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Chapter 30. Effects of Social Inequality 651
other by reason of Independent relations with common third persons, or
the like. Such contacts are the most numerous type, except possibly on the
plantation and in other rural areas where either the Negro or the white
population forms a small proportion of the total. Casual contacts are
important in an urban civilization. But they, are especially important in
Negro-white contacts, since they are only slightly diminished by patterns of
segregation and discrimination as compared to other types of Negro-white
contacts. Since the casual contact is one in which the participants have no
occasion to regard each other as individuals but only as members of a
group, the main efect of the casual contact would seem to be a strength-
ening of stereotypes. Negroes, but not whites, have something of an antidote
for the casual contact in their economic contact with whites. The main effect
of casual contacts is, therefore, to create and preserve stereotypes of
Negroes in the minds of the whites. This is not to say that casual contacts
are the only, or even the most important, cause of stereotypes of Negroes.
But the impersonality of the comparatively numerous casual contacts allows
whites to see Negroes as a relatively uniform biological and social type and
to ignore the great variations that would become apparent if observation
were more attentive. All Negroes come to look alike to the average white
person.
Casual contact between Negroes and whites is probably increasing as
Negroes—and whites—are becoming more mobile and as the scope of
Negro activity is becoming broader. Also it has been taking on a slightly
different character as it enters the urban environment. In a city it is some-
times impossible to avoid close physical contact. Negroes and whites jostle
each other unconcernedly on crowded streets, and Negroes have been
observed to be standing in the white sections of crowded Jim Crow buses.
The increase of casual contacts in Southern cities is undoubtedly wearing
away somewhat the strictness of racial etiquette.
The increased range of casual contacts in recent years is not unrelated
to the growth of a Negro upper class. This Is especially important in the
North, where there are no laws against Negroes using public facilities. A
well-mannered Negro dressed in good taste who appears in a restaurant, a
white church, or a railroad station is likely to weaken unfavorable Negro
stereotypes rather than to strengthen them. In the South the effect of the
appearance of the upper class Negro is somewhat more problematical. In
the long run this will probably have a favorable effect, but in many known
instances it has led to violence from lower and middle class whites who
felt that the Negroes were getting too ^^uppity.” The Negroes physical
appurtenances—that is, his home, store, or automobile—^will serve as a
casual contact in the same manner as his person.
The effect of increased casual contacts due to increased Negro mobility
has, thus far and when considered alone, probably hurt the Negro in the
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