"Racism, Colonialism and World Peace"
Excerpt from Weltfish, Gene, “Racism, Colonialism and World Peace.” In Speaking of Peace: An Edited Report of the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, New York, March 25, 26 and 27, 1949, under the Auspices of the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, ed. Daniel S. Gillmor (New York: National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, 1949) (permission Reverend Neil A. Margetson)
Excerpted by Marianne Kinkel
Dr. Gene Weltfish is well known to most of us as co-author of the book, Races of Mankind. She is with the Department of Anthropology of Columbia University.
I
The road to peace lies along the path of the ever greater improvement in the lot of mankind. The basic idea that production is more important than people which largely underlies our present way of life is antithetical to this objective. Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in our dealings with colonial peoples. The special and most effective social device for carrying on repressive colonialism is the doctrine of racism. Under its banner a cold war has been carried on for years by the nations of Europe against the peoples of Africa, Asia, the South Seas and Latin America. By this means, the capacities for sympathy and understanding of the people in the home country for the peoples of these other nations are repressed and obscured.
[…]
Contrary to the common belief that racism arises from natural antagonism of different peoples for each other, a study by B. Lasker on Race Attitudes in Children shows that the child masters race stereotypes only by about the tenth year, along with geography, history and other abstract concepts.
As the United States, as the most powerful nation, becomes more and more deeply involved in the affairs of peoples all over the world, there is a deep concern about the racist policies and practices current in this country today.
Racism is more than a verbal doctrine; it is a non-employer and a killer. A detailed study* of anti-semitism in employment revealed that the main source of the refusal to employ comes from the executive level of large business companies, whose directives are then carried out in various ways, if necessary through subterfuges. Major offenders are banks, insurance companies, brokerage houses, utility companies; professional fields, accounting, advertising, engineering, law, chemical and allied industries, aircraft.
Not only employment, but also professional training is denied: There is hardly a professional school in the country that does not adhere to a "confidential quota" — 3 per cent, 5 per cent, 10 per cent of the entering class.
The United States Government is not blameless in this respect. In the Panama Canal Zone, which is under complete control of the executive branch of the government of the United States, Negro workers and their families suffer segregation and discrimination under the term "silver workers" — the term "gold" applying to the whites. These Negro workers of Panamanian and West Indian derivation are largely responsible for the building and maintenance of the Panama Canal. For the same work and skills they receive:
Comparable or worse discrimination applies to living conditions, schooling and recreation. Union organizers, trying to unite these people in their own interest have been jailed; T. M. Nolan was prosecuted by U. S. officials and sentenced to jail for 9 months. At the present, Joe Sachs, a young navy veteran, assigned to the local by the International Union (United Public Workers C. I. O.), was indicted and sentenced to 9 months at hard labor on a practically unheard of charge of criminal libel. He is still in prison.
A year ago when the United Public Workers campaigned for equal opportunity for "silver" workers to take civil service examinations in the zone, representatives of the A. F. of L. Metal Trades Council came to Washington to oppose this. Two official representatives of the A. F. of L. testified before a Senate Committee, warning that "silver" workers were "thieves" — that "they were known to sell secrets at $25 a secret." They warned against permitting "silver" workers to take examinations for "gold" jobs as a danger to national security. Panama Canal Zone Governor Mehaffy testified at the same hearing to the effect that not one single "silver" worker had ever been involved in any activity against the interests of the United States. For the record, he told of the unmarched [sic] loyalty of the "silver" workers through World War I and World War II. The case was won despite the A. F. of L. testimony.
As to educational differentials in the Panama Canal Zone, the government spends $51.59 per year for a Negro child's, and $160.21 for a white child's education. Zone Governor Francis K. Newcomer said that Panama's own administration is providing "such schooling as the Negroes could absorb." Governor Newcomer admitted he is not completely satisfied with conditions as they are. He is constantly trying to make improvements. He said he believed that "the way to make progress is within the frame work of Jim Crow segregation."
The gradualist state of mind is shared by many avowedly sympathetic people. However, to the Negro people of the United States whose life expectnacy [sic] is ten years less than the white population, and those years lived under discrimination and lynch terror, gradualism doesn't look so rosy. Each American Negro has but one life to give — but he does not want to give it for Jim Crow. The contrast is striking:
These conditions call for bold and clear action! It is not enough to "let your conscience be your guide"; relentless pressure for legislation and its enforcement are mandatory.
II
Now let us turn from the United States to another area, Africa, in which we are becoming very heavily involved — and point to the high cost of racism to the "discriminated" and to the callous withholding of effective human sympathies on the part of the discriminator: As a result of a terrible drought in Nyasaland, British East Africa, 2,500,000 people face famine and death through the destruction of root and maize crops which constitute their meager subsistence. In some districts the people were making a meal out of grass seeds and the bulbs of water lilies.
