781 (An American Dilemma : the Negro Problem and Modern Democracy)

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CHAPTER 38
NEGRO POPULAR THEORIES"
I. Instability
Negro thinking is thinking under the pressure and conflicts to which the
Negro is subjected. Du Bois pointed out:
!t is doubtful if there is another group of twelve million people in the midst of
a modern cultured land who arc so widely inhibited and mentally confined as the
American Negro. Within the colored race the philosophy of salvation has by the
pressure of caste been curiously twisted and distorted. Shall they use the torch and
dynamite? Shall they go North, or fight it out in the South? Shall they segregate
themselves even more than they are now, in states, towns, cities or sections? Shall they
leave the country? Are they Americans or foreigners? Shall they stand and sing “My
Country ’Tis of Thee’’? Shall they marry and rear children and save and buy homes,
or deliberately commit race suicide?^
Frustration and defeatism, forced accommodation under concealed protest,
vicious competition modified by caste solidarity, form the main texture into
which the patterns of Negro political and social thinking are woven. Upon
the personality basis we have sketched in Chapter 36, these patterns cannot
possibly become consistent and stable. And Negro political and social
thinking does not have much connection with broader American and world
problems. To an American Negro, there is little point in having definite
opinions about the world.
To an extent this is true of the little fellow everywhere in a big world.

Throughout this book, and especially in this chapter, we use the term “popular
theories” to refer to a consciously thought-out, though not necessarily logical or accurate,
system of ideas held by a large group of people concerning something that is importam
or interesting to them. Popular theories may be attempts at abstract explanation 01
attempts at practical solution of problems which bother these people. They include not
only beliefs concerning facts but also valuations, and they are usually complex in that
they contain many beliefs and valuations and in that they have far-reaching implications.
Some writers have used the term “ideologies” in the same way that we use the term
“popular beliefs,” but there is no unanimity among those who use the term as to its
definition, and the term is almost completely foreign to the man in the street. Other
writers have used the terms “popular beliefs” and “mass beliefs” in somewhat the same
way as we use the term “popular theories,” but in this book we have restricted the term
“belief” to a simple comprehension of facts, as distinguished from valuations.
781

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