Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems: Expanded Edition

Royce’s "Race Questions and Prejudices"

royce’s ‘‘race questions and prejudices’’ Shannon Sullivan  One of the most striking features of Race Questions, Provincialism , and Other American Problems is that Josiah Royce wrote ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices’’ as early as 1905 and then chose to make it the lead piece of a collection that puts his philosophy of loyalty to work. These facts suggest that the topic of race, especially in connection with an increasingly global world, was at the heart of Royce’s thinking about the pragmatic and existential implications of his idealist philosophy. In the book’s 1908 introduction, Royce says that its lead essay is ‘‘an effort to express and to justify, in the special case of the race-problems, the spirit which I have elsewhere defined as that of ‘Loyalty to Loyalty.’’’1 Royce refers to his development of his ethical philosophy in The Philosophy of Loyalty, also published in 1908.2 While his comment in the introduction might seem to imply that ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices’’ merely applies a concept first developed in The Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce’s essay on race in fact is where Royce begins to work out the philosophy of loyalty later presented more fully in his book on loyalty. {  } shannon sullivan  The centrality of the race essay to Royce’s thinking is all the more significant since, with the exception of W. E. B. Du Bois and perhaps also Jane Addams, no other major figure associated with pragmatist philosophy substantially addressed issues of race and racism in his or her written work, nor did so as early in the twentieth century as Royce did.3 Alain Locke delivered five ‘‘Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race’’ in 1915, but unfortunately they were never published in his lifetime.4 In a written corpus spanning over seventy years, John Dewey devoted one essay to the topic of ‘‘Racial Prejudice and Friction ’’ in 1922; his 1932 ‘‘Address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’’ was published posthumously.5 The absence of pragmatist treatments of race is most noticeable, however, in the works of William James, George Herbert Mead, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Alfred North Whitehead, who rarely if ever broach the topic in their philosophical writing. Royce stands out in the history of classical American philosophy because of his anti-racist focus on race questions when very few philosophers—especially white male philosophers—took scholarly time to think about these issues. ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices’’ also is situated historically in ways that bear on the essay’s significance. It was composed two years after the 1903 publication of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, in which Du Bois famously declared that ‘‘the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.’’6 The year 1905 also was the year of President Theodore Roosevelt’s now-infamous speech ‘‘On American Motherhood,’’ in which Roosevelt warned of white ‘‘race suicide’’ if white families continued to reproduce at a slower rate than other races (http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trmothers1905.html). In ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices,’’ Royce was speaking and writing against racism in a time of growing anti-immigration sentiment and pro-imperialism caused by white anxiety in the United States about the possible decline of global white supremacy. It is unclear whether Royce read Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk before writing ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices,’’ but he begins his essay by acknowledging something like Du Bois’s color line as a signi ficant problem looming at the beginning of the twentieth century.  royce’s ‘‘race questions and prejudices’’ In the essay’s opening section, Royce notes that the ‘‘numerous questions and prejudices which are aroused by the contact of the various races of men . . . promise . . . to become, in the near future, still more important than they have ever been before’’ (45). Their importance will grow, Royce claims, because of the increasing communication between different races and civilizations across the globe. This increase in contact will intensify the age-old problem of how to deal with people who seem different from one’s own group and how to tell which of these people might be helpful or perilous to one’s own group interests. Royce cautions his readers that as they confront this problem, they cannot assume that they already know which racial groups are potentially harmful to civilization. And he alerts his white...