Joseph Widney - Racial Beliefs

Racial Beliefs

Mike Davis describes Widney as "an ardent Aryanist" (who "called upon Los Angeles' captains of industry to become "the first Captains in the race war". According to Frankiel, Widney "claimed that a distant forebear of his, from the late Middle Ages, was Jewish; and he spoke out against anti-Semitism and for the Jew (though in a rather condescending way)".

Widney lamented the erosion in numbers, influence, and power of the original Hispanic (generally referred to as "Mexican") population of California. Widney observed, "you could visit the hospitals and almshouses in the late 'eighties and look in vain for the Mexican or the Spaniard." He suggested that the old Mexican life of the province had retreated southward along the coastal plains that reach from Los Angeles to Acapulco. Retreating before the Anglo invasion, the old life had never wholly vanished. "Whether they will or not," wrote Widney, "their future is one and together, and I think neither type of race life will destroy the other. They will merge. The tropic plains will help in the merging. Out of it will come a type, not of the north, not of the south, but the American of the semitropics."

Widney in his 1876 History indicates: "In the spring of 1850, probably three or four colored persons were in the city. In 1875, they numbered 175 souls, many of whom hold good city property acquired by industry. They are farmers, mechanics, or some other useful occupation, and remarkable for good habits".

African-American activist W. E. B. Du Bois used Widney's Race Life of the Aryan Peoples to support his own view of the significance of the contributions of blacks to the development of modern civilization. Widney wrote "They once occupied a much wider territory and wielded a vastly greater influence upon earth than they do now. ... The first Babylon seems to have been of a Negroid race. The earliest Egyptian civilization seems to have been Negroid. ... The Black seems to have built up a great empire, such as it was, by the waters of the Ganges before Mongol or Aryan. Way down under the mud and slime of the beginnings ... is the Negroid contribution to the fair superstructure of modern civilization.

In The Three Americas(1935), Widney suggests that the United States buy British Guiana from the United Kingdom and give it to the African Americans as reparations for slavery. British Guiana would only be for the "natural increase" of the African American population, he stated; no one would be forced to go there if they didn't want to. (Widney felt that racial characteristics were determined by soil and climate, and thus he thought that African Americans would be happier living in a tropical climate.) Widney's primary motivation was to provide territory for the "rapidly multiplying black population of our land." However, he believed that the "negroes" should not be compelled to migrate, but would desire to do so for climatic and economic reasons.