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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Footnotes - Chapter 32 - Chapter 33
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1388 An American Dilemma
congregations. Further, the economic and social limitations of their calling restrict their
entree to this class.” {Ihid.y pp. 73-74.)
Hortense Powdermaker speaks of a “lag” in a process of acculturation. “The upper
class enforces strict Puritanical standards formed after the white model. The morals
they enforce, however, correspond to those of a generation ago more closely than those of
today. While they observe and inculcate in their children the Puritanical code of which
their ancestors were deemed incapable, the descendants of the whites from whom they
learned these ideals of behavior are tending to greater laxity.” {Of, cU., p. 355.)
See Chapter 39, Section 6. Hortense Powdermaker sees an interesting parallel
which emphasizes the paradoxical situation of the Negro upper class in the caste conflict:
“There is a further analogy between the position of the Negro upper class and that of
the Poor Whites, one at the top, the other at the botton of 4he social ladder within its
group. Each serves as agent for its race toward the other, taking actions and expressing
sentiments to which the group as a whole is not ready to commit itself. The Poor
White, in his occasional violent expressions of race antagonism, acts for those Whites
who tacitly condone and overtly deplore such behavior. He is rewarded by his fellows
chiefly in resentment, since he embodies, in addition to traits of his own which they
dislike, their own least worthy impulses. The Negro upper class acts out for its race
the denial that Negroes are inferior; it demonstrates that they too can be educated,
moral, industrious, thrifty. This class also reaps a share of resentment from other mem-
bers of its race, but here resentment is far less keen and less conscious, and is offset by
jubstantial advantages, among which is to be numbered a very gratifying prestige. Each
of these two classes is set apart from the rest of its race, experiencing different con-
flicts and holding different attitudes; and each awakens in the other race a special
hostility strongly tinged with fear.” {Of, cU,y pp. 334-335.)
Writing of the upper class in 1 899—when he could still speak of it as “the germ
of a great middle class”—Du Bois observed:
^ . in general its members are curiously hampered by the fact that, being shut
off from the world about them, they are the aristocracy of their own people, with all the
responsibilities of an aristocracy, and yet they, on the one hand, are not prepared for
this role, and their own masses arc not used to looking to them for leadership. As a class
they feel strongly the centrifugal forces of class repulsion among their own people,
and, indeed, are compelled to feel it in sheer self-defense. They do not relish being mis-
taken for servants; they shrink from the free and easy worship of most of the Negro
churches, and they shrink from all such display and publicity as will expose them to the
veiled insult and depreciation which the masses suffer. Consequently this class, which
ought to lead, refuses to head any race movement on the plea that thus they draw the
very color line against which they protest.” {T^fi Philadelfhia Negro, p. 177.)
Dusk of Dawn, p. 185.
Frazier, Negro Youth at the Crossways, p, 28.
Chapter 33. The American Pattern of Individual Leadershif and Mass Passivity
^ The American Commonwealth (1910, first edition, 1893), Vol. 2, p. 373.
- The contrary tendency in American history and social science in recent decades is
evidently a reaction to this popular attitude* It goes, as reactions usually do, to the
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