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Empire. An English gentleman helped me to lose that faith, and made me aware of what was going on in West Africa, South Africa and in India. I have always been aware that there are many differences between the American Negro and the West Indian. The aristocrat of Negro Americans, James Weldon Johnson once explained to me that the American Negro had one way of talking to whites and another to colored. Well, the West Indian is not a consummate politician and I have no training as a diplomat. I was brought up to use the same language to a white person as to a colored, without carrying any chip on my shoulder. When I was a boy I sat down and listened in to my brother talking about world affairs to white as well as colored persons.

In the United States I have met many more highly-educated colored persons than in Jamaica: graduates of colleges and universities, doctors and lawyers, journalists, social workers, scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and Rhodes scholars. But the conversations of all these highly educated persons were always about the Negro problem. It was maddening. I found escape from it among the common Negroes, in barrooms, dancing halls and cabarets. I indulged in much eclectic reading. Twice I travelled to Europe on a shoestring. The second time I spent many years in Europe and North Africa. There, happily, I was not condemned to thinking and talking Negro all the time. I could discuss the different aspects of many-faceted life.

Well, I have lived and I shall die an individual, a man of color, a poet and writer and a member of the human race. I know that the human race is subdivided into racial groups. That is plain enough for any eye that is not color blind to see. But since the Nazis

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went wild and set the world on fire with their damned theories of a
pure race, many unthinking people seem to imagine that the y can
dispense with the fact that there are races. Probably, there is no
such thing as a pure race. Who cares? I know that God, He created races.
It is only in Nazi Germany, Britain and the United States
that men have made a fetich of race.

Jesus Christ rejected the ideal of any special, peculiar
or chosen race or nation, when he charged his apostles: Go ye into
all the world and preach the gospel. Not the gospel of Imperialism
Feudalism or Capitalism, or Socialism, Communism or a National Church.
It was Protestantism that started the movement of national churches.
The Catholic Church superseded the tribal religions in the days when
kings and emperors were gods. And one and indivisible and universal,
it has preached the gospel of the Coming and the Mission of Jesus
Christ, His Passion and Hisurrection and the Redemption to all people
alike. I find in the Catholic Church that which does not exist in
Capitalism, Socialism or Communism--the one true International of
Peace and Good Will on earth to all men. And as a child of Christen-
dom, that suffices for me. Even though many white folk may regard me
as an outcast child.

Some modernists may say that my joining the Catholic
Church is a backward step. But to me it is the progressive step,
which should have been taken long ago. Many of us confuse popular-
ity with progress. But even in a brief lifetime we may discover
that popular things are not lasting things. When I was a boy in
we used to sing a song called:

"Keep in the middle of the road;"

Though the road be deep and wide

There's a ditch on either side--

So keep in the middle of the road."

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It had reached us, it was said, from the United States. And we called it and others like it, "coon songs". We were not aware that "coon" was a word of opprobrium, objectionable to our cousins in the United States. But now, I remember the song as I contemplate the Catholic Church as a vast world organization of true human brotherhood, preaching the Word of the Lord Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, and endeavoring to keep mankind in the middle of the road.