PREJUDICE is a state of mind. Some affect to believe that it is an innate passion parallel with instinct, and is therefore unalterable. Others maintain that it is a stimulated animosity modifiable by time, place and condition, and is on the same footing with other shallow obliterative feelings. But whatever the basis of race prejudice, whether natural or acquired, we do know certainly that it is a pressing, persistent fact, easily stimulated and appeased with difficulty. It forms a barrier between the races which is as real as the seas and as apparent as the mountains.
Like a two-edged sword, race prejudice cuts both ways. It weakens the energies and paralyzes the moral muscle of the white race; it stultifies the conscience and frustrates the normal workings of democracy and Christianity. It fosters a double standard of ethics, and leads to lawlessness, lynching, and all manner of national disgrace. The elements of the white race that are most thoroughly obsessed by this passion show the lowest average of intellectual, moral and spiritual achievement. The Ku Klux Klan spreads its virus through our democracy; Nordicism carries it to the ends of the earth. Its effects are nationally and internationally threatening, and the American people and the Nordic civilization of which they are a part must stop to consider whether in this evil fruit they are not nurturing the fatal seeds of world dissension and catastrophe.
But our present concern is mainly to describe prejudice as it affects the Negro. Here the harvest of prejudice is ripe for the sociologist's gleaning. The outstanding and all-inclusive effect of race prejudice on the Negro can be summed up in one word, segregation. This is but the outer embodiment of the inner feeling of the white race. Whatever the nature and origin of this attitude, it is well nigh universal in the scope of its operation. The watch word is "miscegenation"; the rallying cry is "social equality." The cunning propagandist knows how to play upon these alarms and to adjust their appeal to the varying moods of popular passion and prejudice as a skilled musician plays upon his favorite instrument. Until recently the Negro has been the victim, with little capacity to resist.
This attitude of the white race has decreed residential segregation. Several municipalities have sought to embody this feeling in restrictive ordinances. In their too hasty zeal they over-rode the reaches of the constitution and the law; Negroes, through the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, contested the constitutionality of these ordinances and won a unanimous decision from the Supreme Court. Yet the legal victory merely modified the details of procedure; it had little effect upon the actual fact of segregation, which operates as effectively without the law as within it, except as to the finality of its boundaries.
The most gigantic instance of racial segregation in the United States is seen in Harlem. There is no local law prescribing it. There does not have to be. And yet, under the normal operation of race prejudice, we find 200,000 Negroes shut in segregated areas as sharply marked as the aisles of a church. This is but an example of what it taking place in every city and center where the Negro resorts in great numbers. The recent tide of Northern migration has greatly emphasized this tendency. In Boston, New York Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Indianapolis and Chicago, the Negro contingent lives in wards and sections of wards which the politician and the real estate dealer know as well as the mariners know the depths and shallows of the seas.
We may then take Harlem as a fair specimen of the harvest of race prejudice throughout the United States. Here we have the largest Negro community in the world. It is a city within a city, a part of, and yet apart from the general life of greater New York. We need not stop here to dilate upon the inhumanity, the cruelty or the hardships of race prejudice. The outstanding fact and the consequences immediately flowing from it suffice for the present purpose.
These Negro communities are everywhere extending their boundaries without tending to any fixed limits we can now set. In Chicago the rapidly expanding boundary of the black belt precipitated the lamentable race riot. The issue is still the canse of race agitation in milder form in all parts of the country. The whites are trying to keep back the rising tide of black invasion into residential areas previously regarded as exclusively theirs. The negroes are pushing over the boundaries of racial restriction in quest of more room and better facilities. We may expect this minor border warfare to continue until the matter settles itself by custom, understanding, and acceptance. Thus it is that the sharp accentuation of race consciousness on the part of the white race is developing a counter-tendency on the part of the Negro. this is the first fruit of segregation.
