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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 28. The Basis of Social Inequality - 8. Attitudes among Different Classes of Whites in the South
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Chapter 28. The Basis of Social Inequality 595
simulate dependence in order to avert hostility from the whites and engage
their paternalism. But even if the successful Negro puts on a show of
dependence, he sometimes feels that he is less safe than if he had stayed at
the bottom. A psychological milieu more effective in stifling spontaneous
ambition is hardly thinkable.
This is one of the main roots of Negro “laziness and shiftlessness.” And
there are circular effects back on the whites®^—on their own standards and
on the standards they expect from the servants. Deference is bought for
lowered demands of efficiency. Cable observed this long ago in his pam-
phlet, The Negro Questiotiy and explained that:
. . . the master-caste [in the South] tolerates, with unsurpassed supineness and
unconsciousness, a more indolent, inefficient, slovenly, unclean, untrustworthy, ill
mannered, noisy, disrespectful, disputatious, and yet servile domestic and public
menial service than is tolerated by any other enlightened people.®®
This might be slightly exaggerated even for his time, but it is true that
patriarchalism breeds unambitious sycophants and keeps labor standards
low.
This whole pattern was originally a rural pattern in the South. It fits
best today into communities dominated by the semi- feudal plantation
system. In the cities of the South, the tendency toward more casual and
secondary relations is gradually breaking it up. But even in the cities,
among the white upper classes in their relations to domestic servants,
large parts of it are preserved today.
There is in the South, however, also another type of aristocratic attitude
toward the Negroes, which is equally reluctant to modify the color bar
but is prepared to allow the Negro people a maximum of possibilities for
cultural growth and economic advancement behind the bar. This attitude,
which involves a more unselfish friendliness and a truer social responsibil-
ity, not only to the individual Negro, but to the Negroes as a group, is
perhaps best expressed by Edgar Gardner Murphy, who had the opinion
that “there is no place in our American system for a helot class. . . . We
want no fixed and permanent populations of ^the inferior.’”®® As spokes-
man for the white South he declared:
It is willing that the negro, within his own social world, shall become great,
as true, as re^ly free, as nobly gifted as he has capacity to be.®*^
It was Murphy who coined the phrase “parallel civilizations.”
This is a clear misinterpretation of the position of the majority of aristo-
cratic white Southerners who most certainly do not look, and never have
looked, upon the advancement of the Negro people with this equanimity
and generosity. But it is a fair expression of what Murphy, himself, and
many other white gentlemen of the region before and after him have felt.
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