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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 38. Negro Popular Theories - 1. Instability
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782 An American Dilemma
Everyone who is not on top has to work out his compromise between
accommodation and protest. But the average white American has a better
chance to do this constructively. He can feel himself in power by identify-
ing himself with the American nation of which he is a full-fledged citizen,
and by aligning himself with a group that can struggle with hope of coming
into power sometime in the future. Corresponding to these afliliations with
the nation, with a political party, and with various opinion and interest
groups, popular theories are being developed about how society is and how
it should be conserved or changed. The feeling of belongingness and
integration gives white men some stability and self-assurance. It is true that
even the white masses in America show a relatively low degree of partici-
pation in, and responsibility for, the larger society.*^ Moreover, public
opinion is relatively unstable in America, and propaganda an important
factor. Even the ordinary white man in America has a less well-organized
system of opinions on general matters than he would have in a social order
with more democratic participation. But the difference between whites and
Negroes is tremendous.
Negroes are denied identification with the nation or with national groups
to a much larger degree. To them social speculation, therefore, moves in
a sphere of unreality and futility. Instead of organized popular theories or
ideas, the observer finds in the Negro world, for the most part, only a fuul
and amorphous mass of all sorts of embryos of thoughts, Negroes seem to
be held in a state of eternal freparedness for a great number of contradic-
tory opinions—ready tc accept one type or another depending upon how
they are driven by pressures or where they see an opportunity. Under
certain circumstances, the masses of American Negroes might, for example,
rally around a violently anti-American, anti-Western, anti-white, black
chauvinism of the Garvey type, centered around the idea of Africa as the
mother country. But they might just as likely, if only a slight change of
stimulus is provided, join in an all-out effort to fight for their native
country, the United States of America, for the Western civilization to
which they belong, and for the tenets of democracy in the entire world,
which form their cherished political faith. Or they might develop a passive
cynicism toward it all. Negro intellectuals usually do not have such a tre-
mendous instability of opinion as the masses. But compared with white
intellectuals they show the same difference as Negro masses compared with
the white masses.
This is what white Americans perceive when they tell the observer that
Negroes are ‘‘emotional” or “unstable.” In a sense this judgment is correct.
And this trait can be observed not only in Negroes^ popular theories, or
lack of theories, about the larger society, but also in the type of religious
•Seo Chapter 33.
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