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Chapter 30. Effects of Social Inequality 657
they came to resent discrimination and felt it necessary to withdraw from
white society to hold these advantages of America. Lord Bryce observed:
Slaves or serfs who have been bred up to look upon subjection as their natural
lot bear it as the dispensation of Nature. When they have attained a measure of
independence, when they speak the tongue and read the books and begin to share
the ideas of the dominant race, they resent the inferiority, be it legal or social, to
which they find themselves condemned. Discontent appears and social friction is
intensified, not only because occasions for it grow more frequent, but because the
temper of each race is more angry and suspicious.^®
The paradox is that h is the very absorption of modern American culture
which is the force driving the Negroes to self-segregation to preserve self-
respect, It is, indeed, an impossible proposition to educate the American
Negroes and at the same time to keep them satisfied with their lower caste
position. To try to make it possible, the white Americans should, at least,
have given them a different kind of education. But this has not been pos-
sible in the face of the American Creed. The attempts to keep the Negroes
shut out of the wider national and world culture by purposively stamping
them with a low-grade vocational education for a servant and peasant life
have never, after Reconstruction, been wholehearted enough^ to prevent
the kindling of unrest and resentment.
White Southerners arc still proud of insisting that they^^^ioW the
Negro,” but the observer easily finds out that the actual ignorance about
the other group is often astonishingly great. The average Southerner
knows roughly—with many easily detected opportunistic gaps—the history
of the Negro and the conditions under which Negroes live in the South.
His lack of knowledge is of the Negro himself as an individual human
being—of his ambitions and hopes, of his capacities and achievements. He
zealously cultivates barren half-truths into rigid stereotypes about “the
Negro race.” Because of this pretentious ignorance, and because of the
etiquette, the white Southerner cannot talk to a Negro as man to man and
understand him. This, and the habit of living physically near this strange
and unknown people—and resisting energetically the incorporation of it
into the total life of the community—^breeds among Southern whites a
strained type of systematic human indifference and callousness. Although
the Southerner will not adnlit it, he is beset by guilt-feelings, knowing as
he does that his attitude toward the Negroes is un-American and un-Chris-
tian. Hence he needs to dress his systematic ignorance in stereotypes. The
Southern whites need the sanctioning tradition: “the Negroes we have
always with us.” They need the ceremonial distance to prevent the Ne-
groes^ injuries and sufferings from coming to their attention. W. E. B. Du
Bois comments bitterly:
“ Sec Chapter 4 1
.
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