Note:
Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
Therefore, this work is protected by copyright,
restricting your legal rights to reproduce it.
However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now.
Read more about copyright.
Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VIII. Social Stratification - 32. The Negro Class Structure - 3. Color and Class - 4. The Classes in the Negro Community
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
700 An American Dilemma
But, as Wirth and Goldhamer point out, “It is important to recognize . . .
that in a sense ever’y Negro, whether light or dark, is a marginal man in
American society.”^® And skin color is only one factor among many creat-
ing personality problems for Negroes.
4. The Classes in the Negro Community*
The static or cross-sectional configuration of the Negro class system,
particularly as it is observable in the South, has recently been delineated in
a number of community studies,®® and we know much more on this topic
today than we did ten years ago. In all these studies the conventional
division of a population into three classes
—“lower class,” “middle class,”
“upper class”—^has been applied to the Negro community.®^ Some of these
studies, further, subdivide each of the three classes into two. It is quite
convenient for the investigator to describe two extremes—the lower and
upper classes—and then handle the great amount of variation by describing
a middle class between them. We shall follow this pattern for the conven-
ience of both ourselves and the reader. It should be understood that the
description is in terms of the average, the general and the typical. Actually
each class has a considerable amount of variation and there are often indi-
viduals who are complete exceptions. The actual situation, it must be
remembered, is one of a continuum of social status, with an imperfect
correlation between the factors making up social status and between social
status and the other traits which are to be ascribed to the various classes.
There are also differences between regions and communities, and the class
structure is constantly changing.
The Negro lower clasSy as it is usually described, contains the large
majority of Negroes everywhere.®’ Any reasonable criteria used to describe
the white lower class would, when applied to Negroes, put the majority of
the latter in the lower class.®® They are the unskilled or semi-skilled laborers
and domestic workers of the cities in the South and the North j
and the
agricultural wage laborers, tenants and household servants in Southern
rural districts. During the ’thirties a large portion of this group has, perma-
nently or temporarily, been on relief. Incomes are low and uncertain j
emphasized that he was “the descendant of slave owners,” which, of course, is not uncom-
mon in the Negro world, but in his announcement it had a definitely sadistic and hateful
import. I have been with many passers j
with the exception mentioned, they did not show
any extraordinary hatred of Negroes or any abnormal fixation on “white blood.” Fair-
skinned nonpassing Negroes are generally conscious of their social advantage and are
sometimes cautiously critical of the black masses. They do not ordinarily appear particularly
ofiF balance, but are rather inclined to belong to the complacent type of well-accommodated
fetit bourgeois Negro.
• For other dynamic interpretations of Negro classes, sec: E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro
Family in tht United States ( 1939 ), pp. 393-475 > and Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner,
and Mary R. Ga’dner, Deep South (194.1), Chapters 9 and \o.
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
