Racial discrimination is not peculiar to colonial societies: it still prevails all over the world, and in particular in the most developed countries, such as the United States for example. She is irrational, white and black sharing the same "American way of life", recognizing in the same culture and the same patriotism, practicing the same language and the same religions, sharing the same feeling of exercising leadership global, etc…

 

These factors of integration did not exist in colonial society - it is indeed for this reason that it is an outdated social system that is no longer reproducible.

 

But discrimination, unlike that of today, could be explained thereby objective reasons.

 

People of completely different cultures and standards of living suddenly came into contact. Was it conceivable, under these conditions, that the Whites settled down in authority in the midst of the native villages - would they have accepted them moreover? - that both adopt overnight the same uses, the same conceptions, in health matters, for example, the same family, social and educational organizations, the same language and the same religion. No, whites could only settle on the margins of preexisting habitats, to preserve their way of life and that of their black neighbors.

 

Ideally, this situation was certainly bound to change, and we saw indeed some "advanced" settle in the white cities, and traders, especially Portuguese, settle among the blacks. Proof that this discrimination was neither imposed nor intended, as was South African apartheid. Legal provisions punished, much more severely than ours, in Belgium, too obvious expressions of racism.

 

But the evolution towards the mixture of societies and cultures can only be extremely slow if we judge from the examples of North and South America, where after more than four centuries of coexistence societies remain largely separated, and by the Indonesian situations, where Chinese and Malays continue to live side by side, without interpenetrating. In the countries of the Near and Middle East, Arabs, Christians, and Jews also refuse rapprochement, and the example of the Balkans is too close for the anti-colonialists of Europe - at the head of which was the Yugoslav Tito - to still pretend to give lessons to former colonialists.

 

The question of wages reveals the same complexities. Equal pay for equal work. But even today we do not pay the engineer or the assembler who goes abroad to build a factory in China in the same way as the one who stays in the country to do similar work.

 

And the Chinese engineer and editor, who work alongside their expatriate colleagues, do not claim to receive the same remuneration. The differences are moreover much greater than in the ex-colonies where the top of the salary scales of native employees had come to join the bottom of the scales of their European colleagues.

 

The "advanced" - we understand them - would have liked to be simply integrated into white society, both in terms of remuneration, social status, and friendly and social relationships. In principle, they were right, and in terms of personal and friendly relationships, they often had satisfaction. But from a social point of view, an evolution towards complete integration into white society would have deprived blacks of their elites, those precisely who claimed and obtained independence. Assimilation and Independence were contradictory, and each of the communities felt it unconsciously: too much to bond with the Blacks meant for many Whites the end of the colonial regime from which they benefited, and too much to integrate meant for the best of the Blacks to deny their identity, their past, their family and clan solidarity and renounce all pride: they were the first among their own, at what level would they have found themselves among the Whites? They ultimately preferred to be the first to come home, failing to be able to obtain from the Whites the place they considered themselves entitled to obtain from those whom they finally considered, and with good reason, as foreigners.