personal repulsiveness is a much more significant force than
it is in the South. Assuredly there would be no race problem, anywhere,
were there no contact with others unlike ourselves! The unlikeness
of the unlike is everywhere its indispensable foundation. But we get
nowhither unless we carefully distinguish between the foundation of the
problem and the problem itself. There is nothing in the unlikeness of
the unlike that is necessarily problematical; it may be simply accepted
and dealt with as a fact, like any other fact. The problem arises only
when the people of one race are minded to adopt and act upon some policy
more or less oppressive or repressive in dealing with the people of
another race. In the absence of some such policy, there has never been a
race problem since the world began. It is the existence of such a
policy become traditional, and supported by immovable conviction, which
constitutes the race problem of the Southern states.

There was an immensely tragic race problem distressing the South fifty
years ago; but who will suggest that it was the problem of "living with
human beings who are not like us?" The problem then was, clearly, how to
make good a certain conviction concerning the unlike, how to maintain a
certain policy in dealing with them. What else is it today? The problem,
How to maintain the institution of chattel slavery, ceased to be at
Appomattox; the problem, How to maintain the social, industrial, and
civic inferiority of the descendants of chattel slaves, succeeded it,
and is the race problem of the South at the present time. There is no
other.

Whether the policy adopted by the white South, and supported, as I have
said, by immovable conviction, is expedient or inexpedient, wise or
unwise, righteous or unrighteous, these are questions which I have not
sought to answer one way or another in this article. Perhaps they cannot
be answered at all in our time. Certain is it, that their only real and
satisfactory answer will be many years ahead of the present generation.

In the mean time, nothing could be more unwarranted, than to suppose
that the race problem of one section of this country is peculiar to
that section, because its white inhabitants are themselves in some
sense peculiar; because they are peculiarly prejudiced, because they
are peculiarly behind the hour which the high clock of civilization has
struck. Remove the white inhabitants of the South, give their place to
the white