The Negro Mind Reaches Out

Once upon a time in my younger years and in the dawn of this century I wrote: “The
problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” It was a pert and
singing phrase which I then liked and which since I have often rehearsed to my soul
and asked: how far is this prophecy or speculation? To-day in the last years of the century’s
first quarter, let us examine the matter again, especially in the memory of that
great event of these great years, the World War. Fruit of the bitter rivalries of economic
imperialism, the roots of that catastrophe were in Africa, deeply entwined at
bottom with the problems of the color line. And of the legacy left, the problems the
world inherits hold the same fatal seed; world dissension and catastrophe still lurk in
the unsolved problems of race relations. What then is the world view that the consideration of this question offers?
Most men would agree that our present problem of problems was not the Color
Problem, but what we call Labor, the problem of allocating work and income in the
tremendous and increasingly intricate world-embracing industrial machine that our
civilization has built. But despite our concern and good will, is it not possible that in its consideration our research is not directed to the vital spots geographically? Our good
will is too often confined to that labor which we see and feel and exercise around us,
rather than directed to the periphery of the vast circle, where unseen and inarticulate,
the determining factors are at work. And may not the continual baffling of our effort
and failure of our formula be due to just such mistakes? Modern imperialism and modern
industrialism are one and the same system; root and branch of the same tree. The
race problem is the other side of the labor problem; and the black man’s burden is the
white man’s burden. At least it will be of absorbing interest, to step within these distant
world shadows, and, looking backward, to view the European and white American
labor problem from this wide perspective, remembering always that empire is the
heavy hand of capital abroad.
With nearly every great European empire to-day walks its dark colonial shadow,
while over all Europe there stretches the yellow shadow of Asia that lies across the
world. One might indeed read the riddle of Europe by making its present plight a
matter of colonial shadows, speculating on what might happen if Europe became
suddenly shadowless – if Asia and Africa and the islands were cut permanently away.
At any rate here is a field of inquiry, of likening and contrasting each land and its
far-off shadow.