Note:
Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
Therefore, this work is protected by copyright,
restricting your legal rights to reproduce it.
However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now.
Read more about copyright.
Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 30. Effects of Social Inequality - 1. The Incidence of Social Inequality
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
642 An American Dilemma
progressive, prosperous, and, on the other hand, to imagine him humbly acquiescent
in his status as a social pariah. The thing is out of the question; such saintlike humil-
ity has long ceased to form any part of the moral equipment of the American negro.
The bullet could never be thoroughly encysted; it would always irritate, rankle,
fester.®
If the Negroes were to rise out of illiteracy, economic distress, and so on,
they would no longer have the psychological basis for keeping themselves
socially inferior and servile. It is possible that a limited social segregation,
purified of all elements of discrimination—of the type the Southern white
liberals have dreamed of—would perhaps solve the problem. But this is
far beyond present-day practical discussion.
There is a fundamental flaw in that distinction between what is purely
social and all the rest of discrimination against Negroes. Social discrimina-
tion is powerful as a means of keeping the Negroes down in all other
respects. In reality it is not possible to isolate a sphere of life and call it
‘^social.” There is, in fact, a ^^social” angle to all relations. When the
Negro is disfranchised or kept from public office, the motivation of the
whites is partly that political activity is ^^out of place” for Negroes. When
he is discriminated against in courts or by the police, the justification is
that he is ^finferior” and that he must be ^^kept in his place.” If his citizen-
ship rights were no longer infringed upon, the Negroes social status would
immediately rise as well, and—quite apart from state action made possible
by his political power—much of the psychological basis for social inequality
would be undermined. The very existence of the heavy mechanism of
social segregation and discrimination makes inequalities in politics and
justice more possible and seemingly justifiable on grounds of inferiority.
The interrelations between social status and economic activity are partic-
ularly important. Occupations have numerous social connotations. In the
first place, they help to give social status. As long as Negroes, solely
because of their color, are forcibly held in a lower social status, they will
be shut out from all middle class occupations except in their own segregated
social world. White nurses, stenographers, bank clerks, and store attendants
will decline to work with Negroes, especially when the white person is a
woman and the Negro a man. If social segregation is to be carried out in
the factories, it will be expensive to the employer since he will have to
provide special coordinating facilities and separate toilets, washrooms and
lunchrooms. The same tendencies will work in public employment, in the
schools, and in the armed forces j
the only difference being that in public
employment the state authority might be made to interfere and enforce
equality. If a Negro holds any high occupational position, he will seem
pretentious.
At the lower end of the occupational scale the tendencies are more
complicated. It is clear that white workers with a lower and more uncertain
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
