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 is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads 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 obligato of tune and tone, saying: 

“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, O Israel!” These nations are not white!

After the more comic manifestations and the chilling of generous enthusiasm come subtler, darker deeds.  Everything considered, the title to the universe claimed by White Folk is faulty.  It ought, at least, to look plausible.  How easy, then, by emphasis and omission to make children believe that every great soul the world ever saw was a white man’s soul; that every great thought the world ever knew was a white man’s thought; that every great deed the world ever did was a white man’s deed; that every great dream the world ever sang was a white man’s dream.  In fine, that if from the world were dropped everything that could not fairly be attributed to White Folk, the world would, if anything, be even greater, truer, better than now.  And if all this be a lie, is it not a lie in a great cause?