PHILOSOPHICAL MUSINGS IN THE BY-PATHS
                   OF ETHNOLOGY.

                   By C. V. Roman.
  One of the most disastrous things that can befall an in-
dividual or race is to conceive as essential to life's success
ideals that are absolutely unattainable. This grasping after
the unattainable may lead simply to non-success or it may
take the more virulent form of downright crankery or even
insanity.
  The one great handicap of slavery in this country was the
imposition of the white man's ideal on the black man. This
cramps the black man at every step of his progress and in
many cases is an absolute preventative of any progress
whatever.
  The white man's ideal man is of course WHITE.
  When the black man consciously, or unconsciously accepts
this ideal he has shut himself out of the paradise of earthly
achievement. Ideals once adopted become ideas, and ideas
once fixed in the mind are not possessed by us but possess us
and force us to defend them. It is thus evident that our
ideals eventually regulate our daily conduct and measure our
accomplishment in life. The object of an education should
be to give as correct ideals, for the man with wrong ideals
is on the road that leads to no-where.  Labor with what zeal
he may his efforts are as tangible as "a scudding cloudage
without a shape," and his accomplishments as monumental
as "a footless stocking without a leg." Unattainable ideals
are wrong ideals.  A BLACK MAN CAN NEVER  BE A
WHITE MAN. This is axiomatic. But in the white man's
thinking, White and Man are synonymous terms and he
adopts the above sentence as axiomatic with the word white
left out; and thus the black man with the white man's ideals
                        (444)




			

OHS/National Afro-American Museum & Cultural Center Serial Collection

African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, Vol. 28, Num. 1

Volume:  28
Issue Number:  01
Date:  07/1911