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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 4. Racial Beliefs - 6. The Racial Beliefs of the Unsophisticated
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98 An American Dilemma
such factors as malnutrition, bad housing, and lack of schooling actually
deform the body and the soul of people. The ordinary white man cannot
be expected to be aware of such subtle influences as the denial of certain
outlets for ambitions, social disparagement, cultural isolation, and the early
conditioning of the Negro child’s mind by the caste situation, as factors
molding the Negro’s personality and behavior. The white man is, there-
fore, speaking in good faith when he says that he sincerely believes that
the Negro is racially inferior, not merely because he has an interest in this
belief, but simply because he has seen it. He “knows” it.
Tradition strengthens this honest faith. The factors of environment
were, to the ordinary white man, still less of a concrete reality one hundred
years ago when the racial dogma began to crystallize. Originally the
imported Negro slaves had hardly a trace of Western culture. The tremen-
dous cultural difference between whites and Negroes was maintained “ and,
perhaps, relatively increased by the Negroes being kept, first, in slavery
and, later, in a subordinate caste, while American white culture changed
apace. By both institutions the Negroes’ acculturation was hampered and
steered in certain directions. The Negroes, moreover, showed obvious
differences in physical appearance.
From the beginning these two concomitant differences—the physical and
the cultural—must have been associated in the minds of white people.
“When color differences coincide with differences in cultural levels, then
color becomes symbolic and each individual is automatically classified by
the racial uniform he wears. Darker color, woolly hair, and other con-
spicuous physical Negro characteristics became steadily associated with
servile status, backward culture, low intelligence performance and lack
of morals. All unfavorable reactions to Negroes—which for social if not
for biological reasons, are relatively much more numerous than favorable
reactions—became thus easily attributed to every Negro as a Negro, that
is, to the race and to the individual only secondarily as a member of the
race. Whites categorize Negroes. As has been observed also in other racial
contacts, visible characteristics have a power to overshadow all other
characteristics and to create an illusion of a greater similarity between the
individuals of the out-race and a greater difference from the in-race than
is actually warranted.®*
This last factor is the more important as the unsophisticated mind is
much more “theoretical”—in the popular meaning of being bent upon
simple, abstract, clear-cut generalizations—than the scientifically trained
mind.®^ This works in favor of the race dogma. To conceive that apparent
diftetetvces \tv capacities and aptitudes cou\d be cultural iti origin means a
determent ot judgment tViat is toreign to popular tVvin\dug. It recpiires
• When we say that cultural differences were maintained, we do not refer one way or the
ocher to the retention of African culture.
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