The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. Lothrop Stoddard
blood survives only as vestigial traces of vanishing significance. If this portion of Asia, the former seat of mighty white empires and possibly the very homeland of the white race itself, should have so entirely changed its ethnic character, what assurance can the most impressive political panorama give us that the present world-order may not swiftly and utterly pass away?
The force of this query is exemplified when we turn from the political to the racial map of the globe. What a transformation! Instead of a world politically nine-tenths white, we see a world of which only four-tenths at the most can be considered predominantly white in blood, the rest of the world being inhabited mainly by the other primary races of mankind—yellows, browns, blacks, and reds. Speaking by continents, Europe, North America to the Rio Grande, the southern portion of South America, the Siberian part of Asia, and Australasia constitute the real white world; while the bulk of Asia, virtually the whole of Africa, and most of Central and South America form the world of color. The respective areas of these two racially contrasted worlds are 22,000,000 square miles for the whites and 31,000,000 square miles for the colored races. Furthermore it must be remembered that fully one-third of the white area (notably Australasia and Siberia) is very thinly inhabited and is thus held by a very slender racial tenure—the only tenure which counts in the long run.
The statistical disproportion between the white and colored worlds becomes still more marked when we turn from surveys of area to tables of population. The total number of human beings alive to-day is about 1,700,000,000. Of these 550,000,000 are white, while 1,150,000,000 are colored. The colored races thus outnumber the whites more than two to one. Another fact of capital importance is that the great bulk of the white race is concentrated in the European continent. In 1914 the population of Europe was approximately 450,000,000. The late war has undoubtedly caused an absolute decrease of many millions of souls. Nevertheless, the basic fact remains that some four-fifths of the entire white race is concentrated on less than one-fifth of the white world’s territorial area (Europe), while the remaining one-fifth of the race (some 110,000,000 souls), scattered to the ends of the earth, must protect four-fifths of the white territorial heritage against the pressure of colored races eleven times its numerical strength.
As to the 1,150,000,000 of the colored world, they are divided, as already stated, into four primary categories: yellows, browns, blacks, and reds. The yellows are the most numerous of the colored races, numbering over 500,000,000. Their habitat is eastern Asia. Nearly as numerous and much more wide-spread than the yellows are the browns, numbering some 450,000,000. The browns spread in a broad belt from the Pacific Ocean westward across southern Asia and northern Africa to the Atlantic Ocean. The blacks total about 150,000,000. Their centre is Africa south of the Sahara Desert, but besides the African continent there are vestigial black traces across southern Asia to the Pacific and also strong black outposts in the Americas. Least numerous of the colored race-stocks are the reds—the “Indians” of the western hemisphere. Mustering a total of less than 40,000,000, the reds are almost all located south of the Rio Grande in “Latin America.”
Such is the ethnic make-up of that world of color which, as already seen, outnumbers the white world two to one. That is a formidable ratio, and its significance is heightened by the fact that this ratio seems destined to shift still further in favor of color. There can be no doubt that at present the colored races are increasing very much faster than the white. Treating the primary race-stocks as units, it would appear that whites tend to double in eighty years, yellows and browns in sixty years, blacks in forty years. The whites are thus the slowest breeders, and they will undoubtedly become slower still, since section after section of the white race is revealing that lowered birth-rate which in France has reached the extreme of a stationary population.
On the other hand, none of the colored races shows perceptible signs of declining birth-rate, all tending to breed up to the limits of available subsistence. Such checks as now limit the increase of colored populations are wholly external, like famine, disease, and tribal warfare. But by a curious irony of fate, the white man has long been busy removing these checks to colored multiplication. The greater part of the colored world is to-day under white political control. Wherever the white man goes he attempts to impose the bases of his ordered civilization. He puts down tribal war, he wages truceless combat against epidemic disease, and he so improves communications that augmented and better distributed food-supplies minimize the blight of famine. In response to these life-saving activities the enormous death-rate which in the past has kept the colored races from excessive multiplication is falling to proportions comparable with the death-rate of white countries. But to lower the colored world’s prodigious birth-rate is quite another matter. The consequence is a portentous increase of population in nearly every portion of the colored world now under white political sway. In fact, even those colored countries which have maintained their independence, such as China and Japan, are adopting the white man’s life-conserving methods and are experiencing the same accelerated increase of population.
Now what must be the inevitable result of all this? It can mean only one thing: a tremendous and steadily augmenting outward thrust of surplus colored men from overcrowded colored homelands. Remember that these homelands are already populated up to the available limits of subsistence. Of course present limits can in many cases be pushed back by better living conditions, improved agriculture, and the rise of modern machine industry such as is already under way in Japan. Nevertheless, in view of the tremendous population increases which must occur, these can be only palliatives. Where, then, should the congested colored world tend to pour its accumulating human surplus, inexorably condemned to emigrate or starve? The answer is: into those emptier regions of the earth under white political control. But many of these relatively empty lands have been definitely set aside by the white man as his own special heritage. The upshot is that the rising flood of color finds itself walled in by white dikes debarring it from many a promised land which it would fain deluge with its dusky waves.
Thus the colored world, long restive under white political domination, is being welded by the most fundamental of instincts, the instinct of self-preservation, into a common solidarity of feeling against the dominant white man, and in the fire of a common purpose internecine differences tend, for the time at least, to be burned away. Before the supreme fact of white political world-domination, antipathies within the colored world must inevitably recede into the background.
The imperious urge of the colored world toward racial expansion was well visualized by that keen English student of world affairs, Doctor E. J. Dillon, when he wrote more than a decade ago: “The problem is one of life and death—a veritable sphinx-question—to those most nearly concerned. For, no race, however inferior it may be, will consent to famish slowly in order that other people may fatten and take their ease, especially if it has a good chance to make a fight for life.”[1]
This white statement of the colored thesis is an accurate reflection of what colored men say themselves. For example, a Japanese scholar, Professor Ryutaro Nagai, writes: “The world was not made for the white races, but for the other races as well. In Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the United States, there are vast tracts of unoccupied territory awaiting settlement, and although the citizens of the ruling Powers refuse to take up the land, no yellow people are permitted to enter. Thus the white races seem ready to commit to the savage birds and beasts what they refuse to intrust to their brethren of the yellow race. Surely the arrogance and avarice of the nobility in apportioning to themselves the most and the best of the land in certain countries is as nothing compared with the attitude of the white races toward those of a different hue.”[2]
The bitter resentment of white predominance and exclusiveness awakened in many colored breasts is typified by the following lines penned by a brown man, a British-educated Afghan, shortly before the European War. Inveighing against our “racial prejudice, that cowardly, wretched caste-mark of the European and the American the world over,” he exultantly predicts “a coming struggle between Asia, all Asia, against Europe and America. You are heaping up material for a Jehad, a Pan-Islam, a Pan-Asia Holy War, a gigantic day of reckoning, an invasion of a new Attila and Tamerlane—who will use rifles and bullets, instead of lances and spears. You are deaf to the voice of reason and fairness, and so you must be taught with the whirring swish of the sword when it is red.”[3]
Of course in these statements there is nothing either exceptional