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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 9. Economic Inequality - 2. Our Main Hypothesis: The Vicious Circle
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2o8 An American Dilemma
Negroes. In the beginning the Negroes were owned as property. When
slavery disappeared, caste remained. Within this framework of adverse
tradition the average Negro in every generation has had a most disadvan-
tageous start. Discrimination against Negroes is thus rooted in this tradition
of economic exploitation. It is justified by the false racial beliefs we studied
in Chapter 4. This depreciation of the Negro’s potentialities is given a
semblance of proof by the low standards of efficiency, reliability, ambition,
and morals actually displayed by the average Negro. This is what the white
man ‘^sees,” and he opportunistically exaggerates what he sees. He ‘‘knows”
that the Negro is not “capable” of handling a machine, running a business
or learning a. profession. As we know that these deficiencies are not inborn
in him—or, in any case, in no significant degree—we must conclude that
they are caused, directly or indirectly, by the very poverty we are trying
to explain, and by other discriminations in legal protection, public health,
housing, education and in every other sphere of life.
This scheme of causal interrelation is as important in explaining why
Negroes are so poor and in evaluating the wider social effects of Negro
poverty, as it is in attempting practical planning to raise the economic level
of the Negro people. The dynamics of the problem is this: A primary
change, induced or unplanned, affecting any one of three bundles of inter-
dependent causative factors—(i) the economic level; (2) standards of
intelligence, ambition, health, education, decency, manners, and morals;
and (3) discrimination by whites—will bring changes in the other two and,
through mutual interaction, move the whole system along in one direction
or the other. No single factor, therefore, is the “final cause” in a theoretical
sense. From a practical point of view we may, however, call certain factors
“strategic” in the sense that they can be controlled.
The statistics of the system can be illustrated by the following comments
on the Negro sharecropper in the rural South:
Shiftlessness and laziness are reported as reasons for the dependent state, whereas,
in fact, in so far as they exist, they are not necessarily inherent, but are caused by
the very conditions of the share-cropping system. ... It is a notorious and shameful
fact that the stock arguments employed against any serious eflForts to improve the
lot of the cotton tenant are based upon the very social and cultural conditions which
tenancy itself creates. The mobility of the tenant, his dependence, his lack of
ambition, shiftlessncss, his ignorance and poverty, the lethargy of his pellagra-ridden
body, provide a ready excuse for keeping him under a stern paternalistic control.
There is not a single trait alleged which, where true, does not owe its source and
continuance to the imposed status itself.^
The same type of vicious circle controls the situation for the poverty-
stricken Negroes outside of cotton agriculture. Poverty itself breeds the
conditions which perpetuate poverty.
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