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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 36. The Protest Motive and Negro Personality - 1. A Mental Reservation
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CHAPTER 36
THE PROTEST MOTIVE AND NEGRO PERSONALITY
I. A Mental Reservation
The Negro protest is shut in by caste. Most of it is doomed to be intro-
verted and self-consuming. An uproar like the Garvey movement is likely
only to make the Negro protest appear intrinsically the more hopeless
afterward.
Negroes are only a tenth of the American nation. As an effect of the
perfected caste controls, described in earlier parts of the book, their political
and social power is much less than a tenth. Therefore, Negroes can never
cherish the healthy hope of coming into power. A Negro movement can
never expect to grow Into a democratic majority in politics or in any other
sphere of American life. And to escape from America is a fantastic dream
from which Negroes always awake and find that they do not even want it
to happen. There is a sense of hopelessness in the Negro cause. Meanwhile
the individual Negro has to find his path through life as it is.
But there is no wholehearted acceptance of the present situation. Deep
down in the most dependent and destitute classes of Negroes in the rural
South, the individual Negro of the masses ordinarily keeps a recess in his
mind where he harbors the Negro protest. In the lower classes, and
wherever the caste controls are severe, it is usually framed in the Christian
ideals of human brotherhood and all men’s fundamental equality before
God. Church and religion is a much needed front to give respectability and
acceptability to the suppressed Negro protest. The world can safely be
claimed to be wrong in the light of Christian ideals. The rich and mighty
white people are the possessors of this unrighteous world. Sometime, some-
how, the wrongs are going to be corrected and ^‘the last shall be first and
the first shall be last.” There is not only consolation and escape in this
religious teaching, but it also serves as a means of guarding the democratic
faith in the minds of downtrodden black people. It gives a supreme sanction
to ideas from the American Creed, ideas which are unrealistic and fantastic
in the light of the actual situation. This is the Negro protest in its most
concealed form. In the upper strata, and generally in the North, the Negro
protest is much more clearly thought out and overtly expressed in social,
^ponomic and political terms.
7^7
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