Note 41 — PART I SOUTHWARD HO! (continued 2)

Another negro writer, Mr. W. H. Thomas (“The American Negro,” p. 295), is still more emphatic on this point: “That colour is the prime cause of American prejudice against negroes is not to be believed for one moment. Every shred of authentic evidence disproves conclusions so preposterous.” Mr. Thomas goes on to argue that the condition of “the low class of whites” in the South is “infinitely inferior to that of the lowest plantation negro.” Somewhat similar is the view of a clergyman who writes to me from Clyde, Kansas: “The problem is simply one of caste, and the negro is the extreme example of the labour caste. The problem is one of aristocracy whatever the colour of the plebeians.... Whatever its professions, the South is still pro-slavery. It wants the negro, but it wants him as a slave. And it would want to enslave any other race that came to take his place.” Both of these views seem to me so manifestly paradoxical and excessive that I venture to maintain the position taken up in the text. At the same time, I would not be understood to mean that the difficulty lies in colour alone, apart from the “other physical peculiarities.” On this point a gentleman in Port Arthur, Texas, writes to me: “I have long had a feeling that negrophobia is not a matter of colour.... No, the thing that rouses a blind disgust—not superficial, not capricious, but deep-rooted—is the body odour, the flat nose, the thick lips, the suggestion of ‘slobber’ in the voice and the mouth-movements, together with the unnatural hair and the animalism of bodily contour at many points. I have often thought that some accidental discovery may at any moment put it in the African’s power to remove the dark pigment from his skin: if this ever happens, it will, I think, be found that the real repulsiveness of the negroid type has been merely unveiled, not dissipated.”

Let me take this opportunity of saying that to the best of my belief the “body odour” of which we hear so much is mainly a superstition. The fact probably is that the negro ought to be at least as scrupulous in his ablutions as the white man—but often is not.