They are complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that
toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me
more than the Souls of White Folk.
Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through
them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a
foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of
their thought and flesh of their language. Mine is not the
knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear
memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge that
which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist
of artisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the
back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their
thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes
them now embarrassed, now furious! They deny my right to
live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to them mere
bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet as they preach
and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at
rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go
twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever
stripped,-ugly, human.
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's
peoples is a very modern thing,-a nineteenth and twentieth
century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have
laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Age regarded skin
color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth
century we were hammering our national manikins into one,
great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color
and race even more than birth. Today we have changed all
that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has
discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!
This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone to curious acts;
even the sweeter souls of the dominant world
as they discourse with me on weather, weal, and woe are continually
playing above their actual words an obligation of tune.

"My poor, un-white thing! Weep not nor rage. I know, too
well, that the curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is
not for me to say, but be brave! Do your work in your lowly
sphere, praying the good Lord that into heaven above, where
all is love, you may, one day, be born-white!"
I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly:
"But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire
it?" Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I
am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of
the earth forever and ever, Amen!
Now what is the effect on a man or a nation when it comes
passionately to believe such an extraordinary dictum as this?
That nations are coming to believe it is manifest daily. Wave
on wave, each with increasing virulence, is dashing this new
religion of whiteness on the shores of our time. Its first effects
are funny: the strut of the Southerner, the arrogance of the
Englishman amuck, the whoop of the hoodlum who vicariously
leads your mob. Next it appears dampening generous
enthusiasm in what we once counted glorious; to free the
slave is discovered to be tolerable only in so far as it freed his
master! Do we sense somnolent writhings in black Africa or
angry groans in India or triumphant banzais in Japan? "To
your tents, 0 Israel!" These nations are not white

Such sense of duty assumes two things: a real possession
of the heritage and its frank appreciation by the humbleborn.
So long, then, as humble black folk, voluble with
thanks, receive barrels of old clothes from lordly and generous
whites, there is much mental peace and moral satisfaction.
But when the black man begins to dispute the white man's
title to certain alleged bequests of the Fathers in wage and
position, authority and training; and when his attitude toward
charity is sullen anger rather than humble jollity; when
he insists on his human right to swagger and swear and
waste,-then the spell is suddenly broken and the philanthropist
is ready to believe that Blacks are impudent, that
the South is right, and that Japan wants to fight America.
After this the descent to Hell is easy. On the pale, white
faces which the great billows whirl upward to my tower I see
again and again, often and still more often, a writing of human
hatred, a deep and passionate hatred, vast by the very
vagueness of its expressions. Down through the green waters,
on the bottom of the world, where men move to and fro, I
have seen a man-an educated gentleman-grow livid with
anger because a little, silent, black woman was sitting by herself
in a Pullman car. He was a white man. I have seen a
great, grown man curse a little child, who had wandered into
the wrong waiting-room, searching for its mother: "Here,
you damned black--" He was white. In Central Park I have
seen the upper lip of a quiet, peaceful man curl back in a
tigerish snarl of rage because black folk rode by in a motor
car. He was a white man. We have seen, you and I, city after
city drunk and furious with ungovernable lust of blood; mad
with murder, destroying, killing, and cursing; torturing human
victims because somebody accused of crime happened to
be of the same color as the mob's innocent victims and because
that color was not white! We have seen,-Merciful
God! in these wild days and in the name of Civilization, Justice,
and Motherhood,-what have we not seen, right here in
America, of orgy, cruelty, barbarism, and murder done to
men and women of African descent.

war,-it is but the beginning!
We see Europe's greatest sin precisely where we found Africa's
and Asia's,-in human hatred, the despising of men;
with this difference, however: Europe has the awful lesson of
the past before her, has the splendid results of widened areas
of tolerance, sympathy, and love among men, and she faces a
greater, an infinitely greater, world of men than any preceding
civilization ever faced.
It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on
herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral
protagonist in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for
this role. For two or more centuries America has marched
proudly in the van of human hatred,-making bonfires of human
flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the
insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike,-rather a
great religion, a world war-cry: Up white, down black; to
your tents, 0 white folk, and world war with black and particolored
mongrel beasts!
Instead of standing as a great example of the success of
democracy and the possibility of human brotherhood America
has taken her place as an awful example of its pitfalls and
failures, so far as black and brown and yellow peoples are
concerned. And this, too, in spite of the fact that there has
been no actual failure; the Indian is not dying out, the Japanese
and Chinese have not menaced the land, and the experiment
of the African ethnicity has resulted in the uplift of twelve
million people at a rate probably unparalleled in history. But
what of this? America, Land of Democracy, wanted to believe
in the failure of democracy so far as darker peoples were concerned.
Absolutely without excuse she established a caste system,
rushed into preparation for war, and conquered tropical
colonies. She stands today shoulder to shoulder with Europe
in Europe's worst sin against civilization. She aspires to sit
among the great nations who arbitrate the fate of "lesser
breeds without the law" and she is at times heartily ashamed
even of the large number of "new" white people whom her
democracy has admitted to place and power. Against this
surging forward of Irish and German, of Russian Jew, Slav
and "dago" her social bars have not availed against them
she can and does take her unflinching and immovable
stand, backed by this new public policy of Europe. She
trains her immigrants to this despising of "niggers" from the
day of their landing, and they carry and send the news back
to the submerged classes in the fatherlands.
All this I see and hear up in my tower, above the thunder
of the seven seas. From my narrowed windows I stare into
the night that looms beneath the cloud-swept stars. Eastward
and westward storms are breaking,-great, ugly whirlwinds
of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable.
I will not believe that all that was must be, that all
the shameful drama of the past must be done again today
before the sunlight sweeps the silver seas.
If I cry amid this roar of elemental forces, must my cry be
in vain, because it is but a cry,-a small and human cry amid
Promethean gloom?
Back beyond the world and swept by these wild, white
faces of the awful dead, why will this Soul of White Folk,this
modem Prometheus,-hang bound by his own binding,
tethered by a fable of the past? I hear his mighty cry reverberating
through the world, "I am white!" Well and good, 0
Prometheus, divine thief! Is not the world wide enough for
two colors, for many little shinings of the sun? Why, then,
devour your own vitals if I answer even as proudly, "I am
black!"