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all possible colours, people deny Him by the very fact that they say He did not create everyone in His image. We do not know the colour of Adam, the first human. Since, however, in the history of creation not only does every word have its obvious meaning but also every omission, we must assume that Adam’s skin colour would have been mentioned if God had intended to give a preference to any particular one. But we do not speak of the colour of the first man from whom we are all descended any more than we speak of his mother tongue, his race or his nationality. Rather, we assume that he, who was the founder of mankind, contained within himself the source of all languages, all races, all peoples and all the variations of skin colour. And Adam was the crown of creation. God Himself took a full five long days to make him, and these were not our short human days, from sun-up to sun-down, but vast in extent, according to the time reckoning of eternity not of the calendar. It is a hardly comprehensible honour that God bestowed upon us in devoting such a long period of thought to us. Many differences distinguish we humans from the animals. But the most important is that God gave Himself five days to create man and that He breathed His breath into him alone – just humans, not humans of one or another colour. This is the only permissible pride we may feel that cannot be called a sin. But it is a double sin that we commit when we pervert our just pride at being people into a vile pride at being white, black, brown or red people. And as it is already deemed as disgraceful in our everyday world when an unworthy fellow denies his grandfather, so should it be a mortal sin and branded as such when a man denies Adam, the ancestor of us all. Thus one denies God Himself with whom our first bond is that He animated Adam with His divine breath.
    God created man in his own image. We therefore blaspheme Him when we mock or disparage the hooked nose of the Jew, the slanted eyes of the Mongol or the large lips of the African. Since they are all human beings, each particular feature and each particular colour of every human race is to be found in the sublime and unfathomable countenance of God. Whoever insults the Jew’s nose or the African’s lips or the Mongol’s eyes or the white man’s pallor therefore insults the nose, the lips, the eyes and the colour of God. He also defames His breath, which was breathed into the first man. For in this breath were contained all the virtues of all future people. Within it were the wondrous singing voice of the African, the subtlety and also the fervour of the Mongol, the nobility of the Indian, the intelligence of the Jew – and so forth.
    In the Commission on Colours I saw, however, that not only were the powerful arrogant towards the powerless but that the latter defended themselves with an equal arrogance towards the powerful. And because at this time white men happen to be more powerful than men of other colours, those among them who were still conscientious were striving for the emancipation of the coloured peoples. The Antichrist, however, was already living among both. And he led the coloured peoples, who were not yet freed, who were still enslaved by the whites, to mimic their morals and vices and pretensions. And so the brown and black and yellow men all lived apart, ate and drank apart. The brown men were proud of their brownness, the black of their blackness and the yellow of their yellowness. It was obvious that they did not regard themselves first and foremost as people, but rather as
coloured
people. They also demanded in all their speeches and uprisings not so much the liberties that truly characterize human dignity as the unworthy ones that power usurps as its prerogative. What they demanded, and what they ever repeated, was ‘We want to be masters in our own country.’ Yes, they wantedto be masters, nothing else. And in their own country. Instead of saying