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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - I. The Approach - 3. Facets of the Negro Problem - 2. The Anti-Amalgamation Doctrine
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54 An American Dilemma
the Japanese- America fears the segregation into distinctive isolated groups
of all other elements of its population and looks upon the preservation of
their separate national attributes and group loyalties as a hazard to Ameri-
can institutions. Considerable efforts are directed toward ^^Americanizing’’
all groups of alien origin. But in regard to the colored peoples, the Ameri-
can policy is the reverse. They are excluded from assimilation. Even by their
best friends in the dominant white group and by the promoters of racial
peace and good-will, they are usually advised to keep to themselves and
develop a race pride of their own.
Among the groups commonly considered unassimilable, the Negro peo-
ple is by far the largest. The Negroes do not, like the Japanese and the
Chinese, have a politically organized nation and an accepted culture of their
own outside of America to fall back upon. Unlike the Oriental, there
attaches to the Negro an historical memory of slavery and inferiority. It
is more difficult for them to answer prejudice with prejudice and, as the
Orientals may do, to consider themselves and their history superior to the
white Americans and their recent cultural achievements. The Negroes do
not have these fortifications for self-respect. They are more helplessly
imprisoned as a subordinate caste in America, a caste ® of people deemed to
be lacking a cultural past and assumed to be incapable of a cultural future.
To the ordinary white American the caste line .between whites and
Negroes is based upon, and defended by, the anti-amalgamation doctrine.
This doctrine, more than anything else, gives the Negro problem its unique-
ness among other problems of lower status groups, not only in terms of
intensity of feelings but more fundamentally in the character of the
problem. We follow a general methodological principle, presented pre-
viously, when we now start out from the ordinary white man’s notion of
what constitutes the heart of the Negro problem.
When the Negro people, unlike the white minority groups, is commonly
characterized as unassimilable, it is not, of course, implied that amalgama-
tion is not biologically possible. But crossbreeding is considered undesir-
able. Sometimes the view is expressed that the offspring of cross-
breeding is inferior to both parental stocks. Usually it is only asserted that
it is inferior to the ^‘pure” white stock. The assumption evidently held
is that the Negro stock is ‘‘inferior” to the white stock. On the inherited
• In this inquiry \vc shall use the term “caste” to denote the social status difference
between Negroes and whites in America, The concept and its implications will be discussed
in some detail in Part VIII. It should be emphasized that, although the dividing line
between Negroes and whites is held fixed and rigid so that no Negro legitimately can pass
over from his caste to the higher white caste, the relations between members of the two
castes are different in different regions and social classes and changing in time. It is true
that the term “caste” commonly connotes a static situation even in the latter respect. How-
ever, for a social phenomenon we prefer to use a social concept with too static connotations
rather than tlie biological concept “race” which, of course, carries not only static but many
much more erroneous connotations.
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