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    The argument against Negro equality began with an appeal to history and observable facts; the white race alone was civilized and the inventors and spreaders of civilization; the yellow race had contributed a little; the black race nothing. Then came the Darwinian "survival of the fittest": Africa was a land of slavery because Negroes were fit slaves, and white men, fit masters; when biology>' began to question race distinctions, measurements of head form and brain weight were appealed to. When the results of such studies yielded further confusion there was widespread appeal to psychological reactions which were supposed at first to measure "native" intelligence.
    With this went a series of historical and social studies designed to disclose the ignorance and inefficiency of emancipated Negroes. The leading universities of the United States united to show that the worst result of the Civil War was the enfranchisement of Negroes and that the emancipated slave was worse off than his fathers.
    Despite this desperate and ruthless crusade backed by fiction and art, the experience of Brazil, the West Indies and the United States emphasizes the fact that a considerable and growing proportion of Negroes and mulattoes are modern civilized men, with every prospect of becoming increasingly efficient and creative. The contrast between the white and dark populations of America can no longer for a moment be considered a contrast between cultivated and the uncultivated. The most we can say is that, if one compares the two groups of white and black one will find at the bottom a larger proportion of Negroes and Indians than whites; but in both groups these lower classes share the same human characteristics. On the other hand, at the head of both these groups you will find a small but undeniable proportion of Negroes and Indians side by side with the larger proportion of whites and with no essential differences in ability and creativeness.
    The social average of the Negro group is at present considerably lower than that of the white group; but there are Negroes, and many of them, quite as cultivated as the corresponding classes of whites, just as there are whites quite as hopeless as the lowest class of Negroes. It is the unquestioned truth of facts like these that, in spite of all the accumulated race fiction, has swept the foundations away from modern theories of race and especially of race distinctions based on the color line. There is no scientist of repute today who for a moment would declare that biological differences between white folk and black consign an individual of either race inevitably to a lower status. Consequently the whole argument for a different treatment and a different fate to be meted out for Negroes can no longer be based upon the biological or evolutionary argument. We must face the Negro problem as a series of cultural facts.
     We have, of course, the right to believe that under other circumstances it would have been wiser, and we would have preferred, to keep peoples of different cultural backgrounds and different physical appearance in the parts of the world where they were first developed or at least to make contacts under happier conditions. This may or may not have been advisable; probably not, when we consider the cultural values of race and group contact under any conditions. In any case we must remember that it was the greed and adventure of the white race that in modern days disturbed the ancient distribution of mankind and that Europeans did this primarily for their own selfish purposes. Moreover, we have no right to say that because other generations were guilt3, of the African slave trade and the domination of Asia, that present peoples have no part in the blame. They are heirs of their success, if success it may be called. They are heirs to the enormous prosperity of the Sugar Empire and the Cotton Kingdom and of the capitalistic methods of production which Negro slavery in America was primarily responsible in upbuilding in England and Europe. America could not have been America, without the African slave trade and African slavery. If, therefore, Americans are the heirs of an ancient error, so long as they insist upon grasping and holding the advantages of that error, they must pay for it.
    In the United States we have gone far enough to know that the ability which can be developed among persons of Negro descent, is of the widest range; that in physical, intellectual and artistic lines, the Negro is not only in evidence but if it were not for deliberate hindrance to his development he would doubtless make even better showing. We know that his health and crime can be adequately explained by his poverty, and that increased income and education can without reasonable doubt raise the mass of the Negro people to or above the average level of their white neighbors.
    But these very facts disclose a problem which the nation and the white world are unwilling to face. Even with present barriers, if the Negro continues to develop in the United States and Latin America, there is not a single door of human progress and of social recognition at which he is not going to knock in the future with increasingly bitter violence. On the other hand, if the barriers are done away with, the Negro race in America is going to reach within a calculable time a level of efficiency which will challenge the whole assumption of the natural superiority of the white race. It will take more and more deliberate effort on the part of whites to enforce caste restrictions.
     What do we propose to do about this after the world war? Are we going to see that the Negroes of the Southern United States are admitted to the ballot on the same terms as white folk? Are we going to insist that the England which we have helped rescue at fabulous expenditure of treasure, installs democratic forms of government to control capital and investment in her colonies and especially in the X, Vest Indies? Are the states of South America like Venezuela, Brazil and Colombia going to see to it that through education and social uplift, a foundation of real democratic government is built upon this Negro and Indian Labor? Are we going to continue to let North American influence in South America emphasize and even insist on white supremacy and color discrimination, while all South America and Central American countries who wish capital and tourists respond to this pressure?
