Strange, diverse, and ironic are the stakes of ethnic and political minorities in the current international crisis. Who would have dared believe a few years ago that the successful defense of theoretical democracy in an ethnically white world, would depend so completely upon the black worlds of Africa and the West Indies? Who would have dared voice the idea that the unity of the Americas as desired by the children of the Great White Father in the lands of the North, and their Latin brothers in the continent to the South, would be contingent upon the successful establishment of military, air, and naval bases by the United States in Great Britain's oldest colonies-the British West Indies, the sea-locked black lands of the Western Hemisphere? The situation is ironic, for the West Indies, especially the colonial islands of empire-conscious England, France, and Holland, were, prior to the present crisis, neither fish nor fowl in the hemisphere's political and economic kingdom. The islanders were neither Caucasians nor Latins; they were blacks and mixed-Negroes. The British islanders were regarded as presenting no grave problems of culture -economic, social or lingual-that merited special emphasis in the United States' current good will program for commercial and cultural relations between the American republics. In fact, there isn't a republic among the nine separate governments of the British West Indies. Furthermore, the islands, until recently, presented no grave problems that the British Colonial Office believed could not be solved by the visit of a Royal Commission. Until the world became engaged in the present struggle and military and political defense became important for survival, the British West Indies were regarded as a political and economic liability, not worth their sugar or cocoa or bananas. Today, we face a situation in which the outposts of the United States, prime exponent of democracy, are being located in colonies that have typified much that is undesirable in the practises of a land-grabbing international economy, involving colonies that have been concerned about their past and that have wondered about their future. As the United States takes over bases in the areas of the British West Indies for the emergency, and for so many other of the 99 years as may be necessary, it is forced to realize how formidably malevolent is the benevolence of the good intentions that attend colonization. For it is becoming increasingly evident that a report on Great Britain's colonial achievement in the British West Indies may be summarized in the comment made on Africa by Cecil Rhodes -So much to do, so little done. A true definition of the Negro in the British West Indies, therefore, must rest upon an analysis of the historical significance of these islands in the hemisphere, the broad problems of economics, politics, and culture that