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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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100 An American Dilemma
Without any doubt there is also in the white man’s concept of the Negro
^^race” an irrational element which cannot be grasped in terms of either
biological or cultural differences. It is like the concept ^‘unclean” in primi-
tive religion. It is invoked by the metaphor ^^blood” when describing
ancestry. The ordinary man means something particular but beyond secular
and rational understanding when he refers to %lood.” The one who has
got the smallest drop of “Negro blood” is as one who is smitten by a hide-
ous disease. It does not help if he is good and honest, educated and intelli-
gent, a good worker, an excellent citizen and an agreeable fellow. Inside
him are hidden some unknown and dangerous potentialities, something
which will sooner or later crop up. This totally irrational, actually magical,
belief is implied in the system of specific taboos to be analyzed in Part VII.
White intellectuals, particularly in the South, have often, in attempting
to clarify to the writer their own attitude toward taboos, referred to this
irrational element and described it in the terms utilized above. They some-
times talked of it as an “instinct,” but were well aware that they could
not grasp it by this too sober physio-psychological analogy.
In this magical sphere of the white man’s mind, the Negro is inferior,
totally independent of rational proofs or disproofs. And he is inferior in a
deep and mystical sense. The ^^reality^^ of his injeriority is the white man^s
own indubitable sensing of it, and that feeling afflies to every single Negro.
This is a manifestation of the most primitive form of religion. There is
fear of the unknown in this feeling, which is “superstition” in the literal
sense of this old word. Fear is only increased by the difficulties in expressing
it in rational language and explaining it in such a way that it makes sense.
So the Negro becomes a “contrast conception.” He is “the opposite race”
—
an inner enemy, “antithesis of character and properties of the white man.”"*-
His name is the antonym of white. As the color white is associated with
everything good, with Christ and the angels, with heaven, fairness, clean-
liness, virtue, intelligence, courage, and progress, so black has, through
the ages, carried associations with all that is bad and low: black stands for
dirt, sin, and the devil.’*^ It becomes understandable and “natural” on a
deeper magical plane of reasoning that the Negro is believed to be stupid,
immoral, diseased, lazy, incompetent, and dangerous—dangerous to the
white man’s virtue and social order.
The Negro is segregated, and one deep idea behind segregation is that
of quarantining what is evil, shameful, and feared in society.® When one
speaks about “Americans” or “Southerners,” the Negro is not counted in.
When the “public” is invited, he is not expected. Like the devil and all
his synonyms and satellites, he is enticing at the same time that he is
To illustrate this point and to exemplify how racial beliefs develop in an individual,
we have included as footnote 44 to this chapter one of the clearest analyses of his own
former prejudices by a Southerner to be found in the literature.
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