on bill, a
measure designed to prohibit sexual cohabitation between white persons
and Negroes; to be specific, between white men and Negro women. But
there was no inconsistency whatever in the defeat of that bill. In all
times and places, the status of that portion of the female population,
Lecky's martyred "priestesses of humanity," whose existence men have
demanded for the gratification of unlawful passion, has been that of
social outcasts. They have no rights that they can insist upon; they
are simply privileged to exist by society's permission, and may be
any moment legislated out of their vocation. Hence the defeat of an
anti-miscegenation measure by Southern legislators cannot be
construed as a failure on their part to live up to their conviction
of race-superiority. It must be construed, rather, as legislative
unwillingness to restrict the white man's liberty; to dictate by statute
the kind of social outcast which he may use as a mere means to the
gratification of his passion. To concede to Negro women the status of
a degraded and proscribed class, is not in any sense to overlook or
obscure their racial inferiority, but on the contrary, it may be, to
emphasize it. Precisely the same principle, in a word, compasses the
defeat of an anti-miscegenation bill which would compass the defeat of a
measure to prohibit Negro servants from occupying seats in Pullman cars.

At the risk of reiteration, I must in concluding this article take sharp
issue with the view of a recent very able writer, who asks the question,
"What, essentially, is the Race Problem?" and answers it thus: "The race
problem is the problem of living with human beings who are not like us,
whether they are in our estimation our 'superiors' or inferiors,
whether they have kinky hair or pigtails, whether they are slant-eyed,
hook-nosed, or thick-lipped. In its essence, it is the same problem,
magnified, which besets every neighborhood, even every family."

I have contended so far, and I here repeat, that the race problem is
essentially NOT what this writer declares it to be. It is emphatically
not, in the South, "the problem of living with human beings who are not
like us, whether they are in our estimation our superiors or inferiors."
It may be, it probably is, that in the North, where the Negro is largely
a stranger, a foreigner, very much to the same degree that the Chinese
are strangers and foreigners in the South; and where, consequently, the
Negro's