutions of the minority problem by the democratic states, also through its direct representation of minorities as such in the structure of the national federation. The minority programs offer the possibility of stable cosmopolitan societies based upon cultural pluralism, and dependent for their functioning upon legally guaranteed minority equality. This is significant contrast to the fascist theory and practice of the mono-racial, totalitarian state. We thus have in both the reform democratic and socialist programs of legalized cultural autonomy and institutional freedom for minority sub-groups, two hopes for the resolution of minority conflict situations. For this reason, the fate of minority groups, in large measure, seems bound up with the crucial question of which forms of government and which of these cultural policies are to prevail in Europe, in all Western civilization, for that matter—those rooted in present prevailing majority precedent and privilege or that which is based upon such social experiment and reconstruction as will assure minority groups not only freedom and equal rights but cultural recognition and dignity.
The United States, for all its distinctiveness, is culturally an offshoot of Europe. For a long time, it was in its thinking a cultural province of the homeland of its dominant stocks. That tradition has often blinded America to its own uniqueness and difference, and in no matters more conservatively than in its cultural outlook. In its conception of nationhood the English pattern has been interpreted more strictly even than in English political and legal thought. National unity has been a passionate public interest in America more than it could possibly have been in a country explicitly a United Kingdom, with four different historic ethnic stocks. America has thus always been a multi-national state without much general public recognition of that fact. This illusion has been fostered by the absence of settled historic traditions at the time of its foundation, and has been promoted by the apparent dominance of a single language and cultural tradition.
In addition to its allegiance to the myth of national cultural uniformity, the United States in later stages of its history has been inconsistent in practice with certain precedents of its early settlement, for these early settlements were, for the most part, refugee colonies of oppressed and non-conformist minorities. Only in periods of labor need has the immigration policy of the country been extremely liberal, while at other periods the principle of restriction has been exercised drastically. The tradition of America as the asylum and refuge of the oppressed is not quite borne out by a detailed examination of the immigration laws, restricting both quantitatively and qualitatively, the influx of the foreign-born.
Woofter shows that since 1900 immigration policies have been increasingly restrictive, and have shifted from political to racial and eugenic standards as grounds for exclusion. Medical regulations have reflected an objective and scientific sort of standard which most persons would concede. The racial restriction clauses, relating to Orientals, particularly the Chinese and Japanese, especially since connected with disqualification for citizenship, reflect factors of an indefensible kind. It is claimed that such exclusion is protective, but this is historically fallacious. Restrictive acts against Oriental immigration were preceded by periods when Chinese and Japanese were induced to come to this country to labor in building the Western railroads and for service in the pioneer intensive farming of the hand-cultivated West Coast farms. The stream that was checked was opened up by American initiative and needs, and so far as the experience of the country has gone with Oriental residents, little adequate justification can be given for such restrictive exclusion and civil disability. Most frank observers will admit racial and cultural prejudice as one of the main components in our Oriental exclusion policy.
The quota restrictions of our immigration laws also show cultural bias, in that they are heavily weighted in favor of the older and northern European stocks. The national origins clauses reflect a desire and determination to keep ethnic national character in line with the traditional Anglo-Saxon majority. But historically from time to time, the dominant economic policy of the country has relaxed this cultural policy in favor of any source of needed labor, however ethnically diverse: the presence of thirteen million Negroes of African descent, being a forceful illustration of the operation of this principle of economic advantage—controlling majority practice, whether in or out of line with traditional policy. But when not otherwise countered by economic need, American immigration policy has shown tendencies toward restrictive exclusion and to swinging out of line with democratic and traditional American ideals.
Reinhold, treating the role of refugees in American history, charts the waves of migration fleeing oppression and persecution abroad which have given America her reputation as the haven of the oppressed and persecuted. The mass movements that have contributed the bulk of the population of the country have had by no means so romantic and idealistic a motivation. The refugee, as a symbol of the conditions associated with the earliest American settlement, has come to stand for a rationalized tradition, not always carried out in practice. Group prejudice was never quite absent, even in the early colonies, as shown by the mutual distrust and intolerance of many of the colonies. The great expanse of unsettled country, capable of absorbing any dissident or ostracized group, facilitated physically the problem involved in the treatment of minority and refugee groups. The increased pressure of refugees later, when that elasticity had vanished, has brought reactions of a quite different sort to the traditional American liberality.
