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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 17. The Mechanics of Economic Discrimination as a Practical Problem - 6. The Self-Perpetuating Color Bar - 7. A Position of “Indifferent Equilibrium”
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392 An American Dilemma
workers choose to let them in on a basis of equality. White union members
then resent the ^ingratitude” of the Negroes.
The racial beliefs are conveniently at hand to rationalize prejudice and
discriminatory practices. The whole complex of stereotypes, maintained by
limited contacts, is an element in the vicious circle that perpetuates eco-
nomic discrimination.® With some difficulty, white people might be taught
that there are ail kinds of Negroes as there are all kinds of whites, some
good and some bad, and that many—^not just a few—individual Negroes
are better than many whites. But here the separation between the two
groups works strongly against the Negroes. Anyone having to fill a position
or a job, having to select a fellow worker at his bench, or a neighbor in the
district where he lives, by just drawing a white or a Negro man without
knowing anything in particular about him personally, will feel that, in all
prudence, he has a better chance to get the more congenial and more
capable man if he selects the white. Here the stereotyped concept of the
average Negro as it exists in the Northern white man’s mind works as an
economic bias against the Negro.
7. A Position of ^Indifferent Equilibrium”
There is a tremendous initial resistance to overcome when attempting to
place even superior Negro labor in a plant where Negroes did not work
formerly. Negro labor is often superior to the white man’s expectation,
partly because the thinking in averages and stereotypes makes him under-
estimate the individual Negro. Moreover, the fact that Negroes have
greater difficulties than do whites in securing any kind of employment
renders it probable that there is a greater proportion of capable workers in
the Negro than there is in the white unemployed labor reserve. Employers
who do employ Negroes, therefore, often get a higher appreciation of
them as workers than employers who do not.*^ The same seems to be true
of white workers. If they actually come to work together with Negro
workers, they come to like them better, or to dislike them less, than they
expected to.^
Under these circumstances, the extent to which Negroes work in
Northern industrial plants is determined not as a stable equilibrium, of
the type usually thought of in economic and sociological theory, but as an
“indifferent equilibrium,” like the one when a cylinder rolls on a horizontal
surface and can come to rest in one position as well as in another.® There
are tremendous elements of inertia which resist the introduction of Negro
labor where there has previously been none. If they get in, howevery
they
“ See Chapters 4 and 9.
^
In addition, of course, the fact that some employers hire Negroes may indicate by itself
that they have had a higher appreciation of them to start with.
‘
For a theoret^^’il discussion of these types of equilibria, see Appendix 3.
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