Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/154

150 Such a final racial amalgamation would then seem to be possible. However, there may be other obstacles in the way, and in any case it is not necessarily advisable to work for such an end. This is a question I will discuss a little later.

Let us now consider what have been and are the actual relations between these ethnic types. The whites and the yellows have already mingled to a large extent, so that a considerable proportion of the population of Asia is a cross between the white and yellow races. They have also mixed to a slight extent in Europe. These facts seem to indicate that there is no very serious antipathy between these two types. It is true that at present there is a good deal of hostility between these two races, but this is undoubtedly due in large part to cultural differences and political difficulties.

In his relation to the black, the white has shown a good deal more antipathy. The reasons for this are very evident, since the differences' between the white and the black are much more striking in appearance and much more obvious. And yet even between the white and the black there has been a good deal of mixture. In northern Africa the two races have been mixing for thousands of years, and even in Europe we find traces of a slight amount of mixture in the past. In America we find curious differences in the extent to which the white and the black has mixed. In North America, the Anglo-Saxon has, to a large extent, stood proudly aloof from the black, though he has frequently condescended to illegitimate relations with women of color. But in the southern part of North America, in Central and South America, the Portuguese and Spaniards have mixed very largely with the blacks and have displayed comparatively little of the usual antipathy. These facts suggest that this antipathy of the white to the black may not be as fundamental as it appears, and is due to esthetic ideas and cultural differences and also perhaps to the consciousness of the fact that the blacks until very recently were uncivilized and slaves.

Between the yellows and the blacks also there has been some display of antipathy, though it may not be as great as between the whites and the blacks.

I have said nothing about the American aboriginal type. In Latin America this type has been assimilated very largely by the white, while in Anglo-Saxon America it has become almost extinct.

These facts seem to indicate that these racial antipathies are not as innate or as permanent as they seem to be. But this does not mean that there are no other obstacles in the way of racial amalgamation. Each of the ethnic types evolved in a more or less characteristic physical environment, and is, therefore, adapted to such an environment. Thus the negro is adapted in his color, physiological processes and temperament, which is due largely to emotional characteristics, to a tropical