If Negroes were indiscriminately interspersed among the white population of New York, race consciousness would weaken to the point of disappearance. Three hundred thousand Negroes intermingled among six million whites would be unnoticeable. But when segregated in two or three centers the African contingent becomes not only apparent, but impressive. Whenever people are thrown together they begin to think of their common interests. A common consciousness emerges which shortly expresses itself in organized endeavor. The Negro race as a whole has hitherto had a somewhat vague and indefinite collective consciousness stimulated in large part by stress of outside compulsion. But the race is too numerous, too wide-spread in territory and too diverse in interests to give this conscious edge. Harlem furnishes the needed pressure. The Garvey movement furnishes the most extreme focussing of this feeling. Marcus Garvey found in Harlem not only a mass of Negroes surrounded and overshadowed by whites, but also a considerable group of West Indians, who, in many ways, felt themselves isolated and circumscribed by the native Afro-Americans. Shrewdly enough he seized upon this group as the basis of his focal operation. He preached the impossibility of racial entente on the same soil and under the same political and social régime, and urged a racial hegira. His philosophy does not in this connection interest us. But he has shown to the world the possibility of focussing the racial mind, and of mobilizing racial resources about a formulated ideal.
Another fruit of prejudice is the direction which race effort and organization has been impelled to take; until recently the Negro has been thrown quite too much on the defensive. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People arose to cope with this situation on the basis of fight and protest. Their fundamental philosophy is based upon the belief that race prejudice is medicable by legal and judicial process. Their method is militant; their mood is optimistic. Equality is their goal; the elimination of prejudice their objective. The Urban League, on the other hand, represents the ameliorative method which hopes that in the long run smooth working relations will be effected on the basis of mutual forbearance and good will. Its main attack is local, urban urban and industrial. The Negro Sanhedrin, the most recent attempt at race organization, seeks to understand the nature and extent of race prejudice, and to work on the basis of this understanding. If it should turn out that race preudiÏ cannot be overcome by direct attack and opposition, it may possibly be circumvented by building independently where independence is necessary, and by cooperation where cooperation is possible. It would at least garner the harvest of prejudice to the best advantage of the race. The Negro Sanhedrin seeks to find the common denominator of racial ills, and would federate into one effective effort the scattered energies which are so largely wasted by friction and cross purpose. As a matter of fact, the race as a whole had never hitherto seriously essayed collective handling of the racial situation as a whole. There have been innumerable attempts at dealing with special features along local, religious, political and economic lines. But the integration of the race mind and the focalization of endeavor still await the fuller unfoldment of the workings of some such comprehensive movement as the Negro Sanhedrin. The twelve millions scattered throughout the length and breadth of the land are treated by a single formula so far as the white race is concerned. And yet the Negro has had to rely upon local and scattered effort to offset the solid line of racial exclusiveness with which he is confronted. He must seek concerted action to confront difliculties that are nationwide and race-deep.
Every minority and suppressed group seeks self-expression. Woodrow Wilson let off the lid of a new Pandora's box when he so eloquently preached this doctrine as the shibboleth of the war. The Negro seeks self-determination also. In Harlem he seeks political self-expression. He wants men of his own race to represent him in the city council, in the state legislature and in the national Congress. Wherever a political area is numerically dominated by members of the race, they will naturally seek a voice in political councils. Here again segregation is basic. If the Negro were thinly scattered throughout greater New York, he would be politically negligible. In Chicago, in the recent election, Negro candidates were successful for state Senate, Assembly and the municipal Bench, and the whole race rejoices. What is it that unites twelve million Negroes in jubilation over such successes but the uniting force of race prejudice?
Business is the last place in which prejudice shows itself, and it is in this field that its harvest is least manifest. Scattered throughout Harlem on practically every street corner are Jewish stores catering to the vast Negro constituency. The Jew makes the most acceptable merchant among Negroes because he knows how to reduce race prejudice to a minimum. In Harlem, as in every other large city, the Negro proprietor conducts mainly sumptuary establishments such as eating-houses, barber-shops, beauty parlors, pool rooms, and such places as cater immediately to the appetite or to the taste. The more substantial stores which require a larger exercise of the imagination, such as those dealing in dry goods, shoes, furniture, hardware and groceries, are usually in the hands of whites. Race prejudice will sooner done in the professions; but it awaits the time when Negro shall have developed the business aptitude to compete with the white dealer, who is shrewd enough to hold prejudice in restraint for the sake of trade.
The final outcome of race prejudice operating to establish and maintain Negro sections in New York and elsewhere must evidently be a self-sufficient Negro community, competent to cater to its own needs and necessities as well as to contribute its quota to the general industrial and economic life of the city as a whole. What then will be the form of race adjustment? Will the relationship of the two be characterized by amity or by enmity? We approach the issue with a mixed feeling of hopes and fears, but with our hopes triumphant over our fears. However bitter the fruit of the tree of prejudice may be, the Negro will eat thereof and thrive by the eating.