The result is that in writing of this, one of the most ancient, persistent, and widespread stocks of mankind, one faces astounding prejudice.  That which may be assumed as true of white men must be proven beyond peradventure if it relates to Negroes.  One who writes of the development of the Negro race must continually insist that he is writing of a normal human stock, and that whatever it is fair to predicate of the mass of human beings may be predicated of the Negro.  It is the silent refusal to do this which has led to so much false writing on Africa and of its inhabitants.  Take, for instance, the answer to the apparently simple question “What is a Negro?” We find the most extraordinary confusion of thought and difference of opinion.  There is a certain type in the minds of most people which, as David Livingstone said, can be found only in caricature and not in real life.  When scientists have tried to find an extreme type of black, ugly, and woolly-haired Negro, they have been compelled more and more to limit his home even in Africa.  At least nine-tenths of the African people do not at all conform to this type, and the typical Negro, after being denied a dwelling place in the Sudan, along the Nile, in East Central Africa, and in South Africa, was finally given a very small country between the Senegal and the Niger, and even there was found to give trace of many stocks.  As Winwood Reade says, “The typical Negro is a rare variety even among Negroes.”

As a matter of fact we cannot take such extreme and largely fanciful stock as typifying that which we may fairly call the Negro race.  In the case of no other race is so narrow a definition attempted.  A “white” man may be of any color, size, or facial conformation and have endless variety of cranial measurement and physical characteristics.  A “yellow” man is perhaps an even vaguer conception.

In fact it is generally recognized to-day that no scientific definition of race is possible.  Differences, and striking differences, there are between men and groups of men, but they fade into each other so insensibly that we can only indicate the main divisions of men in broad outlines.  As Von Luschan says, “The question of the number of human races has quite lost its raison d’etre and has become a subject rather of philosophic speculation than of scientific research.  It is of no more importance now to know how many human races there are than to know how many angels can dance on the point of a needle.  Our aim now is to find out how ancient and primitive races developed from others and how races changed or evolved through migration and inter-breeding."[1]

The mulatto (using the term loosely to indicate either an intermediate type between white and black or a mingling of the two) is as typically African as the black man and cannot logically be included in the “white” race, especially when American usage includes the mulatto in the Negro race.