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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 29. Patterns of Social Segregation and Discrimination - 2. Segregation and Discrimination in Interpersonal Relations
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Chapter 29. Social Segregation and Discrimination 607
ostracize mixed couples. This reaction is, however, much more pronounced
toward illicit relations involving Negro women, and it has there the good
reason that such relations are mostly of an exploitative type.
Extra-marital relations between Negro men and white women are all
but nonexistent in the South.® If an incident occurs and is detected, it is
either punished by the courts as rape, or the Negro is lynched, or he is
run out of town. (The white woman is also run out of town if it becomes
known that her action was voluntary.) In the North the sanctions are not
so violent. There seems to be some small amount of interracial sexual
experimentation in bohemian and radical circles involving Negro men
and white women. There are also some white prostitutes catering to Negro
men. The extent of extra-marital relations between white men and Negro
women is a subject on which investigators give divergent estimates,® but
there can be no doubt that it is a fairly common phenomenon throughout
the South® and the North. Though tolerated, it is far from favored by
public opinion and is usually clandestine.^ It is also increasingly of a
casual type. The old custom of white men keeping Negro concubines is
disappearing in the South^ and is rare in the North.
The prohibition of intermarriage in most states and the concomitant lack
of effective legal protection—for claiming inheritance and alimony, for
example—undoubtedly tend to decrease the deterrents on white men to
take sexual advantage of Negro women. Miscegenation will thereby be
kept on a higher level than under a system where the interests of Negro
women and their mixed offspring were more equally protected.® The
practically complete absence of intermarriage in all states has the social
effect of preventing the most intimate type of acceptance into white
society: if Negroes can never get into a white family, they can never be
treated as “one of the family.” Perhaps more important in the South as
an effect of the lack of sanction for intermarriage is the regimentation of
the whole gamut of contacts between adult members of the two races so
that these contacts will be as impersonal as possible. This is commonly
called “the etiquette of race relations.”® This ceremonious attitude in race
relations is especially striking when we consider that the American tends
to be unceremonious in all his other relations. Although the racial etiquette
* See Chapter 5, Section 6.
**
According to Jenks, one Southern (Louisiana) and two Northern (Nevada and South
Dakota) states have laws against cohabitation and concubinage between members of the two
races, as well as laws against intermarriage. (Albert E. Jenks, “The Legal Status of Negro-
White Amalgamation in the United States,” T/te American Journal of Sociology [March,
1916], p. 671.)
* This is the chief argument—^besides general considerations of civil liberty and equality
—of Negro spokesmen who want to have the ban on intermarriage abolished (See Walter
White, Rofe and Faggot [1929], pp. 77 ff.)
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