among us an
abstraction, a symbol--and a symbol not merely of his own race but of
the Orient and of that vague, ill-defined menace we sometimes refer to
as the "yellow peril." This not only determines to a very large extent
the attitude of the white world toward the yellow man but it determines
the attitude of the yellow man toward the white. It puts between the
races the invisible but very real gulf of self-consciousness.

There is another consideration. Peoples we know intimately we respect
and esteem. In our casual contact with aliens, however, it is the
offensive rather than the pleasing traits that impress us. These
impressions accumulate and reinforce natural prejudices. Where races are
distinguished by certain external marks, these furnish a permanent
physical substratum upon which and around which the irritations and
animosities, incidental to all human intercourse, tend to accumulate and
so gain strength and volume.

Assimilation, as the word is here used, brings with it a certain
borrowed significance which it carried over from physiology, where it is
employed to describe the process of nutrition. By a process of
nutrition, somewhat similar to the physiological one, we may conceive
alien peoples to be incorporated with, and made part of, the community
or state. Ordinarily assimilation goes on silently and unconsciously,
and only forces itself into popular conscience when there is some
interruption or disturbance of the process.

At the outset it may be said, then, that assimilation rarely becomes a
problem except in secondary groups. Admission to the primary group, that
is to say, the group in which relationships are direct and personal, as,
for example, in the family and in the tribe, makes assimilation
comparatively easy and almost inevitable.

The most striking illustration of this is the fact of domestic slavery.
Slavery has been, historically, the usual method by which peoples have
been incorporated into alien groups. When a member of an alien race is
adopted into the family as a servant or as a slave, and particularly
when that status is made hereditary, as it was in the case of the Negro
after his importation to America, assimilation followed rapidly and as a
matter of course.

It is difficult to conceive two races farther removed from each other in
temperament and tradition than the Anglo-Saxon and the Negro, and yet
the Negro in the southern states, particularly where he was adopted into
the hou