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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 29. Patterns of Social Segregation and Discrimination - 1. Facts and Beliefs Regarding Segregation and Discrimination - 2. Segregation and Discrimination in Interpersonal Relations
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6o6 An American Dilemma
has to be subservient in every contact with whites and try to ^^keep out of
trouble.” As already mentioned, the white people in the North often do
not realize the scope of actual segregation and discrimination against
Negroes, while Negroes in the North, particularly in the upper and middle
classes, have beliefs which are wrong in the other direction. These deviations
of belief from reality are interesting and worth study. But, to repeat,
statements purporting to describe general patterns of segregation and
discrimination without systematic quantitative evidence—whether offered
spontaneously or after questioning—may be expected to be deficient as
descriptions of actual conditions.
We shall consider social segregation and discrimination under three
categories: personal, residential, institutional. As we have seen, segregation
in interpersonal relations is partly basic to most other forms of segregation
and discrimination. Because of the strategic place it holds in the minds
of white people, we shall consider it as the peak category of the rank order
of social segregation and discrimination.® Much of what we shall have to
say about the personal sphere is peculiar to the South and is unknown to
Northerners. Residential and institutional segregation, on the other hand,
are found in the North almost as much as in the South. Residential segre-
gation is treated before institutional because it facilitates the latter by
creating ^^natural” groupings of Negroes separate from whites.
2. Segregation and Discrimination in Interpersonal Relations
The ban on intermarriage has the highest place in the white man’s rank
order of social segregation and discrimination. Sexual segregation is the
most pervasive form of segregation, and the concern about ‘^race purity”
is, in a sense, basic. No other way of crossing the color line is so attended
by the emotion commonly associated with violating a social taboo as inter-
marriage and extra-marital relations between a Negro man and a white
woman.^ No excuse for other forms of social segregation and discrimination
is so potent as the one that sociable relations on an equal basis between
members of the two races may ’possibly lead to intermarriage.
Intermarriage is prohibited by law in all the Southern states, in all but
five of the non-Southern states west of the Mississippi River, but only in
Indiana among the Northern states east of the Mississippi.^ In practice
there is little intermarriage even where it is not prohibited, since the social
isolation from the white world that the white partner must undergo is
generally intolerable even to those few white people who have enough
social contact and who are unprejudiced enough to consider marriage with
Negroes.* It is said that—as a reaction to the white attitude and as a matter
of ^‘race pride”—the Negro community also is increasingly likely to
* See Chapter 3, Section 4, and Chapter 28, Section 6.
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