Refugee groups and individuals have contributed spectacularly in their land of refuge, and their history has justified the policy of open welcome and ready assimilation. But the very existence of so many quite unabsorbed foreign communities, both in rural settlements and in city slums, tells a general story of majority exclusiveness and cultural intolerance. Certain clannishness on the part of the foreign-born communities, and definite differences in standards and modes of living, have had, of course, their share in this situation. But cultural prejudice has been one of the great deterrents of the assimilative process, and many of these foreign-born communities have passed generations without cultural absorption, even after having assimilated the basic institutional mores of American life.
The United States is, after all, one of the most polyglot and multiracial nations on earth, and has relatively speedier assimilative processes and less historical antipathies than any of the great European nations having heavily mixed populations. As such this country has the unique opportunity of working out the adjustment of many national and racial groups under common institutions and democratic ideals.
In addition to the problem of the cultural absorption of the immigrant, Orientals, the American Indian and the Negro have traditionally been carried in the public mind outside the pale of the majority democratic tradition, although enlightened liberal opinion has repeatedly urged their inclusion. These more acute minority problems of America have been constantly there as obvious exceptions, and also as challenging tests of the American tradition and its professions of equalitarianism. They have passed through several historic crises of reform and reaction, without any basic resolution as yet. The more objectively they are viewed, however, or in longer range historical perspective, the less they seem to be so exceptional. They are in final analysis, important segments of the general minority problem, and are of a piece with the more moderate varieties of majority prejudice and discrimination that often pass almost unnoticed between the majority and less obviously divergent groups. Thus our shortcomings in social democracy are part and parcel of one and the same majority policy and attitude. In the extreme cases of racial prejudice, cultural prejudice only becomes all the more manifest, but a majority bias of the same essential source and character underlies both. Admittedly these racial divides are the more difficult of the social cleavages to bridge but, as with the immigrant and the foreign language minorities, cultural assimilation makes their continuance extremely difficult, if not, in the long run, impossible.
Beliefs in the unassimilability of these groups and of their fundamental cultural difference are, thus, the crux of all our racial minority problems. Majority stereotypes of this character impede even the recognition of the substantial amount of integration that may have taken place. So it is a very significant situation for all minorities, racial as well as cultural, when cultural non-conformity comes to be respected. Eventually this would entail a different standard of group judgment on the part of the majority. No minority group, in fact, can be in a sound position when cultural difference connotes inferiority. Therein lies the profound significance of any change in American attitudes on the question of cultural conformity. This affects all minority groups, and is not a special concession to this one or to that, but involves a fundamental revision of the dominant majority attitude all along the line.
More promising for an improvement of minority status in American democracy than any fluctuating of attitudes toward specific minorities, would be general and fundamental change in the traditional conception of the nature and goal of American culture. The government report on “Cultural Diversity in America,” raises just that basic question. It calls attention to the persistence of cultural difference, combined with the increased juxtaposition of these differences with the rapidly increasing urbanization of America. It thus points to new factors that may force a new cosmopolitan character into the typical American community. Cultural change, according to the report, is not ironing out the cultural divergencies of the many national and racial elements in the American population, but is forcing them into new situations of mutual stress and common experiences. It is no longer a diversity of isolation, but a more challenging type of situation involving reaction across lines which have previously divided.
The excerpt from Cayton and Mitchell on Negro and white workers in Birmingham, forced into a non-traditional co-operation against the grain of deep traditional separatism by common interest under new industrial conditions and programs is certainly a case very much in point. No two elements have been pushed further apart than the poorer white Southern laborer and the Negro laboring group. The narrative of mixed unions in a Southern urban center, functioning against the opposition of inveterate caste and racial prejudice, shows the force of common interests and social forces to dissolve crystallized inhibitions and inveterate animosities. A close industrial alignment has dictated comparatively wide-scale and effective ignoring of these differences; with what results of group interaction only actual experience can demonstrate; since the forecast, on the basis of the racial tradition of the two groups, would have insisted on the utter impossibility of what is now actually taking place.
