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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 4. Racial Beliefs - 6. The Racial Beliefs of the Unsophisticated - 7. Beliefs with a Purpose
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lOI
Chapter 4. Racial Beliefs
disgusting. Like them he is also humorous in a way, and it is possible to
pity him. As the devil with his goat^s foot is earth-bound in a sinister sense,
so the Negro is also more part of ^‘nature” than the white man. The old
theologians of the South meant something specific when they equipped the
Negro with a disproportionate amount of original sin just as Christian
theologians generally characterize the devil as a fallen angel. Behind all
these associations is the heritage of magic and primitive religion which
we carry from prehistoric time and which is always with us in metaphorical
meanings attached to the words we use.
The stereotyped opinions of the Negro express themselves in institu-
tionalized behavior, in jokes and stories, and in fiction. Fiction as a sound-
ing board for, and as a magnifier of, popular prejudices is an object for
research which deserves much more attention. The printed word has an
easily detected magical import and authority for the unintellectual mind.*
It is generalized. People want to see their favorite opinions set forth and
elaborated in print.^^ One of the sources for studying the stereotyped
opinions on the •Negro is, therefore, fiction.**®
7. Beliefs with a Purpose
The low plane of living, the cultural isolation, and all the resulting
bodily, intellectual, and moral disabilities and distortions of the average
Negro make it natural for the ordinary white man not only to see that the
Negro is inferior but also to believe honestly that the Negro’s inferiority
is inborn. This belief means, of course, that all attempts to improve the
Negro by education, health reforms, or merely by giving him his rights
as a worker and a citizen must seem to be less promising of success than
they otherwise would be. The Negro is judged to be fundamentally incor-
rigible and he is, therefore, kept in a slum existence which, in its turn,
leaves the imprint upon his body and soul which makes it natural for the
white man to believe in his inferiority.^ This is a vicious circle j
it is, indeed,
one of the chief examples of cumulative causation.*^ From a practical point
of view, it signifies that one of the ways, in the long run, to raise the white
man’s estimate of the Negro is to improve the Negro’s status and, thereby,
his qualities. It means also, however, that one of the chief hindrances to
improving the Negro is the white man’s firm belief in his inferiority. **. . .
what the greater part of white America merely thinks about us is an influ-
• Every lawyer knows from experience that by presenting a printed blank of a drafted
contract, he can much more easily get anyone to sign it than if it was written for the
occasion.
**
“ . the haughty American Nation . . , makes the negro clean its boots and then proves
tlic moral and physical inferiority of the negro by the fact that he is a shoeblack.” (George
Bernard Shaw, Man and, Sufervtan [1916J first edition, 1903], p. xviii.)
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