He is simply a white man, with a tendency to
the grey or the drab. Yet he will explain, in serious official documents,
that the difference between him and us is a difference between "the
master-race and the inferior-race." The collapse of German philosophy
always occurs at the beginning, rather than the end of an argument; and the
difficulty here is that there is no way of testing which is a master-race
except by asking which is your own race. If you cannot find out (as is
usually the case) you fall back on the absurd occupation of writing history
about prehistoric times. But I suggest quite seriously that if the Germans
can give their philosophy to the Hottentots, there is no reason why they
should not give their sense of superiority to the Hottentots. If they can
see such fine shades between the Goth and the Gaul, there is no reason why
similar shades should not lift the savage above other savages; why any
Ojibway should not discover that he is one tint redder than the Dacotahs;
or any nigger in the Cameroons say he is not so black as he is painted. For
this principle of a quite unproved racial supremacy is the last and worst
of the refusals of reciprocity.
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