The more disadvantaged minority elements are experiencing more rapid cultural change under American conditions than the older majority stocks. This means for them not only enhanced assimilation, but greater impetus toward original and exceptional adjustments and creativeness. Their unusual stress and strain brings in this way considerable dividends of positive benefit both to themselves and to the general culture. The cultural changes, particularly of the urban community, are leveling off the provincialisms of the native-born population more markedly than they are melting down the cultural distinctiveness of the minorities and the foreign-born. It is that majority provincialism and intolerance which has been the great handicap for the underprivileged groups in their struggle for adjustment and improved condition and status.
Randolph Bourne’s article carries this challenge straight to the heart of majority policy. His formula for a sound American culture, and for any democratic society, in fact, is whatever diversity historical circumstances have given it, reconciled by attitudes of cultural reciprocity and tolerance, rather than pressed into any uniformitarian mold or stratified in that unstable dominance and subordination of majority and minority groups. This, he thinks, depends on the enlightened concession of the majority, which it behooves the majority to make unless it would reap a later harvest of minority counterassertion and inner conflict. The American situation permits just this, and in Bourne’s opinion, the democratic ideal calls for it. The prime obstacle in the path of the actual realization of cultural democracy is an unfortunate tradition of majority-prescribed and dominated culture. Stripping minorities of their culture not only impoverishes them, but enfeebles them for assimilation and proper functioning in relation to cultural change and progress. Building up a cultural superiority on their disparagement and repression leads to stagnation of the cultural life of the majority culture itself. In intercultural reciprocity, Bourne finds what he regards the only safe way to cultural democracy.
This chapter seeks to document and analyze the present status of majority-minority group relations with reference to both the national and the international scene. The preceding chapters indicate the danger that such relationships may shortly be expected to reach a phase of active crisis. Such a crisis obviously confronts us.
World War II, to many, seems the cause of this critical intensification of the conflict problems of national, ethnic and cultural groups. But really, it is itself simply an intensified manifestation of previously existing conflicts, and so is more their symptom than their cause. But the war crisis has served to throw all these present-day minority problems into high relief: in fact, by aggravating them, it has posed them dramatically and crucially for present and post-war consideration and solution. Without removing their specific and local character, global war has strikingly brought out their common denominators, revealed some of their basic common causes, and, even more importantly, made clear the need for comprehensive and co-operative solutions.
The social stress and disequilibrium of wartime conditions have intensified notably the minority situation of the American Negro, of the Jew in Europe, of colonial groups in Africa and the Pacific. But global war and its associated world crisis have also posed these and other minority issues in a new and highly significant way. For minority problems, in addition to acquiring a new urgency and centrality, have been set in a new perspective and a new frame of reference. The new perspective is a now almost inescapable international context. No minority situation is today a purely domestic issue. However formerly isolated or previously so considered, it is now seen and known, usually by both parties to the issue, to have real and serious international repercussions. The new frame of reference, too, provides a much more specific and urgent set of criteria than has ever before been associated in the public mind with the concepts of justice, fair play and democracy in social group relations. Mere reference to the Atlantic Charter, the Four Freedoms and the various proposals of the international organization documents of Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta and San Francisco substantiates that fact. Undoubtedly a more precise and universally accepted set of normative principles and criteria for group relations is in the making, and will serve in the future as standards of majority judgment and of minority appeal. It is in these two aspects that the situation of today differs so radically from that of World War I, however vaguely and latently such ideals and objectives were implied in the then accepted slogans of “self-determination for all peoples,” and “making the world safe for democracy.” For the post-war period, at least for the United Nations, group relations will have, in the main, generally conceded criteria and generally accepted goals.
