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Footnotes 1385
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neither is he the inhibited conformist. He is more likely to be restless and race-
conscious, aggressive and radical, ambitious and creative. The lower status to which he is
assigned naturally creates discontented and rebellious feelings. From an earlier, spon-
taneous identification with the white man, he has, under the rebuffs of a categorical
race prejudice, turned about and identified himself with the Negro race. In the process
of so doing, he suffers a profound inner conflict.
“After all, does not the blood of the white man flow in his veins? Does he not
share the higher culture in common with the white American? Is he not legally and
morally an American citizen? And yet he finds himself condemned to a lower caste
in the American system! So the mulatto is likely to think to himself. Living in two such
social worlds, between which there is antagonism and prejudice, he experiences in him-
self the same conflict. In his own consciousness the play and the strife of the two
group attitudes take place, and the manner in which he responds forms one of the most
interesting chapters in the history of the Negro.” ( 0/>. cit,^ pp, 24-25.) Stonequist
makes similar statements about the unhappiness of mulattoes as over against dark Negroes,
on pages 24-27, 110-113, 144-145 and 184-189 of Marginal Man,
The theory of the “marginal man” was originally developed for Jews and other
white immigrants in America, and for them it probably has validity and a strong
empirical basis. It was transferred uncritically to the Negro situation where its validity
it questionable. Stonequist uses two types of evidence to support his theory that the
mulatto has greater personality difficulties than the full-blooded Negro.
(1) He quotes autobiographical statements by mulattoes who complain bitterly about
being colored. Du Bois’ famous statement is quoted, for example:
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at
one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world
that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness—an American, a
Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one
dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” {The Souls
of Black Folk [1903], p. 3. Quoted in ibid,, p. 145.)
In practically all these quotations (many ’of them are from Du Bois), however, the
mulatto is not complaining because he wants to be associated with the white world over
against the black world. He is complaining because of the treatment accorded him as a
Negro. When Du Bois speaks about his “double consciousness”—having loyalties and
feelings of both Negroes and Americans—^he means Negroes and Americans, not—as
Stonequist makes out—Negroes and whites. It is the antithesis between the American
Creed and the Negro’s actual status to which Du Bois calls attention, not the mulatto’s
character as a marginal man. It may justly be said that the American Negro is a marginal
man, but it cannot be claimed, from these quotations, that the mulatto is any more
“marginal” than is the black man.
(2) Stonequist reports the results of a questionnaire study. He finds, for example, that
the 45 Negroes who could possibly pass for white or Indian or Mexican in a sample
of 192 Negro college students had greater “psychological difficulties with which to con-
tend” than the darker Negro students. This sample, however, cannot be regarded as
representative of the entire Negro population. (Of, cit,, pp. 189-190.)
It should be noted that there is some pragmatic truth in the theory that the mulatto
has more Weltschmerz. In so far as there is still a correlation between color and class
status, this is true, because upper class Negroes are more articulate and more sensitive to
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