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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 - 4. Negro Sensitiveness - 5. Negro Aggression
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Chapter 36. Protest Motive and Negro Personality 763
with whites, however, their prejudices, and in the South the racial etiquette,
must be accepted with good grace in order to avoid trouble and to get along.
5. Negro Aggression
But some Negroes will openly tell the interviewer that: “I just get mad
when I think about it all.” Some really “get mad” occasionally and hit at
the whites in the fury of frustration.
In the growing generation of Negroes, there are a good many individuals
like Bigger Thomas, the hero of Richard Wright’s popular novel. Native
Son. They can be seen walking the streets unemployed j
standing around
on the corners j
or laughing, playing, and fighting in the joints and pool-
rooms everywhere in the Negro slums of American cities. They have a
bearing of their whole body, a way of carrying their hats, a way of looking
cheeky and talking coolly, and a general recklessness about their own and
others’ personal security and property, which gives one a feeling that care-
lessness, asociality, and fear have reached their zenith. In some cities they
are known in the Negro community by the appropriate epithet “cats.”
Some few Negroes even outside the world of the “cats” consciously
think out their aggression against the white caste, at least as a temporary
flight of the imagination to relieve inner tension. Ralph Bunche testifies:
There are Negroes too, who, fed up with frustration of their life here, see no hope
and express an angry desire to ‘‘shoot their way out of it.’* 1 have on many occasions
heard Negroes exclaim: “Just give us machine guns and wee’ll blow the lid off the
whole damn business.” Sterling Brown’s “Ballad for Joe Meek” is no mere fantasy
and the humble Negro turned “bad” is not confined to the pages of fiction, granted
that he is the exception. The worm docs turn and a cornered rat will fight.
But physical attack upon the whites is suicidal. Aggression has to be kept
suppressed and normally is suppressed. It creeps up, however, in thousands
of ways. The whites do not get as wholehearted a response from their
Negroes as they would if the latter were well satisfied with the necessity
of accommodation. Not only occasional acts of violence but much laziness,
carelessness, unreliability, petty stealing and lying are undoubtedly to be
explained as concealed aggression.^^ The shielding of Negro criminals and
suspects, the dislike of testifying against another Negro, and generally the
defensive solidarity in the protective Negro community has a definite taint
of hostility.
The truth is that Negroes generally do not feel they have unqualified
moral obligations to white people. This is an observation which a stranger
visiting around in the Negro communities cannot help making time and
again. The voluntary withdrawal which has intensified the isolation between
the two castes is also an expression of the Negro protest under cover.
A less dangerous outlet for aggression is to deflect it from the white
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