Note:
Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
Therefore, this work is protected by copyright,
restricting your legal rights to reproduce it.
However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now.
Read more about copyright.
Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - I. The Approach - 2. Encountering the Negro Problem - 6. The Convenience of Ignorance
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
Chapter 2. Encountering the Negro Problem 41
It thus happens that not only the man in the street, but also the pro-
fessional man, shows ignorance in his own field of work. One meets physi-
cians who hold absurd ideas about the anatomical characteristics of the Negro
people or about the frequency of disease among the Negroes in their
own community; educators who have succeeded in keeping wholly unaware
of the results of modern intelligence research; lawyers who believe that
practically all the lynchings are caused by rape; ministers of the gospel
who know practically nothing about Negro churches in their own town.
In the North, particularly in such groups where contacts with Negroes are
lacking or scarce, the knowledge might not be. greater, but the number of
erroneous conceptions seems much smaller. The important thing and the
reason for suspecting this ignorance to be part of the escape apparatus is
that knowledge is constantly twisted in one direction—toward classifying
the Negro low and the white high.
The ignorance about the Negro is the more striking as the Southerner
is himself convinced that he “knows the Negro,” while the Yankee is sup-
posedly ignorant on the subject. The insistence on the part of the Southern
whites that they have reliable and intimate knowledge about the Negro
problem is one of the most pathetic stereotypes in the South. In fact, the
average Southerner “knows” the Negro and the interracial problem as the
patient “knows” the toothache—in the sense that he feels a concern—not
as the diagnosing dentist knows his own or his patient’s trouble. He further
“knows” the Negro in the sense that he is brought up to use a social tech-
nique in dealing with Negroes by which he is able to get them into sub-
missive patterns of behavior. This technique is simple; I have often
observed that merely speaking the Southern dialect works the trick.
Segregation is now becoming so complete that the white Southerner
practically never secs a Negro except as his servant and in other stan-
dardized and formalized caste situatipns. The situation may have been dif-
ferent in the old patriarchial times with their greater abundance of primary
contacts. Today the average Southerner of middle or upper class status
seems to be just as likely as the typical Northerner to judge all Negroes by
his cook, and he is definitely more disposed than the Northerner to draw
the widest conclusions from this restricted source of information. I have
also found that the white participants in the work of the local interracial
commissions—who are not typical Southerners because they are extraor-
dinarily friendly to the Negro and are looked upon as local experts on the
race problem—regularly stress the importance of those meetings in bring-
ing together representatives of the two races so that they can “come to know
each other.” They often confess how vastly their own knowledge of the
Negro has increased because they, in these meetings, had a chance to talk to
Reverend So-and-so or Doctor So-and-so. These testimonies are the more
telling when one has been present at a few of these interracial meetings
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