Concomitantly with this condition, at Victoria Falls last month, plans were being shaped up for the political unification of Southern Rhodesia (80,000 white; 1,500,000 native population); Northern Rhodesia (16,000 White; 1,500,000 native population); and Nyasaland with about 2,000 white population. The famine was not the subject of the discourse. Chairman of the Conference, Sir Miles Thomas (also Chairman of the British Overseas Airways Corporation) spoke of himself as being "a great believer in the value of the African as a contributor to the prosperity and security of the British Empire." At the same conference Sir Godfrey Huggins, Governor of Southern Rhodesia stated:
In this part of Africa, with our racial differences, we (italics mine) can have only pseudo-democracy for a very long time to come, and meanwhile we shall require an aristocracy in the best sense of the word, to see that justice and advancement be the lot of all.
Meanwhile "New Rhodesia" (September 12, 1947) a weekly journal published in Southern Rhodesia by Europeans, publishes extracts from "a plan for an African Development Company" that had been discussed in various influential quarters in Great Britain, America and France and other countries of Western Europe:
The whole Anglo-Saxon bloc must go into profit-making development; something which is going to develop entirely new sources of wealth, provide new markets, and smash right through the whole idea of reduction and restraint.
The solution is an African Development Company with a minimum capital of £5,000,000,000 (20 billion dollars) . . .
An African Development Company would have such resources and influence that it would get first priorities for everything it required. Of course, it would not interfere with the sovereignty of any territory; it would be a commercial concern — out for profits — large expanding profits.1
It is to be noted that the U. S. finance group, Stettinius Associates, is reported to be chief sponsor of the World Commerce Corporation, with representatives in forty-seven countries, subsidiaries in six and "unlimited capital resources among its potent U. S., British and Canadian backers."
An example of the degree of United States commercial involvement in Africa is to be found in an article in the New York Times (10/16/46) from Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The article mentions the building of large plants in that city by Goodyear Tire and Rubber, General Motors, Firestone, Ford Motors, Radiac (abrasives — subsidiary of A. P. de Sanno and Son of Phoenixville, Pa.) as well as proposed assembly plants for Studebaker and Heinz products.
In October, 1947, the New Union Goldfields mining group was transferred to Anglo-Transvaal Consolidated Investment Company, by which means the $20 million American Anglo-Transvaal Corporation established control of vast mining areas throughout South Africa and a substantial interest in over 100 industrial companies in the territory. In Egypt, six major industrial concerns, including Westinghouse, are establishing branches. In Ethiopia the Sinclair Oil Corporation has a monopoly over the potential oil resources of the entire country for some time. From Belgian Congo, French African colonies and Rhodesia as well as Liberia, similar data are at hand.
In addition to this type of direct interest, the United States exerts, through the Marshall Plan countries, an indirect economic and political rule of the African colonies. Speaking to a group of Liverpool business men recently, Lord Trefgarne, Chairman of the State-sponsored British Colonial Development Corporation (one of the original directors of the Barclay Overseas Development Corp. now providing outlets for private capital investments in Africa) said:
The United Kingdom has an annual dollar deficit of £500 million — that is the background against which the productivity of colonial territories must be viewed. If the colonies could raise their overall productivity during the next ten years by £200 million per annum, that indeed would be a mercy twice-blessed . . . The reason why we look to the colonies is that their products — food and raw materials are more acceptable to the U. S. than manufactured goods . . . Thanks to tin, rubber, cocoa, the colonial territories over all are playing a good part in the dollar-sterling balance — obviously, therefore, it is sound policy to aim at greatly increased exports of colonial products.
In 1947 U. S. imports of coffee alone amounted to more than three times the value of all British manufactured imports. In the same year, the U. S. imported $152 million worth of cocoa, largely from British West Africa. The way in which these materials were to be supplied was written into the E. R. P. According to the State Department, the Marshall Plan countries would be expected to supply this country with certain required raw materials (tin, industrial diamonds, rubber, quinine, etc.) "from within their own territory or that of their colonies, territories or dependencies — under an aggressive plan of exploration, development and expansion of productive facilities." Since the European nations cannot accomplish this in their present condition, loans are offered by the U. S. which the borrower lacking dollars can repay in further raw materials. Meanwhile, the European powers, looking to the colonies for their own recovery, must squeeze a considerable surplus over and above what is drained off to the U. S. out of the colonies. Sir John Strachey confirmed this in a report to the British Cabinet:
Our national position is really too grave to warrant any indulgence in our particular opinions on the methods of overseas development. By one means or another, by hook or by crook, the development of primary productions of all sorts in the colonial territories and dependent areas in the commonwealth in far more abundant quantities than exist today is, it is hardly too much to say, a life and death matter for the economy of the country.
With a territory that promises to save two continents, what is the dividend of the African worker? The Trusteeship Council's Visiting Mission to East Africa reports: that a recruiting system very much like slave trading is practiced in Tanganyika; wages for unskilled farm labor at a dollar a month; British laws in the territory allow extraction of forced labor from "able-bodied males between the ages of 18 and 45" for a 60 day period in any one year. These laws permit flogging of any worker over 16 years of age who uses abusive or insulting language to his employer "calculated to provoke a breach of peace", with an additional penalty of a fine "not exceeding the amount of half a month's wages or a month's imprisonment". Workers over 16 who quit their jobs "with intent not to return thereto" may be fined up to $10 or jailed 3 months. Tanganyika has 5,250,000 Africans, 34,000 Asians and 10,000 Europeans.
