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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VIII. Social Stratification - 31. Caste and Class - 3. The Caste Struggle
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682 An American Dilemma
where they have legal protection and the suffrage, the situation is becom-
ing different. There they will fight.®
But Negro solidarity produced by caste pressure and appearing as a
mutually protective cohesion has its function in more ordinary and every-
day problems. Even then it has nothing of the strength and regularity of
white solidarity. Perhaps we can best illustrate the difference by observing
the Negro who breaks caste solidarity. The Negro counterpart to the
“nigger lover” is the “white man’s nigger.” He is much less exceptional.
In the Negro community there is no fuss about his motives: they are simply
assumed to be the selfish ones of attempting to benefit from playing up to
the whites. His crime is not that he “fraternizes” with individuals of the
other caste, but, quite the contrary, that he submits to excessive subservience
and that he takes orders and carries them out even against the interests of
his own caste. He will usually not be universally condemned by the Negro
community. There are regularly other Negroes who would be prepared
to take the same role or are actually doing it. In a way he is only exaggerat-
ing the “natural” role of the lower caste individual. To the white man he
is a “good” Negro, continuing the cherished tradition from slavery. He
puts the white man into his “natural” aristocratic role and becomes rewarded
with condescending, benevolence.*’
The disapproval of the “white man’s nigger” in the Negro community
will depend upon the relative material and cultural independence of the
community and usually varies directly with the social and educational status
of the reacting individual Negro. It never approaches the rage, on the
other side of the caste line, against a “nigger lover.” His white protection
will make the “white man’s nigger” powerful. I have observed in several
instances, both in the South and in the North, that individuals who are
notorious as “white man’s niggers” or “Uncle Toms” have a status in the
Negro community for this very reason. Negroes in general, even if they
dislike them, and, in a sense, despise them, are nevertheless inclined to
envy them and give them deference at the same time. Negroes ordinarily,
it must be remembered, depend upon the good-will and help of whites in
most matters. When Negroes want something done in their community,
they will send their “Uncle Toms” as intermediaries. They will often
do so even if they know in the individual case that those persons are
thoroughly unreliable from the Negro point of view and, perhaps, that
they actually act as spies and stool pigeons for the whites. The Negroes
know that they will not succeed if they try to ignore the white man’s
trusted Negroes. The “white man’s nigger” exists in the North as well
as in the South, but he is rarer and has less influence in his own caste.
In the South he is sometimes an humble uneducated servant or ex-servant,
•See Chapter 27, Section 5.
® See Chapter 34.
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