Consideration should be given to the reasons for this. The democratic nations have encountered in the war against fascism a type of challenge and opposition which is obviously a moral antithesis as well as a political enemy. That fact is calculated to arouse democratic societies from considerable lethargy and decadence to a sharpened realization of their own basic values and objectives. It also forces them to disavow, and to eliminate from their own internal economies, elements latently or actually similar to the repudiated creeds and practices of their enemies. Realistically, we know that much in the creed and practice of the fascist states has less obviously and less ruthlessly been part and parcel of group belief and practice among ourselves. The enemy, unfortunately, have had no monopoly on imperialist militarism and exploitation, racist rationalizations of world rule and dominance, harsh persecution of particular minorities, or doctrinaire bigotries of cultural superiority. But once all these become overtly and widely stigmatized, a moral situation has been precipitated, with inevitable alternatives. Democracy at war, and seemingly in the peace, must therefore more definitely outline its position and more unequivocally avow its basic principles. It is out of such realistic logic that the present situation stems; and it is fortunate for the prospects of reform and reconstruction that the motivations and the pressures are realistic, not wholly ideological and moral.
Realistic also are the external pressures. Almost every minority group the world over is vocal and aroused, and in most cases also, aware of the converging and reinforcing causes and claims of other minorities. One might almost speak of a moral coalition of minority causes in the making, comprising the vast numerical majority of mankind. Over against this new alignment of forces, even with only their exercise of passive resistance, it is hard to imagine any force capable of maintaining more than a precarious and ineffective peace without some basic adjustment of the aspirations and claims of many or most of these minority groups.
Further, realistic analysis of the line-up of political forces indicates, even within the Council of the Big Five powers, strong self-interest pressures favoring minority group interests—a Russia constitutionally committed to a radically liberal minority policy and program, a China committed on ethnic grounds to the principle of racial and cultural parity. Outside that inner circle, one observes a restive Moslem-Arab bloc, a still more restive India, and an altered balance of forces in large areas of the colonial world, with France and Belgium, and probably Holland, strategically dependent on military support and economic cooperation from their colonies. To these must be added the weighty factor of an Orient suspicious and resentful of any resumption of Western hegemony. It is unrealistic to imagine any bloc of traditional majority powers—Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American—able to exercise long-term control and domination of such a world situation. Indeed, in the face of so much resentment of their past policies of power domination, the best world course for such nations would be to take a role of moral leadership grounded in an abdication of their previous presumptions and an acceptance, which now seems likely, of a truly democratic basis of world co-operation.
Moreover, it is likely that the exigencies of economic reconstruction will dictate the really vital policies of the post-war world, and that political policies and ambitions will in all likelihood have to yield wherever they run seriously counter to these exigencies. With economic attrition affecting the victors nearly as severely as the vanquished, vested interests will be forced to consider radical changes from past policies and procedures. The war will leave us with a world both psychologically and economically harder to exploit. Combining favorably with all this are the important new recognitions both in the Atlantic and in the San Francisco Charter of the two basic economic roots of war—unequal access to markets and sources of raw materials, and widespread differentials in living standards and economic security. Any very practical approach to these problems, particularly the latter, must have constructive regard for minority interests and must of necessity shift the emphasis in handling them from the competitive to the collaborative basis. Rationally viewed, therefore, the imperatives of the peace loom up as specifications for a co-operative democratic world organization. That imperative spells out, as a corollary, a radical revision of minority policies and major improvements of minority status.
With respect to minority issues, America’s political commitments are clear and sound, even if her practical position is paradoxical. The war has brought the United States increased internal minority tensions, but also measurable improvements on the whole and certainly chastening enlightenment. On two fronts we have had to face the increasing high costs of racial and cultural prejudice. If we consider the repercussions in our world relations and the negative effects on our moral authority of our color prejudice against the Negro and our cultural prejudice against Mexicans, Indians and Orientals, we can readily understand why today the foreign frontier of race is more critical even than the domestic. Color discrimination against the Negro, apart from its general effect on opinion in the non-white world, will have specific reactions in the Caribbean, in parts of Latin America and in Africa. Similar ill effects of unfair treatment of the American Indian minority will register heavily in Mexico and throughout South America. We have yet to recognize fully the loss of democratic face incurred by sending out in this war racially segregated armed forces to the five continents and the Seven Seas.
