"Given the opportunity, the descendant of serfs may be a Tchekov. But the child of colour, unless his colour is attenuated to the verge of vanishing point, does not seem to have in him the ability to rise. It is as if the offspring of the originally mixed unions had, through generations, and through circumscription of life and interbreeding, achieved a definite, inferior, and static race: a race not given to wildness (its mothers were savages, but they were slaves); a race with something old and civilised about it (its fathers were Europeans); a race made up of weak materials and without the capacity for spiritual or intellectual growth."