A mere statement: "This
is the custom" settles the matter finally. There is no necessity,
nor passing thought even, of finding any logical cause. The
matter was worked out in the mental evolution of remote
ancestors. At that time, perhaps, insurgent and Standpatter,
Conservative and Radical fought out the questions of the day, and
the Muckrakers swung by their tails and chattered about it.
Those days are all long since over. The questions of the world
are settled forever. The people have passed through the struggles
of their formative period to the ultimate highest perfection of
adjustment to material and spiritual environment of which they
were capable under the influence of their original racial force.
Parenthetically, it is now a question whether or not an added
impulse can be communicated from without. Such an impulse must
(a) unsettle all the old beliefs, (b) inspire an era of
skepticism, (c) reintroduce the old struggle of ideas between the
Insurgent and the Standpatter, and Radical and the Conservative,
(d) in the meantime furnish, from the older civilization,
materials, both in the thought-world and in the object-world, for
building slowly a new set of customs more closely approximating
those we are building for ourselves. This is a longer and slower
and more complicated affair than teaching the native to wear
clothes and sing hymns; or to build houses and drink gin; but it
is what must be accomplished step by step before the African
peoples are really civilized. I, personally, do not think it can
be done.
Now having, a hundred thousand years or so ago, worked out the
highest good of the human race, according to them, what must they
say to themselves and what must their attitude be when the white
man has come and has unrolled his carpet of wonderful tricks? The
dilemma is evident. Either we, as black men, must admit that our
hundred-thousand-year-old ideas as to what constitutes the
highest type of human relation to environment is all wrong, or
else we must evolve a new attitude toward this new phenomena. It
is human nature to do the latter. Therefore the native has not
abandoned his old gods; nor has he adopted a new. He still
believes firmly that his way is the best way of doing things, but
he acknowledges the Superman.
To the Superman, with all races, anything is possible. Only our
Superman is an idea, and ideal. The native has his Superman
before him in the actual flesh.
We will suppose that our own Superman has appeared among us,
accomplishing things that apparantly contravene all our
established tenets of skill, of intellect, of possibility. It
will be readily acknowledged that such an individual would at
first create some astonishment. He wanders into a crowded hotel
lobby, let us say, evidently with the desire of going to the bar.
Instead of pushing laboriously through the crowd, he floats just
above their heads, gets his drink, and floats out again!