     In answer to these queries we may note today four centers of solution for future relations between black people and white on the American continent: the policy of racial absorption especially in Brazil; the policy of absorption with Negro suppression through the domination of capital as in Jamaica and Cuba; the policy of racial segregation illustrated by Haiti; and the policy of legal caste shown in the Southern states of the United States.
    We have grown used to being told the settlement of the Negro problem in Brazil is merely a matter of time and absorption: that if we shut our eyes long enough, a white Brazil and white Venezuela and Colombia will emerge and Africa in South America disappear. The United States has made a wry face at such a process and tried to blame most of the political and social ills of American regions south of us to this miscegenation. Y. Many of our unfortunate relationships with our continental neighbors have arisen because of this racial prejudice. X. We have established ourselves as missionaries of white supremacy and refused personal relationships with South Americans who show too evidently Negro and Indian blood. We are willing to accent the white result, but hate the colored means.
    Backed by the tremendous power of our capital and tourist wealth, this attitude has unduly influenced race relations, and when added to the equally strict but more carefully expressed attitude of England, countries like Brazil, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela have striven to be "white" nations and make the process of the absorption of Indians and Negro involve the gradual disappearance of these people.
    Biologically such absorption is difficult because of the numbers involved. Fully half of the fifty million population of Brazil today is of acknowledged Negro and Indian descent and this proportion of whites has only been maintained by large Portuguese and Italian immigration. Of the fifteen million people in Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela not more than 20 per cent are white; perhaps only xo percent of Peru's six and one-half millions. This means that biological absorption into a "white" race will be difficult without greatly increased white immigration. Such immigration is hard to procure because Indians and Negro form a chief laboring proletariat with whom white labor cannot compete. And if the status of the Negroes and Indians deliberately is raised, white immigration will further decrease. The result already is a noticeable darkening of the white group in most of these countries with a distinct Indian or Negroid mixture.
    In addition to this, and of far greater importance is the question of cultural blending. The Negro brought to America strongly developed cultural patterns which even slavery could not entirely efface. With emancipation came his frantic efforts to adopt white European culture, and the net result has been a cultural blending which has deeply stamped South America in music, dance, art and literature. So much so that in the deeper currents of thought a new race is envisioned in which the strong Negro and Indian element is frankly recognized.
     On the other hand, the economic trend is away from this. No South American country wishes to be regarded as "colored" in a world organized in industry and politics for white peoples. In diplomatic and social intercourse, usually with Europe, always with North America, South America suppresses color, and in this policy the Negroids usually consent and cooperate. A dark Brazilian might occupy a high office of state but he would never be ambassador to St. James. And even domestic industry using English and United States capital would tend to keep the black worker "in his place" and withhold authority from mulattoes. There are only occasional signs of revolt against this pattern of action on the part of blacks and mulattoes, although this may increase.
   The racial absorption in Brazil therefore is not simple and has not had altogether happy results. With the avoidance of racial friction and the open color bar which Brazil has accomplished, there has come the economic class line, when color combined with poverty has kept a large class of dark laborers in a depressed condition; and which consequently makes it unlikely that a Brazilian would care to boast of his African ancestry as openly as he would assert his descent from white Europeans. Unless, therefore, racial absorption in Brazil is going to be accompanied by economic emancipation and a real democracy of equals, the solution of the Brazilian problem of African and American cannot be really accomplished. Moreover such amalgamation, as many see, will not leave Brazil "white." Negro and Indian blood will produce a new race, undeniably "colored."
    In the West Indies the pattern again changes. Of the 13 million inhabitants, probably 12 millions are of Negro descent. This means that the so-called whites are largely mulattoes. In Cuba for instance, competent authorities maintain that 6o per cent are of Negro descent although the census admits less than 40 per cent..\Manifestly, the white minority cannot absorb the black majority of \Vest Indies. The partial absorption dating from the sixteenth century has established a powerful class of mulattoes who for the most part are distinctly white in mores and often white in color. Every economic and social incentive drives these folk to escape into the white race. It is this that leads the colored Dominican Republican to welcome Jews and bar black immigration.
    On the other hand, the blacks, both in culture and blood, dominate this beautiful, rich and intriguing part of the world and are held by the unyielding color bar especially of England and America. United States capital and English investment in Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, rule like tyrants, to establish color caste, keep down wages and deny labor the right to organize. Political power is mainly in the hands of the whites and the property-holding mulattoes. In Cuba and Puerto Rico where the dark proletariat has some power and is trying to exercise it, the whole power of property and foreign investment is holding them in check. 
   

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