Now this is not an exaggerated picture of much that has recently been printed in newspaper and magazine, and does it not make us feel the paradox that if we are to judge the Negro fairly, we must not judge him at all, so little are we temperamentally capable of meeting the first requirement?
"My brother Saxons," says Matthew Arnold, "have a terrible way with them of wanting to improve everything but themselves off the face of the earth." And he adds, "I have no such passion for finding nothing but myself everywhere." Among our American writers a few, like Arnold, do not care to find only themselves everywhere, and these have told us a different story of the American Negro. They are poets and writers of fiction, men and women who are happy in meeting and appreciating different types of human beings.[3] If these writers were to instruct us, they would say that we must individualize more when we think of the black people about us, must differentiate. That, too, we must remember that when we pass judgment, we need to know whether our own standard is the best, whether we may not have something to learn from the standards of others. Supposing Ezekiel is deliberate and slow to make changes or to take risks; are we who are "acceleration mad," who acquire heart disease hustling to catch trains, who mortgage our farms to buy automobiles, who seek continually new sensations, really better than he? Is it not a matter of difference, just as we may each place in different order our desires, the one choosing struggle for power and the accumulation of wealth, the other preferring serenity and pleasure in the immediate present? And lastly, after having praised our own virtues and our own ideals, must we not beware that we do not blame the Negro when he adopts them, that we do not turn upon him and fiercely demand only servile virtues, the virtues that make him useful not to himself but to us?[4]
No one can talk for long of the Negro in America without propounding the all-embracing question, What will become of him, what will be the outcome of all this racial controversy? It is a daring person who attempts to answer. We, who have studied the Negro in New York, may perhaps venture to predict a little regarding his future in this city, his possible status in the later years of the century; whether he will lose in opportunity and social position, or whether he will advance in his struggle to be a man.
