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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 30. Effects of Social Inequality - 1. The Incidence of Social Inequality
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Chapter 30. Effects of Social Inequality 643
status in the occupational hierarchy may feel not less but more reason to
object to Negro fellow workers. It is to be expected that the present trend
of organizational stratification—^giving more power over employment
policy to the agents of the employees and attempting to raise standards of
responsibility and respectability in all occupations—will tend to squeeze
out the Negroes. This is not true, however, where they are already firmly
entrenched, or their equality can be sanctioned by law, or an ideology of
labor solidarity can be successfully invoked. This is the big question of
what increasing unionization of labor will mean to the Negroes.® Every-
where in the labor market the very idea of their social inferiority is one
of the Negroes’ strongest handicaps in the competition for jobs. The
vicious circle works here, too: the very fact that the masses of Negroes,
because of economic discrimination—^partly caused by social inequality
—
are prevented from entering even the bottom of the occupational hierarchy,
are paid low wages and, consequently, are poor gives in its turn motivation
for continued social discrimination.
The fact that social segregation involves a substantial element of
discrimination will add its influence to this vicious circle. Negroes are given
inadequate education, health protection, and hospitalization; they are
segregated into districts where public services of water provision, sewage
and garbage removal, street cleaning, street lighting, street paving, police
protection and everything else is neglected or withheld while vice is often
allowed. All this must keep the Negro masses inferior and provide reasons
for further discrimination in politics, justice and breadwinning.
Under these circumstances there develops also what John M. Mecklin
calls “the curious dualism in the social conscience or a double standard of
conduct, one for the white and another for the black,” which puts the
Negro in a still more inferior social position.^ This is partly the result of
social segregation and discrimination but, at the same time, it gives justifica-
tion to the whites for insisting upon their supremacy and for relegating
the Negroes to a subordinate position. Here again we see the vicious circle
in operation. It makes the task of . the educator and reformer difficult. “As
long as it is possible for a negro to violate half of the commands of the
decalogue and still not lose social standing with his group, it is useless to
hope for material improvement.”® The ambition of the Negro youth is
cramped not only by the severe restrictions placed in his way by segrega-
tion and discrimination, but also by the low expectation from both white
and Negro society. He is not expected to make good in the same way as
the white youth. And if he is not extraordinary, he will not expect it him-
self and will not really put his shoulder to the wheel.®
Segregation and discrimination have had material and moral effects on
* See Chapter 1 8, Sections 3 and 4.
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