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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - I. The Approach - 3. Facets of the Negro Problem - 5. Relationships between Lower Class Groups
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Chapter 3. Facets of the Negro Problem 69
considerable mobility, especially in the North, the Negroes are held apart
from the whites by caste, which furnishes a formidable bar to mutual
identification and solidarity.
It has often occurred to me, when reflecting upon the responses I get
from white laboring people on this strategic question, that my friends among
the younger Negro intellectuals, whose judgment I otherwise have
learned to admire greatly, have perhaps, and for natural reasons, not had
enough occasion to find out for themselves what a bitter, spiteful, and
relentless feeling often prevails against the Negroes among lower class
white people in America. Again relying upon my own observations, I have
become convinced that the laboring Negroes do not resent whites in any
degree comparable with the resentment shown in the opposite direction
by the laboring whites. The competitive situation is, and is likely to remain,
highly unstable.
It must be admitted that, in the midst of harsh caste resentment, signs
of newborn working class solidarity are not entirely lacking j
we shall have
to discuss these recent tendencies in some detail in order to evaluate the
resultant trend and the prospects for the future.® On this point there
seems, however, to be a danger of wishful thinking present in most writ-
ings on the subject. The Marxian solidarity between the toilers of all the
earth will, indeed, have a long way to go as far as concerns solidarity of
the poor white Americans with the toiling Negro. This is particularly true
of the South but true also of the communities in the North where the
Negroes arc numerous and competing with the whites for employment.
Our hypothesis is similar to the view taken by an older group of Negro
writers and by most white writers who have touched this crucial question:
that the Negro’s friend—or the one who is least unfriendly—is still rather
the upper class of white people, the people with economic and social security
who are truly a ^^noncompeting group.” There are many things in the
economic, political, and social history of the Negro which are simply
inexplicable by the Marxian theory of class solidarity but which fit into
our hypothesis of the predominance of internal lower class struggle. Du
Bois, in Black Reconstruction
y
argues that it would have been desirable
if after the Civil War the landless Negroes and the poor whites had joined
hands to retain political power and carry out a land reform and a progres-
sive government in the Southern states j
one sometimes feels that he thinks
it would have been a possibility.^^ From our point of view such a possibility
did not exist at all, and the negative outcome was neither an accident nor
a result of simple deception or delusion. These two groups, illiterate and
insecure in an impoverished South, placed in an intensified competition
with each other, lacking every trace of primary solidarity, and marked off
from each other by color and tradition, could not possibly be expected to
* See Chapter 1 8.
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