The student, perplexed, realizing that from the earnestness of the café proprietor’s tone there was truth in what he said, appealed to Ray in face of the contradictory facts.
“You are both right,” Ray said to the student. “All the things you say about the Negro in the States are facts and what he says about the Negro’s progress is true. You see race prejudice over there drives the Negroes together to develop their own group life. American Negroes have their own schools, churches, newspapers, theaters, cabarets, restaurants, hotels. They work for the whites, but they have their own social group life, an intense, throbbing, vital thing in the midst of the army of whites milling around them. There is nothing like it in the West Indies nor in Africa, because there you don’t have a hundred-million-strong white pressure that just carries the Negro group along with it. Here in Europe you have more social liberties than Negroes have in America, but you have no warm group life. You need colored women for that. Women that can understand us as human beings and not as wild oversexed savages. And you haven’t any. The successful Negro in Europe always marries a white woman, and I have noticed in almost every case that it is a white woman inferior to himself in brains and physique. The energy of such a Negro is lost to his race and goes to build up some decaying white family.”
“But look at all the mulattoes you have in America,” said the student. “White men are continually going with colored women.”
“Because the colored women like it as much as the white men,” replied Ray.
“Ray!” exclaimed Goosey who had entered the café, “you are scandalous and beneath contempt.”
“That’s all right, Goosey. I know that the American Negro press says that American colored women have no protection from the lust and passion of white men on account of the Southern state laws prohibiting marriage between colored and white and I know that you believe that. But that is newspaper truth and no more real than the crackers shouting that white women live in fear and trembling of black rapists. The days of chivalry are stone dead, and the world today is too enlightened about sex to be fooled by white or black propaganda.
“In the West Indies, where there are no prohibitory laws, the Europeans have all the black and mulatto concubines they need. In Africa, too. Woman is woman all over the world, no matter what her color is. She is cast in a passive role and she worships the active success of man and rewards it with her body. The colored woman is no different from the white in this. If she is not inhibited by race feeling she’ll give herself to the white man because he stands for power and property. Property controls sex.
“When you understand that, Goosey, you’ll understand the meaning of the struggle between class and class, nation and nation, race and race. You’ll understand that society chases after power just as woman chases after property, because society is feminine. And you’ll see that the white races today are ahead of the colored because their women are emancipated, and that there is greater material advancement among those white nations whose women have the most freedom.
“Understand this and you will understand why the white race tries so hard to suppress the colored races. You’ll understand the root of the relation between colored women and white men and why white men will make love to colored women but will not marry them.”
“But white women marry colored men, all the same,” said Goosey. “White women feel better toward colored people than white men.”
“You’re a fool,” replied Ray. “White men are what their women make them. That’s plain enough to see in the South. White women hate Negroes because the colored women steal their men and so many of them are society wives in name only. You know what class of white women marry colored men.”
“There are Negroes in America who had their fortunes made by white women,” said Goosey.
“There are exceptions—white women with money who are fed up. But the majority are what I said a while ago. … Show me a white woman or man who can marry a Negro and belong to respectable society in London or New York or any place. I can understand these ignorant black men marrying broken-down white women because they are under the delusion that there is some superiority in the white skin that has suppressed and bossed it over them all their lives. But I can’t understand an intelligent race-conscious man doing it. Especially a man who is bellyaching about race rights. He is the one who should exercise a certain control and self-denial of his desires. Take Senghor and his comrades in propaganda for example. They are the bitterest and most humorless of propagandists and they are all married to white women. It is as if the experience has over-soured them. As if they thought it would bring them closer to the white race, only to realize too late that it couldn’t.
“Why marry, I ask? There are so many other ways of doing it. Europe can afford some of its excess women to successful Negroes
