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Chapter 30. Effects of Social Inequality 647
groups. This is a heavy cost for Southern society, and it might create great
dangers in the future.^*
The behavior patterns and attitudes of the small Negro middle and
upper class group are of greatest importance for the whole Negro people
as they set the standards which are spread from the pulpit and the teacher’s
desk, by the influential Negro press and through Social imitation. As has
already been suggested, popular education in America is even more essen-
tially directed on the dissemination of middle class views and ways of life
than in most other countries. The cultural rise of the Negro masses means
their gradual approach to middle class standards. Negro education is now
segregated in the South nearly to the limit and is, consequently, in the
hands of this spiritually isolated Negro middle and upper class group.
White people do not know much about what goes on in Negro schools or
what is printed in the Negro press. They would be shocked if they knew.
But more fundamentally, white people are caught in the contradictions of
their own thinking. The white control of the Negro schools cannot check,
and cannot be intent upon checking, the spread among Negroes of the
middle class attitudes leading to Negro social withdrawal. This is what
the whites have asked for. Racial pride and voluntary isolation is increas-
ingly becoming the pattern for the whole Negro people. Lower class
Negro parents now teach their children to keep out of the way of white
people.
Meanwhile the old bonds of intimacy between upper class white families
and their Negro servants have been breaking down. This process started
immediately after Emancipation but is not yet fully consummated. Con-
tacts are becoming less personal and intensive, more formal, temporary and
casual. In so far as Negro professionals increasingly are taking care of the
souls and the bodies of Negroes generally, the result is not only the
creation of a culturally isolated Negro middle and upper class but also, on
the other side of the fence, a new barrier to communication between white
people and lower class Negroes.^® In their daily work also Negroes and
whites have been becoming increasingly separated. The only exception in the
South to the general trend of increasing separation is the recent coming
together of Negro and white workers in the new labor unions.
Voluntary withdrawal is now becoming a habit in all social classes of
Negroes.^® It can be observed on the street. It can be seen in the stores.
Raper describes a general store in the rural South, for example:
Both races frequent the same store, at the same time, for the same purpose; whites
and blacks stand together at the counter and buy. Negroes can buy anything, in any
part of the store, at any time they have the money or credit to secure it. The mem-
bers of the two races, however, mingle in the store only when they occupy the
status of prospective purchasers, only when they are moving.
As soon as the Negroes have finished their buying, they tend to move off to
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