Perhaps the most frequent remark one hears in any discussion of racial discrimination or segregation in America is that it hurts the prestige of the United States abroad. Why, I should like to ask, abroad? That adverb “abroad” tends to single out the United States as the lone black sheep in a lily-white flock.
Actually the manifestations of racial discrimination are more acute and extreme almost everywhere in the world than they have been in the United States for nearly a hundred years. In Sierra Leone, British West Africa, for example, I have seen natives “disciplined” by being made to stand in the tropical sun for hours at a time, each with a heavy stone on his head. In the very center of Dakar, before the unconcerned eyes of French citizens sipping their aperitifs in sidewalk cafes, I have seen Negroes beaten within an inch of their lives by drunken French soldiers. Until very recently, and so far as I know even now, French Army camps in North Africa considered cots for native soldiers an “unnecessary luxury.” There is no question of “separate but equal” facilities. Facilities are separate, all right, but no one has ever dreamed they should be equal.
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