Why the racial discrimination, separation between white and black establishments, differences in salaries?

Racial discrimination is not peculiar to colonial societies: it is still rampant throughout the world today, especially in the most developed countries, such as the United States. There it is irrational, with whites and blacks sharing the same “American way of life”, recognising themselves in the same culture and patriotism, practising the same language and religions, sharing the same sense of exercising world leadership, and so on.

These integration factors did not exist in colonial society – which is why it is an obsolete social system that is no longer reproducible.

But discrimination, unlike today’s, can be explained by objective reasons.

Individuals with completely different cultures and standards of living suddenly found themselves in each other’s presence. Under these circumstances, was it conceivable that the whites would settle in the midst of the indigenous villages – moreover, would the latter have accepted them? – that overnight they would adopt the same customs, the same concepts, for instance in health, the same family, social and educational organisations, the same language and the same religion. No, the whites could only settle on the outskirts of pre-existing settlements to preserve their way of life and that of their black neighbours.

Ideally, this situation would certainly change, and indeed, some “evolved” people settled in white towns, and merchants, especially Portuguese, settled among blacks. Proof that this discrimination was not imposed or intended, like South African apartheid. Moreover, overt displays of racism in Belgium were punished by legal provisions much more severely than ours.

But the trend towards mixing societies and cultures can only be extremely slow, if we look at the examples of North and South America, where societies remain largely separate after more than four centuries of living together, and at the Indonesian situation, where Chinese and Malay continue to live side by side, without intermingling. In the countries of the Near and Middle East, Arabs, Christians and Jews also refuse to unite, and the example of the Balkans is too close for the anti-colonialists of Europe – led by Yugoslav Tito – to claim they can teach lessons to the former colonialists.

The issue of salaries shows the same complexity. Equal pay for equal work. But even today, we do not pay the engineer or mechanic who goes abroad to build a factory in China the same as the one who stays in the country to do similar work.

And the Chinese engineer and mechanic, working alongside their foreign colleagues, do not claim to receive the same pay. The differences are far greater than in the former colonies, where the top of the pay scale for native workers had joined the bottom of the pay scale for their European counterparts.

The “evolved” – one can understand them – would have liked to be simply integrated into white society, both in terms of wages and social status and friendly and social business. In principle, they were right, and in terms of personal and friendly relationships, they were often content. But from a social point of view, a move towards full integration into white society would have deprived blacks of their elites, the elites who demanded and obtained independence. Assimilation and Independence were antinomian, and each of the communities felt it unconsciously: for many whites, too much contact with blacks meant the end of the colonial regime they enjoyed, and too much integration for the best blacks meant denying their identity, their past, their family and clan solidarity, and giving up all pride: they were first among their own people, at what level would they have found themselves among whites? In the end, they preferred to be first among their own people because they were unable to get from the whites the place they were supposed to be allowed to get from those they ultimately, and rightly, considered strangers.