"In writing about Sharp Harker tends to use the word 'culture' where Sharp seems to have been thinking of something inherent."

Sharp regularly used the word 'race', but in context it often carried more of a sense of 'nation'. He certainly wrote of 'the English race' as distinct from, say, the German, so the kind of pan-European Aryan fantasy that is sometimes laid at Sharp's door is clearly not what he intended.

As for the remark about the racial inferiority of the 'negro' - the authenticity of which no-one is disputing - as Lighter commented earlier, this was "the nearly universal European intellectual assumption at the time." Sharp admitted at one point that until he visited the USA, the only black people he'd ever come across were touring blackface minstrels, with their gross parodies of African-American life. His ignorance on the subject was profound, but whether he deserves to be judged more harshly than others of his time with similar or worse opinions is something I'd question. Jim has quoted variou examples from the period, to which I could add some questionable utterances by Keir Hardie, and an attack on black sailors led by Manny Shinwell shortly before the Red Clydeside unrest in 1919. The sad fact is that during this period even socialists were quite capable of holding racist attitudes.