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21 6 An American Dilemma
white man’s burden.” ^^Negroes couldn’t live at all without the aid and
guidance of the white people,” it is said. “What little they have, they have
got from the whites.” Their own sacrifices apparently do not count. Their
poverty itself becomes, in fact, the basis of the rationalization. “The whites
give them all the jobs.” “Actually, they live on us white people.” “They
couldn’t sustain themselves a day if we gave them up.” “The whites pay all
the taxes, or don’t they?”
Then, too, economic inequality “has to” be maintained, for It is the
barrier against “social equality”:* “you wouldn’t let your sister or
daughter marry a nigger.” The sister or the daughter comes inevitably even
into the economic discussion.
This is the ordinary Southerner explaining the matter in plain words to
the inquisitive stranger. He is serious and, in a sense, honest. We must
remember that the whole white Southern culture, generation after genera-
tion, is laboring to convince Itself that there is no conflict between the
equalitarlanism in the American Creed and the economic discrimination
against Negroes. And they can never get enough good reasons for their
behavior. They pile arguments one on top of the other.*^
The most important intellectual bridge between the American Creed
and actual practices in the economic sphere is, of course, the complex of
racial beliefs discussed above in Chapter 4. Their import in the economic
sphere is that the Negro is looked upon as inherently inferior as a worker
and as a consumer. God himself has made the Negro to be only a servant
or a laborer employed for menial, dirty, heavy and disagreeable work.
And, since practically all such work is badly paid, it is God’s will that the
Negro should have a low income. Also, any attempt to raise Negro incomes
goes against “the laws of supply and demand” which are part of the order
of nature. The Negro is bad as a consumer too. “If you give him more pay,
he will stop working” 5
he will “drink it up and start a row.” “Higher
wages will make the nigger lazy and morally degraded.” This last belief
particularly, but also many of the others, bears a striking similarity to ideas
about the laboring class as a whole developed in a systematic form by
European mercantilist writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.**
• Sec Part VII.
’’See Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism (translated by Mendel Shapiro, i935i first pub-
lished, 1931).
The whole ideology displays a static, precapitalistic tendency. When white Southerners
object to a conspicuous rise in Negro levels of living, they act much like the upper classes
in most European countries centuries ago when they frowned upon lower class people’s
rise to higher levels of consumption, and even instituted legal regulations forbidding the
humbler estates to have servants, to own certain types of dress, and so on. An American
Negro in a luxurious car draws unfavorable comment, and so—in previous times—did a
Swedish maid who **dressed like a lady.” In the static pre-competitive society, tradition was
in itself a value.
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