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(1944) [MARC] Author: Gunnar Myrdal
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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.

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Chapter 36. Protest Motive and Negro Personality 765
not accept them, they are doomed to loneliness together with some few like-
minded and like-classed Negroes.
The students at Negro colleges enjoy a particularly protected life for
some years, and it will be found that often the entire campus, or at least the
majority cliques, arrange their life according to this pattern of isolation
from the whites and from the Negro masses. They ordinarily meet difficul-
ties in keeping it up in later life when they have left college. But many will
try. The observer finds in Negro communities everywhere individual fam-
ilies or clusterings of families of this sortj in the bigger cities they form
small exclusive societies. By their escape into class they have, however,
only succeeded in isolating themselves from the Negroes, but have not
succeeded in integrating themselves into the wider world, either socially
and economically or ideologically. Their personality situation is usually
more cramped than that of ordinary members of the Negro caste. While
making it a policy to overlook caste humiliations, some small incident may,
as we pointed out, cause them to flare up in accumulated resentment.
Most upper class Negroes cannot sustain and cannot afford for economic
reasons even to attempt the isolation from the Negro caste which this type
of escape presupposes. They must identify themselves with ^Uhe race?^ But
their class is also important to them. They often then try to take the whole
“race” along in an imaginary escape into class. Many Negroes who by
individual ability, hard work, or luck have succeeded in climbing the social
ladder in the Negro community—often thanks to social monopolies created
by the segregation and discrimination they protest against—feel satisfied
with their own exceptional success only to the degree that they generalize
it and think of it as applicable to the whole race. They are then inclined to
minimize the handicaps the Negro caste labors under. There is a consider-
able amount of accommodation in this attitude. I have often met Negro
upper class persons who have idealized their own life history and, on this
ground, come to entertain totally exaggerated notions about Negro progress
in recent time and Negro opportunities for the future.®
This attitude seems to be quite common among individualistic business-
men and professionals. They borrow the spirit of the ordinary local Amer-
ican chamber of commerce, boast of their accomplishments and opportuni-
ties, and assume that they apply to the whole Negro people. Successful
Negro preachers and educators, and some white friends of the Negro, join
in the choir as it serves the good purpose of encouraging the Negro people
to clamp down on the Negro protest somewhat, and to make a less resentful,
more positive attitude toward life possible for the young and the rising.
But there is little basis in reality for this attitude. It also is an escape. The
boaster often reveals that he, himself, is not unaware of the self-deception
* There are perfect parallels in the white world among" “self-made men” who have,
risen from poverty.

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