I think racism does was a large part of the reason why Roosevelt dishonorably discharged the black soldiers in the Brownsville incident. Roosevelt  said he believed that blacks could gradually become socially equal with whites, but he felt like this would take several years and that they shouldn’t be given equality right away.  He felt like it took whites thousands of years to change from savagery to being able to take care of themselves. In his mind, blacks were still in the savagery stage and they wouldn’t be able to change to civilized over night. He assigned some blacks to political offices because he believed that some of them were able to handle those positions, but he felt that blacks as a general whole was not ready for that type of responsibility. He felt that a race had to grow to be “fit” to govern themselves. According to him, “Such fitness is not a God-given natural right, but comes to a race only through the slow growth of centuries, and then only to those races which posses an immense reserve fund of strength, common sense, and morality” (Idea 97).  He also had some racial reserves when it came to the military. He thought that there was a distinct difference in race when it came to fighting also. He felt like black soldiers fight well, but their color should be taken into account whenever there’s fighting for an extended period of time. He felt like blacks were too dependent on the whites and would not be able to become leaders themselves. He  said that whites remained cool while the fighting was going on, but the blacks panicked and ran to the back of the line to protect themselves. He felt that this superstitious behavior and panic was due to their recent removal from savagery. When the threat of losing black votes was brought up due to this accusation, Roosevelt re-evaluated his public statement  and said that it was a white captain’s fault that he thought that. He also said that he wouldn’t say anything against black soldiers, but there’s no proof that he changed his views privately. Although he did believe in the possibility of blacks becoming equal to whites, he still showed some racism against how he viewed blacks at that time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011 at 10:42 am and is filed under Charli. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.