Volume 8, Number 12 · June 29, 1967
Color Clash
By Ronald Steel
The Race War
by Ronald Segal
Viking, 416 pp., $6.50
Color and Race
Daedalus, 350 pp., $1.75
The struggle between whites and nonwhites, an expatriate South African informs us on the opening page of The Race War, 'is the major preoccupation of mankind.' The title alone is the clue to the book. The world is perilously split between the rich, smug, mostly white exploiters of the temperate lands, and the impoverished, miserable, mostly non-white peoples of the Third World. The West—which is the villain of this morality tale—lives off the blood of the dark-skinned masses, exploiting all off-white shades for its economic advantage and political power. But the game is nearly up. The non-whites are seething, and 'the sense of outrage rouses all regions of the population, driving even many of those cajoled by privilege into revolt.' The real war is not between communism and capitalism, nor one against poverty and injustice, between ethnic groups within a single nation (as one might suspect from the recent blood bath in Indonesia), nor between political factions as in China and Vietnam, but only between whites and non-whites. This is a war that cannot be halted, for 'violence must surely spread till the rich and the poor, the dominant and the dominated, are alike, in the final accommodation of an equal humanity or an equal annihilation.'
Review, 2835 words
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