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White Editor Flays Own Race and Tells Them “Where to Get Off” as To Ridiculing of Colored PeopleWilliam Allen White, Emporia, Kansas Newspaper Editor, Takes Own Race to Task Because of Derision Sent Out Over Country When Negro Golf dub Organizes in New Jersey.(Associated Negro Press.)Chicago, Aug. 11—William Allen White, nationally famed daily newspaper editor of Emporia,Kansas, in a syndicated article, published recently in a number of daily papers, told the “white people where to get off, so far as “poking fun at Colored people is concerned. Said Mr. White:“At Westfield, N. J. a Colored golf club has been established and a nine-hole course laid out. A Colored colony there seems to warrant the golf course. The item that this course is laid out will cause a million giggles to sizzle across the country. Cartoonists will make funny pictures of it. Vaudeville artists will do sketches about it. Something exquisitely funny seems to excite the white race when it sees the Colored race doing things which are ordinary parts of the day’s wrork and play to the white people. It is as though the elephant should drive an auto or a horse play the piano.“The reason for this risibility of the white man at the black man's human activities is obvious, and it is no credit to the white man. He thinks it funny to see the black man doing things that normal human beings do, because the white man does not think of his dark-skinned fellow traveler on the planet as a human companion. The white man considers any Colored man- black, brown, red, yellow, or maroon—as an animal. The anthopological conceit ot the white man is ponderous, unbelievable, vastly amusing to the Gods.“Why should not the black man play golf if his economic status gives him leisure for golf? Why should he not have a motor car and a country house if he can afford it? Why giggle at the normal activities of men whose skin differs from our own?Something of the same psychological reason is being the fact that we middle-class people make merry over the fact that the* worker in the mines or shops or furnaces w'ears a silk shirt or rents a house with a bath or rides to work in a car. Why shouldn't he? Is he an elephant doing stunts? Is he a horse playing the piano? What’s the joke if he develops the same desires and aspirations that we do? And who in God's name are we, anyway?
Newspaper Details
The Northwestern Bulletin
Saint Paul, Minnesota, US
Sat, Aug 12, 1922
Page 1
Full Page
Clipped by
Ysabel C.
NY, USA 12 Mar 2021
Other Publications Near Saint Paul, Minnesota
Saint Paul Daily Globe
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Saint Paul Labor Advocate
Saint Paul Sunday Times
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