Note:
Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
Therefore, this work is protected by copyright,
restricting your legal rights to reproduce it.
However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now.
Read more about copyright.
Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 30. Effects of Social Inequality - 2. Increasing Isolation
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
Chapter 30. Effects of Social Inequality 649
the Negro people ^‘separation is not looked upon as a hardship but rather
as a simple, natural fact, which is never questioned.”* It is, however, my
impression that this is a rationalization just as deceptive, and for a similar
cause, as the belief that Southern Negroes are politically apathetic and do
not care for suffrage. If they do not bother to try to vote, they have, as we
found, in most cases good reasons in various sanctions they would meet and
in the knowledge that elections do not have much importance anyhow
under the system of the white primary. Likewise the Negroes have good
reasons to keep to themselves socially, and the habit has grown into a stiff
pattern. But this isolation is a consequence of segregation and discrimina-
tion and should not be construed as a cause (except in so far as it is part of
a vicious circle), and still less as a moral support for the system. On this
point Negroes are, in general, quite sophisticated.
The material presented in the American Youth Commission studies
suggests a most important general observation: there is almost a complete
lack of reference in the interviews with young Negroes in the South to
intimate and personaly friendly relations with white persons or families of
the type so prevalent in earlier times. For the Negro youth growing up
today in the Black Belty both in cities and in the countryy this old protective
master-servant pattern seems to have almost entirely disappeared. What
still exists of it is felt by the older generation of Negroes and is bound to
disappear with them. A social process is drawing to its close. A negative
practical conclusion may be drawn from this observation: in planning for
future race relations in the South the factor of personal intimacy and
friendliness between individual whites and Negroes upon the old patri-
archal principle should be left out entirely as lacking in practical impor-
tance. If it be deemed desirable to establish more positive human contacts
in order to mitigate the dangerous accumulating estrangement between the
two groups, this must be built on another foundation than the master-
servant relation inherited from slavery.
In the North the Negroes have always been more isolated from whites.
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