Some 104,277 workers in the European-owned plantations receive an average wage of about 10 cents a day for unskilled labor; 14 cents a day for semiskilled.
For the year ending June 30, 1948, the Company's trading profit was over 50 per cent higher than for the previous year. The increase was in part due to increase in the price of sisal. The Company's chairman added, however: "We can in fact congratulate ourselves (and the Labor Bureau . . .) on having attained a labor force adequate at least in numbers if not yet in skill, and the result has begun to be reflected in our production." The U. S. is currently importing $4 million worth of sisal from Tanganyika.
For criticism of inaction regarding labor and political grievances newspaper editors are fined, jailed or deported. From Uganda in a petition to the U. N. General Assembly December 7, 1948, Mr. Mulumba, head of the Bataka (Elders of the People) organization: "Most of the African news editors (in Uganda) are flung into jail for publishing anything that protests against or criticizes the British Uganda Government.” He named 5 editors sentenced to imprisonment for periods of from 3 months to 18 months.
The President of Liberia, it is reported, has asked the Legislature for power to deport Mr. C. Frederick Taylor, a naturalized Liberian citizen and owner and editor of "The African Nationalist" published in Monrovia. This newspaper in several issues has carried criticism of U. S. plans for the establishment of a military base at the port of Monrovia and also of the terms under which the Liberia Company, organized by Edward R. Stettinius Jr., has acquired authority over virtually the whole economy of Liberia. During construction of the port, the workers struck twice for an increase in their wage of 25 cents a day. The strikers were put down when U. S. naval officers with drawn pistols ordered the men back to work.
In all this is the underlying viewpoint that production is an end in itself and that raw materials are the means to its achievement, but the most essential part of the equation is left out: the people who work the raw materials, their wants, their rights, their needs and their power. If the racist-tainted mind in the U. S., and in the colonial countries, believes that the colonial peoples do not see this error, he is mistaken. There is in some colonial peoples a certain refinement of mind that is foreign to our Western civilization.
Observe, for instance, the following communication from the Gold Coast, a British West African colony, dated January 14, 1949, where an incipient revolt was crushed just a year ago:
There is much anxiety among the people of the Gold Coast on account of the large number of British troops being drafted into this country. It has also been noticed that British Civil Servants and Europeans here are being supplied with revolvers and rifles. There is no war on, nor has this country been declared a base for British military manoeuvers.
It is to our everlasting shame that the U. S. General Assembly in 1946 failed to reaffirm the resolution on discrimination against Indians in South Africa, due largely to the influence of the United States delegation. In a speech to the General Assembly just before the vote was taken Madam Pandit, leader of the Indian delegation, facing the American delegation said that the United States by virtue of its own "brave breaking away from colonial domination represented a source of inspiration to peoples who cherish freedom and equality . . . Today the United States alone of all nations of the world is in a position to feed, clothe, and rehabilitate those who are in need. The United States has stretched out its hands to aid the distressed millions of people in Europe . . . But man does not live by bread alone; the spirit, too, must be fed. There are millions of people in the world whose spirit has been starved by the denial of elementary human rights, whose hunger for food and material needs, great as it is, is not greater than their yearning for a place of honor and equality in the world. To them also, the United States owes an obligation."
The necessity for developing the underdeveloped areas of the world cannot be denied. That the problem is a vast and complex one is also clear. Nevertheless, no resort to mythology, racist or other, will either solve the problem, or even delay the pressure of the human need. To point the finger all around the world, wherever people seek thir [sic] human rights, and shout communism will aggravate rather than mitigate the condition.
It is clear that the Americans bear an enormous responsibility to preserve world peace. We must use the gifts of science, telegraph, telephone, and postal, train, jeep and aeroplane, and turn this country into a vast town hall to tell our representatives in the Nation, the State and in the City, that as our employees, we want the job done our way — not the Pentagon, Stettinius, Westinghouse way.
We want peace and trade on a fair basis with all countries, — with sincere and genuine negotiations through the United Nations. We do not want the largest peace time draft in history — ten times as large as in 1939 — 2,000,000 young men, six out of ten of them in their teens. We want these young men to remain in the United States — in the words of Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast "to keep our youth at home to produce more food and wealth for our needs" — rather than sending out the flower of our youth just to keep watch on other peoples whose only sin consists in their desire to work out their own problems in their own lands!
For a new humanism is arising, and we are throwing off the shackles of racism and colonialism. We want production for the needs of human beings, not human beings broken on the wheel of production. In this, the twentieth century, the world is going to belong to the people who inhabit it, for through peace or through war, they will claim it as their own.
This quotation and other material on Africa was obtained through the valued assistance of Dr. Alpheus Hunton of the Council on African Affairs. ↩