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 6 10 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

sort of ^'-prejudice a horror of the external aspect of the negro and many northerners report that they have a feeling against eating from a dish handled by a negro. The association of master and slave in the South was, however, close, even if not intimate, and much of the feeling of physical repulsion for a black skin disappeared. This was particularly true of the house servants. White girls and boys kissed their black mammies with real affection, and after marriage returned from other states to the funeral of an old slave. But while color was not here repul- sive, it was so ineradicably associated with inferiority that it was impossible for a southern white to think the negro into his own class. This is well shown by the following comment of a south- ern woman on the color of Shakespeare's Othello :

Iu studying the play of Othello I have always imagined its hero a white man. It is true the dramatist paints him black, but this shade does not suit the man. It is a stage decoration which my taste discards ; a fault of color from an artistic point of view. I have, therefore, as I before stated, in my readings of this play dispensed with it. Shakespeare was too correct a delin- eator of human nature to have colored Othello black, if he had personally acquainted himself with the idiosyncrasies of the African race. We may regard, then, the daub of black upon Othello's portrait as an ebullition of fancy, a freak of imagination the visionary conception of an ideal figure one of the few erroneous strokes of the great master's brush, the single blemish on a faultless work. Othello was a white man! 1

This lady would have been equally incapable of understand- ing Livingstone's comment on a black woman :

A very beautiful young woman came to look at us, perfect in every way, and nearly naked, but unconscious of indecency ; a very Venus in black.*

Race-prejudice is an instinct originating in the tribal stage of society, when solidarity in feeling and action were essential to the preservation of the group. It, or some analogue of it, will probably never disappear completely, since an identity of stand- ards, traditions, and physical appearance in all geographical zones is neither possible nor aesthetically desirable. It is, too, an affair which can neither be reasoned with nor legislated about very effectively, because it is connected with the affective, rather

'MARY PRESTON, Studies in Shakespeare, 1869, p. 71. 'Last Journals, Vol. I, p. 283.