ck
people in the South, their mere personal presence is so far from being
responsible for our race problem, that the South would not seem Southern
without them, as it would not without its crape myrtles, and live-oaks,
and magnolias, its cotton and its sugar-cane!

It is very easy to go astray in regard to the matter of personal
aversion toward the members of alien races, to magnify greatly the
reality and importance of it. What seems race-aversion is frequently
something else, namely, revulsion aroused by the presence of the
strange, the unusual, the uncanny, the not-understood. Such revulsion is
aroused, not only by the members of alien races, alien and unfamiliar,
but as certainly by strange animals of not more terrifying appearance
than the well-loved cow and horse; and it would be aroused as really
and as painfully, doubtless, by the sudden proximity of one of Milton's
archangels. It was not necessarily race-aversion which made Emerson,
and may have made many another Concord philosopher, uncomfortable in the
presence of a Negro, any more than it is race-aversion which makes the
Fifth Avenue boy run from the gentle farmyard cow; any more than it is
race-aversion which would make me uncomfortable in the presence of Li
Hung Chang. The Negro, simply, it may be, was a mystery to Emerson, as
the farmyard cow is a mystery to the Fifth Avenue boy, as the Chinaman
is a mystery to me.

The Negro is NOT a mystery to people whom he has nursed and waited on,
whose language he has spoken, whose ways, good and bad, he has copied
for generations; and his personal presence does not render them
uncomfortable, not, at any rate, uncomfortable enough to beget the sense
of a burden or a problem.

It may be very difficult for Northern readers, to whom the Negro is in
reality a stranger, a foreigner, to appreciate fully the force of what
has just been said; but appreciated by them it must be, or they can
never hope to realize the innermost meaning of the race problem in the
South.

So much for what the race problem is not. Let me without further delay
state what it is. The foundation of it, true or false, is the white
man's conviction that the Negro as a race, and as an individual, is his
inferior: not human in the sense that he is human, not entitled to
the exercise of human rights in the sense that he is entitled to the
exercise of them. The problem itself, the essence of it, the heart
of it, is the white man's determination to m