Racial thinkers applied the concept of human
competitiveness to racial conflict instead of to individual
competition. In its usual form the Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic race
was depicted as superior, and the Semitic and Negroid races as
inferior. Human history was explained as the history of race
conflict, and racial hostility was justified because, through
this conflict, the superior types would survive and human
civilization would be elevated. The concept of human equality was
reduced to a meaningless abstraction, Scholars like William
Graham Sumner insisted that the founding fathers only intended
human equality to refer to their own kind of people.
To Thomas Nelson Page, in the North American Review, it appeared
that the African race had not progressed in human history. It had
failed to progress in America, not because it had been enslaved,
but because it did not have the faculty to raise itself above
that status. He continued to argue that its inability to advance
in the scale of civilization was demonstrated by the level of
social and political life to be found in Liberia, Haiti, the
Dominican Republic, and Brazil.
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