50 Years Ago: The Johnson-Jeffries Fight
[The defeat at Reno of Jeffries, by the coloured boxer Johnson, led to racial rioting in America. The following comments on the film of the fight appeared in the SOCIALIST STANDARD, August, 1910.]
Was it to be supposed that civilisation could stand it? We all know that civilisation is based firstly upon the superiority of the white to the coloured races, and secondly, upon the superiority of the capitalist to the ordinary or worker white. But what sort of an effect would these moving pictures have upon the social aspect in Africa, and what tale would they whisper into the ear of young India, and how would they be received on the banks of the Nile, where the burden of the white man’s civilisation sits none too lightly on brown backs? The best black man has beaten the best white. The best black man is better than the best white. The black is better than the white.
As Japan snatched the halo of sanctity from the Western Brow when she drove the Russiao legions before her, so these pictures of the best white man trying and failing to chew all he had bitten off might be taken by the dusky ones the world over as evidence that the miraculous no more belongs to the white skin than to the Western position. . . and then goodbye to British misrule in India and Egypt, and farewell to white supremacy in East and West. And then when the worker white made the startling discovery that there was nothing inferior to him he might begin to seriously ask if there is anything superior, and such an inward searching really would place the foundations of our capitalist civilisation in jeopardy.