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    In most of these islands, one sees a frantic rush of black folk to be included in the privileged status of the whites. Most Negroes seek to accomplish this not so much by cultural progress as by breeding white at any social sacrifice. The cost of this to family life, normal contacts and political action is too great. Always you have left a poverty-stricken peasantry who can be deprived of real political power and social advantage because they are a depressed economic class, in addition to being Negroes. American capital comes in to strengthen and perpetuate this class and caste.
     In the case of Haiti one has the solution of separation: a black republic with a mulatto elite but with the African cultural background distinctly recognized. Instead of that being a solution, it makes Haiti at distinct disadvantage in her whole intercourse with the white world. She not only suffered immense economic injustice in her brave effort to make herself free from France, but she has suffered the same injustice in her intercourse with England, the United States and South America. She has become a sort of pariah of the Western Hemisphere, excluded largely from cultural contact, from economic cooperation and from recognition in the society of nations.
    In her inner social development Haiti occupies a peculiar place. Her land belongs primarily to her illiterate peasants which means that the weapon of land monopoly has been denied to Haitian aristocrats. The Haitian elite, therefore, has not become like the East Indian elite and the white overlords of Cuba, a rich oligarchy. On the other hand, they are, on the whole poor men but educated and cultured. If there can be built up between this leading aristocracy and the Haitian peasantry a nexus of leadership and direction, without slavery of labor which has in the past and in so many places characterized this leadership, Haiti may give to the world an extraordinary example of economic and social development. There are some signs of this: there are an educational movement among the younger educated people and an interest in Haitian folklore and African cultural survival which are encouraging. Perhaps no other part of the West Indies, or even of South America, has so rare a chance for social experiment.
    Haiti's prolonged and determined fight for recognition is one of the finest the modern world has seen. She rightly claims, as her greatest statesman said at the recent American Conference of National Commissions of Intellectual Cooperation at Havana, to be the center of French culture in America. Haitian art and literature is no small part of French art. But far more than this, Haiti represents Africa. Nearly all the chief African tribes have left their cultural imprint and this is being to a degree consciously developed. Alone of American peoples, Haiti is not ashamed to be black.
    In the United States our whole social advance has been continually frustrated and made paradoxical by our attitude toward Negroes. We declared all men free and equal when we owned 750,000 black slaves. We fought for a Union of white men and could get it only after using a half million black soldiers and laborers and emancipating four million slaves as a desperate but only possible bid for victory. We cannot today discuss democracy; we cannot carry through a draft for war; we cannot hold an election; we cannot establish hospitals; we cannot raise wages; or do any one of the thousand things that social uplift calls for, without running across a discrimination with regard to Negroes that either blocks or weakens our best efforts or convicts us as hypocrites. With all our tumult and shouting and pious rage against Hitler, we are perfectly aware that his race philosophy and methods are but extreme development and application of our own save that he is drawing his race lines in somewhat different places.
    It is ridiculous for an intelligent nation to allow this to go on. In order to preserve our intellectual honesty and ethical pretensions, this question must come in for frank discussion and decision. We cannot permit the Southern United States to be a social back-water in order to hold the Negro "in his place." Neither can we allow the West Indies and Central America to be made deliberate slums for the profits and vacation activities of the whites. In South America we have long pretended to see a possible solution in the gradual amalgamation of whites, Indians and blacks. But this amalgamation does not in our mind envisage any decrease of power and prestige among whites as compared with Indians, Negroes and mixed bloods; if it did and so far as it may, it will result in a new mulatto culture not a white. A white culture means an inclusion within the so-called white group of a considerable infiltration of dark blood, while at the same rime maintaining the economic exploitation and consequent political disfranchisement of dark blood as such. We have thus the spectacle of the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico and even Jamaica trying desperately and doggedly to be "white" in spite of the fact that the majority of the white group is of Negro or Indian descent. The success of such an effort spells prolonged poverty, disease and crime.
    Before everything today in our thought must stand the question of the induction of the Negro in the whole \Western Hemisphere into the democratic status. Democracy cannot have a rebirth in the world unless it firmly establishes itself in America. It cannot establish itself in America if the majority of Negroes in the United States are disfranchised despite intelligence and property; if property barriers and administrative oligarchy reduce Negroes to serfs in the West Indies; and if there is in South America no determined attempt through education and social uplift to make the Negro and the Indian and the mixed blood an intelligent, modern citizen. Denial of steps like these, is simply conspiracy of industrial exploitation, the rule of political oligarchies and the encouragement of future economic and race war.
    This problem of the African in America cannot be avoided. He is not dying out; and he is not likely to die out. His sudden physical absorption without planned social effort would result in a distinct lowering of the level o£ culture over wide areas. His slow absorption if accompanied by curbing and extinction of his genius is but worship of white domination. On the other hand, the attempt to raise culture among the whites and lower or even retard it among the Negroes and mulattoes, is a task inexcusable if not impossible.
    There is needed, therefore, in the Western world widespread consultation and planning, backed by united effort, first to decide just how far we are willing to treat Negroes and mulattoes as human beings, and if not, what tenable justification we have for denying it. If we are going to break down the barriers and at great cost in wealth and effort gradually raise this depressed class to the level of culture of which they are capable, we must frankly understand that this does not involve the continued domination of white world, in the future; in fact, it is the beginning of the end of such domination. There is no moral question facing the Americas of greater and more pressing importance than this question of racial tolerance in the Western Hemisphere.
    We are only deceiving ourselves if we try to think that the solution of the problem of these millions of black folk in America is going to cost us nothing. That simply by a polite waving of the hands and judicious propaganda the problem will disappear. No. If we want to realize humanit3' and world peace, this can only be done at the cost of so thorough and drastic an overturning of our inherited fixations and cultural patterns as will shake the Western World. In the first place it will call for a stern attitude toward Europe and especially the British Empire. The British Empire is predominantly colored: black, brown and yellow people form the overwhelming majority of its folk. It has never been a democratic organization and does not today propose to be one, because its white minority is supporting itself in luxury from the depressed wage and cheap raw material which they are extracting from colored folk through their organized and dominant military power and industrial technique.
    Not only has this got to be overthrown, but the means of its overthrowing is a firm conviction on the part of white America that a change in the present organization of the world is best for the world. And that only by recognition and conviction, and action following such conviction, can the world come to a place where it recognizes human beings as essentially equal and works toward the actual equality which may be accomplished.
    There are many people in the Americas and especially in the United States who would rather die than see any such world or equal white and colored people. They must be made to realize that this is the ultimate price which they are going to pay for the solution of the Negro problem. That otherwise they are setting before the world a vision of continual struggle, of continual recurrence of war after war, the end of which no living man can see.

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