The Colour Bar
[The Spectator does not necessarily agree with all the views of the writers contributing to this series on the Colour Bar. Our object in publishing the series is to attempt some explanation of why the Colour Bar exists, and to emphasize the importance of the problem for the British Commonwealth. Next week Professor G. Elliot Smith will discuss Sir Arthur Keith's Rectorial Address at Aberdeen University. Our correspondence columns are open at all times to letters which seem to us to add to the interest of this discussion ; and such correspondence is cordially invited.—En. Spectator.]
The Administrative Aspect of the Colour Bar
BY LORD LUGARD.
FROM time to time during the past thirty years, some acknowledged, authority has been heard to declare that " The Colour Question " was the outstanding problem of the twentieth century, but not until certain events in the Great War and more recent happenings in India and South Africa—no less than in China, in the Dutch East Indies and in French Indo-China—had begun to demon- strate that the warning could no longer pass unheeded, has Western civilization awoken to the gravity and the insistence of the problem.
It is just ten years since the Spectator opened its columns to a discussion of the subject. The American writer, Dr. Lothrop Stoddard, in his book, The Rising Tide of Colour, had dealt with the subject largely from the biological aspect, and he drew alarming conclusions from the transmission of hereditary characteristics of opposing racial types. Mr. S. H. Oldham (Christianity and The Race Problem), on the other hand, laid emphasis rather on sociological, economic, and environmental causes than on hereditary instincts. A striking brochure on the subject in 1924 by Mr. Basil Mathews (The Clash of Colour) formed the basis of half a dozen articles in the Review of the Churches in the following April, to which Sir Valentine Chiral and Dr. Stoddard contributed.
To the exhaustive examination of the subject contained in these books and articles (including a separate analysis by Dr. J. W. Gregory) there is little that is new to be added, except perhaps to suggest that in the opinions expressed there seems to be some little confusion of thought between two distinct, though closely related, aspects of the subject—viz., the question of racial aver- sions based on colour—be it instinctive or acquired—and the question of racial discrimination which ostensibly, and often unconsciously, adopts colour as its line of cleavage.
The term " Colour Bar " obviously applies not so much to the feeling of aloofness or even repugnance, which beyond question exists very widely, though by no means universally, in regard to intimate social, especially sexual, relations between persons of different colour, as to the reluctance of the politically dominant races to share their privileges of place and power with the subject races. There is indeed nothing inherently impossible in main- taining an extreme colour bar policy without any strong feeling of colour prejudice. The colour bar legislation proposed by General Hertzog in the Union of South Africa is frankly designed to exclude the subject races from the exercise of political power, and witnesses before the Joint Committee now sitting on the East African question have testified in the same breath to their sym- pathy with and their attachment to the native Africans, and to their determination to uphold the racial domina- tion of the Whites. Whether it is consonant with natural justice that a small White minority should legislate for a vastly preponderant Black majority, on matters in which the interests of the two may be divergent, is not primarily a matter of colour. The claim of the White race for the concentration-of political power in its own hands is based, we are told, on a higher civilization, and a mature political experience, and not on colour prejudice.
In the Union of South Africa, and I believe to some extent in the Southern States of North America, the claim is wider, and extends quite logically to the economic sphere, for the "White man then feels the necessity of safe- guarding, not only his political power, but also his mono- poly of skilled labour lest he be submerged not only by the votes of an enfranchised proletariat, but also by the skill of the African in handicraft, and his ability to accept a wage upon which a White man would starve. This very ability to support a lower standard of living is itself often confounded with colour prejudice, though in reality the racial hostility which it creates is based on purely eco- nomic causes and the instinct of self-preservation.
Fear is, indeed, the root cause of colour bar discrimina- tion. The White man argues that it is due to his ability to apply scientific knowledge, to his inventions and his capacity for organization and the adaptation of new pro- cesses in industry, that the plane of material civilization has been raised, to the benefit of the subject races, and he resents and fears their claim to utilize his methods and knowledge against himself.
The pages of history afford endless examples of the methods to which the dominant race has resorted to maintain its supremacy, whether by the aid of religious sanctions, as in the Brahminical caste system, or by purely secular methods, such as the exclusive trade unions of South Africa or the prohibition of education to their slaves by the early Virginian planters. To such discrimination the British ideal is steadfastly opposed, though in practice we may sometimes have fallen short of it. The principle defined by Mr. Rhodes as " Equal rights for all civilized men " was accepted, and endorsed on behalf of the British Government by Mr. Churchill when Under-Secretary for the Colonies. The increasing recognition of the policy of building on Native foundations and of encouraging the people to manage their own affairs is probably the best possible antidote to racial unrest.
Though the dominant race may be actuated by mixed motives of self-interest in maintaining a monopoly of political power, or of self-preservation in the face of over- whelming numbers on a lower or a different plane of civilization, or even by altruistic ideals of trusteeship and guidance for peoples not yet able to stand alone, colour affords a convenient line of demarcation and in varying degrees reinforces and accentuates the racial distinction.
On the other hand, the origin and predisposing causes of antipathies really based on difference of colour are difficult to define, nor do we know with any certainty to what extent they are reciprocal, or to what degree racial aversions exist between the different coloured races them- selves. Undoubtedly they are more pronounced among the Northern than the Southern or Latin races of Europe, and it would seem that the union between the latter and the coloured races is more prolific and the offspring com- pares favourably in, physique with that of the union with the Northern races.
Another proposition which will not I think be denied is that colours prejudice is intensified—and often origi- nated in those who previously were unaware of its exist- ence—by residence among the coloured races. This genuine colour-feeling is, as I have said, entirely com- patible with close and cordial association in the common affairs of life and with mutual good will, but it draws the line at physical contact and sexual intercourse, thOugh strange to say there is evidence that colour in isolated cases even in the " Nordic " races becomes a sexual attraction, and we are assured by an obviously well- informed writer in the Round Table that miscegenation— even of White women with Africans—is not only tolerated but encouraged in French West Africa.
Speaking generally, however; it is I think true to say that it is in this aspect that the real colour-feeling finds expression, not only as between the White and coloured races, but between the Black, Brown, and Yellow races inter le. It is the attempt to overstep this dearly defined line which leads to the horrible lynchings in the Southern States, of which Mr. Stephen Graham gives so ghastly a picture.* A decade ago, in the endeavour to demonstrate that this deep-seated aversion from social intimacy and physical contact between opposing types of the human species as distinguished by colour, is due to a natural law, or instinct, which no race need be ashamed to recognize, and does not preclude mutual esteem, I attempted to define the relation in words which the then President of the United States quoted with approval when on tour in the Southern States. " Here then (I suggested) is the true conception of the inter-relation of colour ; complete uniformity in ideals ; absolute equality in the paths of knowledge and culture ; equal opportunity for those who strive, equal admiration for those who achieve ; in matters social and racial a separate path, each pursuing his own inherited traditions, preserving his own race purity and race pride. Equality in things spiritual; agreed divergence in the physical and material."-i- On the other hand, let us recognize that unrest among peoples who are subject to the control of the White races is not primarily, a question of colour, but of race con- sciousness and of dissatisfaction due to political, economic, religious, or social causes which it is within the power of the dominant race to modify or remove. Chief among these is the imposition upon Asiatics and Africans of institutions, whether Governmental, Judicial, or Educa- tional, opposed to immemorial tradition, and out of harmony with inherited aptitudes. Policies of class- legislation and racial repression must, as Mr. Justice Rose-Innes and his distinguished co-signatories said in a recent letter to The Times, inevitably lead to disaster, in which difference in colour will lend an adventitious aid and bitterness.
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