However, there have been compensations and gains in American group relations. Among the gains have been definite improvements in our program for the American Indian, the repeal of the Chinese exclusion act, the promulgation of Philippine independence, measurable progress under war pressures in the treatment of Negroes, especially with regard to their industrial opportunities, and the conclusion by international agreement of a liberal labor charter for immigrant Mexican workers in the United States. But we must constantly remember that no world order with the taint of racism, extreme or moderate, is permanently possible. Over and above the instability and inconsistency of our racial situation domestically, it behooves America to realize that the world-tide is now against racialism and its undemocratic attitudes and values. A progressive world course cannot be steered against this tide, and world leadership is not to the nation or culture that cannot abandon racial and cultural prejudice.
The report on the Negro minority situation comes from Charles S. Johnson, who discusses the present status of race relations in the South, and from Edwin R. Embree, who presents an over-all balance sheet of race gains and losses on a national scale. On some points these reports overlap, but with corroborative effect. They indicate as one of the most important recent trends in the American race situation its transformation with the increased dispersion of the Negro population from a sectional into a national issue. Both observers agree that the breach in economic color caste through the triple openings of greater inclusion and diversification in war industrial jobs, more democratic mass inclusion in labor unions, particularly C.I.O. unions, and new protections against industrial discrimination through federal and state Fair Employment Practice Acts, is the outstanding new gain. The heavy shifts in the Negro population, which employment in war jobs has brought about, is regarded as the next most important change. It might easily be considered as just part of the industrial picture but for the fact of the quite separate attendant problems of residential segregation and community tensions occasioned by the sudden disturbance of the ethnic balance of so many localities.
Both observers are optimistic, though cautiously so. They see substantial gains on the racial front by reason of the marked increase of organized concern on the part of many local communities and in view of the accumulative effects of social legislation and planning, particularly those of federal origin and New Deal orientation. Their reservations stem from the unpredictables of post-war policy, especially the extent of full employment programs. With Negroes in a more militant mood than ever before, and many determined not to be driven back to the miserable conditions from which they have migrated, the job situation becomes the key factor of post-war race relations. Prospects will be more favorable if occupational diversity can be maintained and even increased for the Negro, since in times of crisis and depression, minorities economically stratified invariably become the scapegoats of the situation. Both observers agree that segregation in residence and in the armed forces are the most negative factors, and that the most positive are the rise of such integrated movements as mixed labor and farm unionization, and of such common-cause organizations as the Southern Conference on Human Welfare and various intercultural and inter-faith movements that have organized themselves democratically on an interracial basis. Increased political activity on the part of the Negro is also rightly regarded as an important safeguard of expanding democracy.
Louis Wirth reports on the general minority situation, finding that the war has stressed national solidarity to the advantage of minority groups. Events have shown that even the German and Italian Americans, Negroes, Filipinos and Chinese have gained considerably as social distance has been cut down by propaganda and activities stressing national unity. While there is no assurance of holding all of these gains, some hold-over seems likely.
The Miyamoto article gives dispassionate analysis to the single negative case of the Japanese. Noting improved relations with other Oriental groups, he considers the Japanese situation more political than ethnic. However, when the war crisis came, inveterate attitudes of anti-Japanese racism were primarily responsible for the extremisms of the evacuation program. It was a painful paradox that Hawaii, seat of Pearl Harbor and where there was a heavier percentage of Japanese population, was able to deal with the situation more successfully and democratically than the West Coast. A firm corrective post-war policy is demanded both to correct the injustices done to the 62 per cent Nisei citizens and to curb the inflammable potentialities of this Pacific Coast problem. The danger to any minority group of the narrow industrial specialization typical of the West Coast Japanese is pointed out, with the responsibility divided between clannishness on the part of the Japanese and industrial and political ostracism on the part of the majority whites.
Ruth Benedict’s article furnishes an incisive criticism of past and current educational programs for the cultivation of democratic attitudes. The promotion of tolerance based on respect for cultural diversity and its contemporary emphasis on “cultural pluralism” she regards as only a half-way step toward a thoroughly sound program for intercultural education in America. The dominant cultural trends in America, she finds, are toward assimilation and sharing of the majority culture. Accordingly the indicated emphasis for sound democratic education with us should be the integration of the various racial and cultural groups along with whatever elements of their cultural traditions, backgrounds and contributions can be commonly shared. Minority self-respect will be more effectively fortified through such inclusive recognition and acceptance than by any program of cultivated cultural parochialism. The process of educational attack must then be to modify the intolerant exclusiveness of the majority tradition and liberalize its undemocratic and all-too-common tendencies to ethnocentric pride and prejudice at the expense of “outsiders” or “newcomers.”
