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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 30. Effects of Social Inequality - 2. Increasing Isolation
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648 An American Dilemma
themselves. When a Negro goes to sit down at the stove, he just naturally, it seems,
sits by a member of his own race. Other Negroes drift in and the “Negro side” of
the stove, which may be any side, reaches two-thirds around; half an hour later,
the “white side,” may take up two-thirds of the circle. All day long this circle
around the stove gradually changes its racial complexion, with almost no intermixing
of the races. The seating is not prearranged, and doubtless the sitters themselves arc
unaware of the typical arrangement, which anyone may observe for himself by
“hanging around” a store in the rural portions of [a] county.^^
Even the children keep apart. When occasionally they play together—only
in very young ages and then only in the lower classes—the picture is
usually one like that observed in Washington, D.C., by E. Franklin
Frazier:
The colored children seemed to form a play group within a play group, the
white children’s talk almost all being addressed to other white children. Moreover,
the colored children seemed to hang back and let the white children take the lead
during the play. The colored children stood around and watched the white children
as if admiring them. However, when the number of colored children increased and
the two groups were about equal in numbers, the colored children showed much
greater courage in swinging higher and longer on the limb, and much less fear than
did the white children. ... It is apparent from their overt behavior that the colored
children hesitated to participate freely in the play group until they had the support
of larger numbers of their own race. Even then it appears that they did not partici-
pate individually but rather as a group. Their self-consciousness was indicated not
only by their initial hesitancy about participating freely in the play but also by their
attempt to outstrip the white children.^*
The present writer has made similar observations in all sorts of life
situations:
1 once visited a progressive prison in the North, one of the very finest institutions
of its kind 1 have ever seen. The director pointed out to me that he was most eager
to avoid every vestige of segregation between white and Negro prisoners. The
individual cells where they slept during the night were allotted them in the alpha-
betic order of their names. But when I looked at the prisoners playing ball, the
picture was one of separate cliques of whites and Negroes. Balls were passed from
one clique to another but apparently always with minute observance of the color line.
The director saw my reflection and explained to me that he has now given up
fighting against the prisoners’ self-segregation. He had even allowed the common
rooms to be divided between the two groups. “The Negroes are nearly all born in
the South,” he commented. “If I were ignorant about the American race order in
which they are all brought up, I should believe that this tenacious segregation is in
their blood, or, at least, that the Negroes are just as eager to withdraw as the whites.
In a sense they arc. But in a deeper sense they are not. It is just social pressure con-
gealed into habit.”
This all seems to give a confirmation of the Southern white stereotype
that “Negroes are happiest among themselves.” and that by the mass of
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