Christian Ethics by Georgia Harkness Part 2. Problems of Social Decision
Chapter 9: Christianity and the Race Problem
2. The causes of race prejudice
Race prejudice is a pervasive human phenomenon. Yet clearly it is not inborn. Colored and white children will play together when permitted to do so with full friendliness. On the street where I live there is also a
Negro physician and his fine family, and it is an attractive sight to see these children playing with the white children of the neighborhood.
Little Gentiles get along very well with the little Jews, or at least, as well as with other little Gentiles. It is when frightened parents erect prohibitions that the seeds of prejudice are planted. These in most cases are planted early and grow luxuriously.
By the time of adolescence, unless positive steps are taken to counteract it, segregation has emerged as a dominant pattern. So powerful are the drives toward conformity in high school and college years that it is not uncommon to find an intense and irrational cruelty toward those of other races. On the other hand, young people are more apt than their elders to break through the patterns of racial discrimination if there are
democratic and Christian influences upon their thinking and friendly group contacts are possible with those of another race. Where
segregation is removed in practice, its justification in principle rapidly subsides.
Confront an adult with the fact of his race prejudice, and he will do one of three things. He will deny it, he will admit it but admit also that it is irrational, or he will begin to rationalize his attitudes. The
rationalizations will usually take the form of words about being different from "our kind of people"; about inferior and superior races; about dirt and smells, or dishonesty and treachery and the "yellow peril"; about the danger of intermarriage; about how those of other races are "creeping up on us" and "don’t know their place." When sifted out these
rationalizations indicate that psychological, cultural, social,
nationalistic, and economic factors have been superimposed upon and confused with biological facts. As a result, we have a "color caste" of which the roots are not primarily to be found in biological differences, but with its evil effects irrationally transferred to great groups loosely designated as racial.
Race is a most ambiguous term, in which many national, geographical, cultural, and linguistic elements are mixed. Though race is sometimes correctly designated by basic biological types as Caucasian, Mongolian, or Negroid, in practice it is more often indicated by color, as black, white, red, yellow, or brown; or by nationality, as Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Mexican; or by geographical origin, as Oriental, Asiatic, European, African; or by a combination of ethnic, national, and geographical factors, as Nordic, Teutonic, Slavic, Latin American, French Canadian. A particular problem is posed by an attempt to
classify the Jews, for while they are a Semitic people who have had relatively little racial intermixture through the centuries, it is an ever- present problem as to whether the terms "Jew" and "Jewish" refer mainly to a race or to a religion.
Such adjectives give evidence that the race problem is never wholly a matter of biological distinction and stratification. Racial intermixtures have produced some very white-skinned Negroes with blue eyes and fair hair, yet the product of such a union remains a Negro.5 Race as the term is commonly used designates very nearly what the Germans call Volk — a group sharing a common cultural tradition, whether of achievement or servitude, with some measure of national, geographical, and biological affinity. Our language being what it is, we must use the term "race" in spite of its looseness.
Racial prejudice is, first of all, a psychological factor, rooting in collective egotism and pride and the pervasive human tendency to dislike the different. Though an ancient evil, it began to receive intellectual defense more recently than most evils, for it was only a century ago that Count Gobineau published in French his four-volume Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, in which he contended that color of skin determines mental and spiritual differences, and that
mixture of blood produces degeneracy and the fall of civilizations.
There was little, if any, racial discrimination in the early or medieval Church, the conditions of membership and fellowship being determined by faith in Jesus Christ and fidelity to the ordinances of his church.
"Race and color did not count in the early existence of the Protestant church. It was when modern Western imperialism began to explore and exploit the colored peoples of Africa, Asia and America that the
beginning of segregation and discrimination based on color and race was initiated." 6 Nevertheless, the roots of race prejudice are as old as the human race in the tendency to like those who are like oneself and to dislike those who for any reason, biological or cultural, are different.
Sometimes this psychological dislike of the different is intensified by proximity, again by separation. For example, it is not uncommon for American Christians to be quite concerned to send missionaries to the Negroes of Africa, and to admire greatly Albert Schweitzer’s service to them, and yet to stand rigidly for segregation in one’s own community or church. it is easy for persons in New England to be more "broad- minded" on the matter of racial integration than they would be if they lived in Mississippi. Nevertheless, proximity need not breed tension; it
can create fellowship. As we shall observe in noting what the Church can do about racial tension, one of the first steps in overcoming it is to bring people together, both physically and spiritually, so that what seems to be difference can be discovered to be kinship. This calls for a mingling of the races wherever this can be done without fresh outbreaks of animosity, and a sharing of the best in every cultural tradition.
Another form of rationalization, we noted, was the claim of "superior"
and "inferior" races. Count Gobineau’s contentions were widely believed until quite recently, and are still bandied about by those who never heard his name. Yet for the past two decades they have been scientifically exploded, and no reputable psychologist or anthropologist now accepts them. In 1938 the American Psychological Association went on record as declaring that there are no innate mental differences among races. In the same year the American Anthropological
Association asserted that there is no scientific basis for the biological inheritance of cultural traits, or of any traits implying racial inferiority.7 These judgments have been corroborated by medical science in
reference to the Negro blood bank by declaring that there is no
difference in the blood of colored and white persons, thus reinforcing the biblical word that God "hath made of one blood all nations of men"
(K.J.V.) to dwell together.
There are, of course, primitive and advanced groups even as there are stupid and highly capable individuals within every group. These discernible differences have lent support to the myth of natural
inequality. Informed opinion, however, agrees with Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma that there is a vicious circle at this point.8 Denied the cultural, educational, and economic advantages held by others,
underprivileged groups tend to remain in this status, as in America the restriction of Negroes to unskilled labor and meager educational
facilities has prevented their advancement to positions of leadership comparable with the more privileged. Increasingly in the world scene, as in America, it becomes evident that there are persons of extraordinary ability in every racial group, and the flowering of such talent awaits only the opportunity.
