proclaiming It he evokes imitation in his victim. Hence the peculiar oppressiveness of recently oppressed peoples in Europe. Hence the Negro who desires to be an imitation white man. Hence again the determination to suppress the Negro who attempts to imitate the white man. For so long as the status of the white man is in every way superior to that of the colored, the advancement of the colored man can mean nothing but an attempt to share the white man's social privileges. From this arises that terrible confusion between the idea of social equality and the idea of social mixture.
Since permanent degradation is unthinkable, and amalgamation undesirable both for blacks and whites, the ideal would seem to lie in what might be called race parallelism. Parallel lines may be equally long and equally straight; they do not join except in infinity, which is further away than anyone need worry about just now. We shall have to work out with the Negro a relationship which gives him complete access to all the machinery of our common civilization, and yet allows him to live so that no Negro need dream of a white heaven and of bleached angels. Pride of race will come to the Negro when a dark skin is no longer associated with poverty, ignorance, misery, terror and insult. When this pride arises every white man in America will be the happier for it. He will be able then, as he is not now, to enjoy the finest quality of civilized living—the fellowship of different men.
Whitestone, Long Island.
August 26, 1919.