Assuming democratic education to eliminate racial and cultural prejudice to be of necessity a long-term remedy, Carey McWilliams forcefully defends the thesis that as an immediate safeguard and corrective, it is the function of law in a democracy to outlaw overt discrimination against racial and other minorities. It is certainly not, he thinks, a proper function of law in a democratic society to incorporate undemocratic folkways and thus become the legal bulwark of reaction. Calling attention to the success of socially-intentioned public interest legislation in other fields, such as the National Labor Relations Act, he contends for federal legal reenforcement of democratic rights and privileges. Such measures should combat local abridgments of citizenship and civic rights and restrictive residence covenants. Such agencies as the Fair Employment Practices Committee should outlaw active discrimination in employment. Undemocratic legislation, he rightly observes, not only reenforces but breeds prejudice.
Turning next to the international aspects of the minority problem, John Collier discusses our Indian policy in its hemispheric implications. He finds that recent changes toward a more democratic treatment of less than a half-million American Indians have favorable repercussion on the thirty millions of Indian blood and descent in Mexico and South America. The 1940 Inter-American Conference on Indian Life he considers a reassuring foundation for a hemispheric policy of cultural democracy, as well as a strategic reenforcement of Pan-American solidarity. Right in principle, it is also expedient in the light of the new cultural program of Mexico in which Indian life and tradition have been assigned so important a place. Groups that are minority groups in one economy are related by racial or cultural ties to large majorities elsewhere. This holds for the Negro, the Oriental and other segments of our heterogeneous population, and our minority policies and practices must be intelligently based on strategic recognition of such facts.
By reason of the unprecedented Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe, this minority’s condition and future have become the most international of all minority questions. Indeed, it is hard to see how any constructive program for the reconstruction of Jewish life can take place except under international auspices and protection. Planned, co-operative rehabilitation for this group will set valuable precedents—among them, some contend, an international bill of human rights, or, others believe, international guarantees for the protection of all minorities. Contemporary anti-Semitism has precipitated the issue inescapably, as well as shown itself up as one of reaction’s chief weapons.
Considerable portions of the Jewish situation merge with the problem of displaced peoples. Here, as Warren points out, there is also grave need for an over-all program, to take the issues out of the petty context of political disputes and reset them in the broad domain of human welfare. The use of millions of such persons in general economic reconstruction offers great prospects if a basic social philosophy for a new social order can be achieved.
On the minority question the Soviet Union, Stern reports, has handled the issues basically and consistently. With the revolution giving opportunity for a wholesale reversal of Tsarist policy, a consistent democratic program of minority rights and status has been evolved, the challenge of which is unmistakable. It has proved itself a reliable basis of effective unity in the war and has thus come to worldwide attention. The 1936 Constitution makes “any advocacy of racial or national exclusiveness or hatred or contempt punishable by law.” All alternative ways of settling minority questions in the near future, however different in theory or situation, must face comparison and competition with the Russian results as an obvious achievement.
In the final excerpt, Kennedy reviews the critical international subject of colonies in a post-war world. The West has no longer a monopoly on those aspects of civilization and technology which were once considered its proprietary interest and its controlled world investment. That makes the present, according to Kennedy, a trying and necessary transitional stage between an era of paternalistic imperialism and co-operative world federation. Colonial areas must come into this framework either on the basis of independence, or as federated states or democratically administered trusteeships. The main danger in the latter is that of an easy reversion to the old mandate situation of clandestine colonies and stalking-horse concealments of the old imperialism.
“The new concept of democracy,” says Professor Kennedy aptly, “is international.” Democracy has successfully met a world challenge. It finds itself faced in the post-war period with a world situation and world responsibility. Both logically and pragmatically, it can best promote and insure itself by and through a democratic world order.