If it's all kumbaya and campfires, then sure, very nice. If it's part of a "here, let's help you poor dark-skinned people become civilized like us," then not so much.
I've got a different viewpoint from that image, Yoda. Once taught in a junior college in San Antonio where they, not surprisingly, had a "Hispanic Culture" field of study, where they taught Hispanic history, Hispanic languages, Hispanic cooking, and I kid you not, they even had a class in Hispanic "crafts," primarily basket-weaving! Of course, a lot of the Hispanic youngsters (there is a large Hispanic population in San Antone) enrolled in these studies, none of which one could classify as particularly challenging, even for a student not steeped in Hispanic culture from birth. And I couldn't help thinking that going over to the business school and taking a class in accounting or business managment would do them more good and help them break out of the barrio (or even remain in the barrio and prosper) more than all the Hispanic Culture classes being offered. Feel good classes are fine--brown pride, black pride, white pride is wonderful--as long as you don't use it as an excuse for looking down on one of the other colors. But courses tailored to race or culture isn't going to provide anyone with the markable skills to get ahead in the real world--not unless there's a difference between black and white accounting methods or between brown and white math.
Now a white person can sit around the campfire with another race or another culture and sing kumbaya and other native songs until it's time to pee on the ashes and go home, at which time the white person gets into a bigger more expensive car and drives to a gated, more expensive neighborhood and his more luxurious and expensive house thinking what a great person he's been to put himself on the same level as those poor folks and sit around the campfire like equals and sing native songs, and boy, those people sure can sing, can't they!
Trying to help other cultures and races to a better life doesn't have to be as condesending as you make it sound. It can be a prenatal nurse teaching young pregnant women how to take care of themselves and their babies, how to sterilize water and screen windows and doors and other little things that will protect their and their babies' heath. It can be a retired farmer in the peace corps teaching local farmers how to get more productivity from the land with fertilizers and crop rotations. Or it could be a husky high school graduate who spends the summer providing the muscle power to dig a water well or even more sanitary outdoor toilets in a remote native village before college starts.
It just seems to me spending a week or a month or a summer trying to lift poorer people up closer to my level of civilization is better than spending a week or a month or a summer sitting around campfires singing kumbaya while slapping disease-carrying skeeters, sharing their meager food supply, and peeing behind trees. Lowering myself to their level does nothing for either of us; raising them to my level improves their lifestyle and that of the world.
Regardless, though On the Origin of Species doesn't contain anything too overt (though, as you've noticed, significant qualifiers like "no more racist than anyone else of his time" are necessary), it does make reference to "savages," which he examines much in the same way one would an animal.
Things become more overt in his next book on the subject, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, which was published 12 years later. In it, he has a chapter on race where he talks openly about how the "civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world," and specifically notes the difference in "intellectual faculties" among races.
I'll admit up front I've never read Darwin--always seemed too dry to me. So I'm willing to take your word for what he says in his book. But I noted that Descent of Man was published in 1871, a time when the great majority of Europeans, Americans, and other whites definitely were extremely racist by today's standards, and nearly everyone really thought blacks and "savages" were mentally inferior to whites. Yeah, that's stupid; yeah, they were wrong. But they didn't know that then.
It's true and not an excuse to say Abe Lincoln was no more prejudice than most people of his time. In fact, I think his visit to Richmond after his capture would show he was less prejudice than many. When he issued his emancipation proclamation, it didn't free one single slave because it stipulated freedom only in those Confederate states that were still in rebellion on that date, and excluded any of the 4 slave-holding states still in the Union plus all lands then occupied by the US Army. Lincoln's primary purpose at the time was not to free black slaves in the US. His purpose was to make slavery an official issue in the war to prevent England from giving recognition and aid to the Confederacy. His main concern from start to finish was to preserve the Union. Yet his proclamation, although issued for essentially all the wrong reasons, did set the stage for freeing slaves at the end of the war.
For that matter, I once read one of the Walden Pond bunch of philosophers (the real guys, not from the Doonesbury comics) was rabidly anti-Irish, yet his teachings are still worthwhile.
As for his statement about the civilized races would exterminate the "savage" races, it certainly looked in 1871 we were well on the way to that, being just 5 years short of a US Army surprise attack on an Indian village that became Custer's Last Stand.
Fortunately, the "savages" weren't exterminated, but the life they previously lived could not be tolerated and were pushed aside in North and South America, Australia, Africa, southeast Asia and the Pacific islands by more advanced cultures. Take the American Indians--by the 1870s, they were still basically living in the stone age, using hides for clothes and tents, farming with sharp pointed sticks, living in small bands because it was hard to sustain themselves on limited food supplies.
Before the coming of Columbus, they had domesticated only the dog and the turkey, and, in South America, the lama. It was the horses that the Spanish introduced to the Americas that later increased their mobility. But they never built a wheel or a pulley, their folk remedies were insufficient for major diseases (they introduced syphilis to the Europeans but never found an effective way to treat it themselves). The same raw ingredients were available in the Americas as in China and Europe, yet they never manufactured gunpowder, even after they learned about from European settlers. They were dependent on the white man for the rifles they owned, the ammunition they shot, the steel knives and axes that could hold an edge, unlike their stone tools and weapons.
They simply were too poorly equipped and too small a number to resist a more advanced and populus civilization. One had to give way, and in each and every case, it was the "savages." Darwin was wrong in thinking the more advanced civilizations would eliminate the less advance--unless of course he was speaking of the less advanced civilization being absorbed by the more advanced group so they eventually became one, rather than being killed off. That has happened to a large extent and continues to this day around the world.
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