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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 29. Patterns of Social Segregation and Discrimination - 2. Segregation and Discrimination in Interpersonal Relations
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Chapter 29. Social Segregation and Discrimination 617
the Pasteur treatment. I got up and walked out. He followed me and called me
everything but a child of God. He certainly did scare me. It is against the law to
refuse the Pasteur treatment, but I never got it.^®
Whether the rule or etiquette will be broken will obviously depend on
the nature of the situation, on the presence or absence of white spectators
and on the personality of the white man. A study of the effects on the white
man^s attitudes toward the etiquette and toward his own behavior would
shed a great deal of light both on the nature of the etiquette and on human
nature. Negroes seldom meet the problem since they are supposed to
render assistance to whites under almost all circumstances. This fact only
increases their bitterness when whites fail to reciprocate. There are certain
situations, however, in which Negroes have the choice of refusing to aid
a white person in need because they can avoid doing so without fear of
detection. Such a revenge situation provides a subject for study parallel
to that mentioned for whites. Even apart from the revenge motive, a
Southern Negro, who is passing through territory where he is not known,
has good reasons not to stop and offer his services, as he never knows what
might come of it in the end. If the white person is a woman, he would be
taking a considerable risk in offering to help her.
Conditions are sufficiently different in the North to lead us to regard
the pattern of segregation and discrimination in interpersonal relations as
having a different basis. It certainly does not cover the whole gamut of
interpersonal relations but is spotty: it restricts marriage, but does not for-
bid itj it restricts dancing and swimming together but not eating and
drinking together j
it does not affect speech and body actions during speech.
The Northern pattern could hardly be called an etiquette because it does not
require that Negroes act in a special way toward whites or that whites act
in a special way toward Negroes. Rather it takes the form of institu-
tionalizing and rendering impersonal a limited number of types of segre-
gation: Negroes are requested not to use bathing beaches reserved for
whites 5
Negroes are requested not to patronize certain dance halls, hotels,
and restaurants, and things are made unpleasant for them if they do.
There is no organized force to stop intermarriage in most Northern states
—whether legal or illegal. The pressure against intermarriage is simply,
but effectively, the unorganized one of public opinion. Too, there seems to
be little connection in motivation between the types of relations in which
there is segregation and discrimination. It would seem much more reason-
able in the North than in the South to accept the belief that Negroes are
dirty as the main reason why they are not liked on the same bathing
beaches. This belief is more natural for Northerners, since there is quite a
bit of physical touch contact between Negroes and whites in the South and
little in the North. Southerners tie up the bathing prohibition to the
sexual prohibition—which Northerners less frequently do. Economic rea
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