Cultural aversion to those of other races, whether in the form of depreciating their ability or in more offensive matters of name calling and the attaching of uncomplimentary labels, eventuates from the common tendency to commit the fallacy of hasty generalization. Some Negroes have grown up in circumstances where they have not learned to
bathe; hence it is assumed that all are dirty. Under economic pressure for many centuries, some Jews have developed a tendency to drive a sharp bargain; hence it is assumed that this is a universal racial trait.
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and China is held by the Communists;
hence nobody from the Orient is to be trusted! The internment and relocation of 110,000 Japanese on the Pacific Coast during the Second World War, not for any acts of disloyalty but simply through a suspicion based on racial identification, was less virulent in its effect than the Nazi destruction of the Jews but equally irrational. The outbreak of violence, intimidation, and the formation of "white citizens’ councils" that has come with the effort to desegregate the schools is a carry-over both from the Negro’s former status as a slave and from the assumption by white persons of the Negro’s general inferiority.
Such hasty generalization cannot be dealt with simply by demonstrating its irrationality. That it is irrational to judge whole peoples by mass standards of approval or disapproval rather than by individual status is certainly true, and needs to be constantly kept in mind. But since this type of judgment is basically a matter of feeling rather than reason, only a change of feeling can correct it. This is why the Christian faith, when it is made vital in terms of the equal worth of all persons to God, is a more effective solvent of ill feeling than argument, even as a sense of sin about race prejudice is a necessary prelude to repentance and change.
This cultural aversion appears in its most potent form in the fear of intermarriage. This is cited again and again as the all-sufficient reason why there must be no social intermingling of the different racial groups, and in particular why the young people must be kept apart not only in schools but in churches. About this two judgments must be passed. The first is that miscegenation ought not to be encouraged. Not because any biological inferiority results from a mixing of racial stocks, but because in the present state of society tensions are more often increased than abated by it, intermarriage is on the whole a step away from the solution of the race problem rather than toward it.
The second judgment is that there is no law of God against such intermarriage, and there ought to be none of the State. The World Council of Churches took a bold and true step when it declared:
While it can find in the Bible no clear justification or condemnation of intermarriage, but only a discussion of the duties of the faithful in
marriage with partners of other religions, it cannot approve any law against racial or ethnic intermarriage, for Christian marriage involves primarily a union of two individuals before God which goes beyond the jurisdiction of the state or of culture.
Some intermarriages have produced happy and effective Christian
homes; others have not. Here as elsewhere, hasty generalization must be avoided. What can be said with certainty is that the fear of
intermarriage, erected as a barrier to social fellowship, does harm and thwarts constructive effort far in excess of the actual justification of such a fear.
Ramifying through all these factors are economic rivalry and a fear of the loss of prestige or power through the influx or advancement of those of other racial stocks. This is evidenced by the fact that in industry, schools, and many other aspects of community life, a racial minority will be tolerated as long as it is a very minor minority. Let the numbers increase, or the positions other than those of unskilled manual labor be taken by those of another race, and there is an outbreak of objection which is easily stirred into violence.
Paradoxically, labor unions have gone further than any other group in America, not excepting the churches, to witness against racial injustice and try to secure equality of treatment. This is probably due chiefly to a certain sense of solidarity in injustice in protest against the dominant white, bourgeois, employing classes. Yet in both labor unions and churches, the official group pronouncements are on a higher level of insight than the actual practices of great numbers of their membership.
While the unions exercise a coercive power that the churches cannot, psychological reaction to economic rivalry follows a consistent pattern.
Wherever status is touched or income is jeopardized, the liberality of attitudes tends to shrink and rationalizations of discrimination to emerge.
Racial and cultural are mixed with national factors to make the term
"foreigner" one of opprobrium. This is evident in the tendency to speak of the Italians, Mexicans, French Canadians, or Irish as a separate racial stock, the degree of acceptance even in the "melting pot" of democratic America being by no means certain. In the Old Testament the Jews drew tight lines between themselves as the chosen people of God and their neighbors, in the New Testament the "Jews have no dealings with
Samaritans," and in every culture from the beginning of recorded history
to the present there are evidences of antipathy between the "in-grout and the "out-group." Robert P. Tristram Coffin in a whimsical but
nevertheless serious poem has represented the men of Ur and Akkad as telling why they do not like each other:
The Man of Akkad:
The men of Ur have heads too round.
They have to build themselves a mound To reach their god. Their toes turn in, They have no hair upon their chin.
They are not men. Their women wear The finer wool and build their hair High as towers in their pride,
The men go meekly dressed in hide.
They eat the fat part of their goats,
Their speech is low down in their throats.
To them the only proper word Is the thin edge of a sword.
The Man of Ur:
The men of Akkad have no faces.
Their curled beards are the nesting places Of the vermin and the flea.
They turn their toes out wantonly.
Their heads are squeezed too long for brains, They have to ask their gods for rains.
They beat their wives, they wear soft clothes, Their speech is high and through the nose, Their noses are as great as plows,
They eat the udders of their cows.
The language that will suit them best Is the arrow through the breast.
Ur and Akkad are dead sands, But they have sons in living lands.9
Thus far we have been noting the merging of race prejudice with cultural, economic, and political antipathies in the domestic scene. Yet no informed person needs to be told that racism is a world-wide
phenomenon and that in our interdependent world, racial antipathies anywhere endanger the security and welfare of persons everywhere.
Let us look, therefore, somewhat more briefly at the effects of race prejudice.