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Chapter 30. Effects of Social Inequality 661
of the North’s labor troubles. Even the Southern liberal has the habit of
never mentioning a fault of the South without mentioning a corresponding
condition in the North. Many a Northern visitor to the South gets the
feeling that the South is “still fighting the Civil War.” But, as Kelly
Miller observed, the “you also” argument is never resorted to except in
palliation of conduct that is felt to be intrinsically indefensible.^^
Southerners travel and migrate and are visited by Northerners and
Europeans. They listen to the radio*"*^^ and read papers, magazines and books
directed to the wider national audience. Southern writers—in social science,
politics, and belles-lettres—aspire to national recognition and not only pro-
vincial applause. The thesis that the region is poor and culturally backward,
and that this is largely due to the presence of the Negroes and to the
Southern Negro policy, has been for a long time developed by Southern
authors. The average Southerner is beginning to feel the need for funda-
mental reforms. Many Southern newspapers have become liberal. Inter-
racial work is beginning to be recognized as socially respectable.
The diffusion of scientific knowledge regarding race cannot be region-
alized any more effectively than it can be segregated along a color line.
Racial beliefs are becoming undermined, at least for the younger genera-
tion in the middle and upper classes. Most of them never reach the printing
press or the microphone any more, as they are no longer intellectually
respectable. The educated classes of whites are gradually coming to regard
those who believe in the Negro’s biological inferiority as narrow-minded
and backward. When a person arrives at the point where he says that he
knows his views are irrational but that “they are just instinctive” with
him, he is beginning to retreat from these views.
The capital N in “Negro” is finding its way into the Southern newspapers
as it earlier did into books. It is becoming a mark of education in the white
South to speak of Negroes as “niggras” and not as “niggers”—a com-
promise pronunciation which still offends the Yankee Negro but is a great
step from the Southern white man’s traditional point of view. In Southern
newspapers Negro problems and Negro activity even outside crime are
beginning to be commented upon, not only to draw Negro subscribers, but
also because these matters are actually found to be of some general com-
munity interest. Letters from Negroes are not infrequently printed and
sometimes the content discussed with respect. It would be no great revolu-
tion, at least not in the Upper South, if a newspaper one morning carried
a portrait of a distinguished Negro on the front page. In liberal newspapers
in the Upper South, Negro pictures have already occasionally been printed
in the back pages.
The educated, respectable, self-possessed Negro is to the average white
Southerner not so often as earlier just the “smart nigger” or the “uppity
nigger.” As the South becomes urbanized and some Negroes rise in status,
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