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CHAPTER 44
NON-INSTITUTIONAL ASPECTS OF THE
NEGRO COMMUNITY
I. ^Teculiarities” of Negro Culture and Personality
The increasing isolation between Negroes and whites has, as we noted,*
increased the mutual ignorance of the two groups. Lower class Negroes
know much of the private side of the lives of the whites since so many of
them are servants to whites; upper and middle class Negroes know very
little about either the private or the public life of whites. Whites of all
classes know even less about Negroes. Because of their lack of intimate
contact with Negroes, whites create and maintain stereotypes about them.
Most of the stereotypes have no basis in fact, but even those that are super-
ficially true are not understood by whites in terms of their motivation and
cultural origin. Even when they do not mean to be unfriendly to Negroes,
whites observe that certain aspects of Negro life are ^^different” or ^‘pecul-
iar.” Some of these cultural peculiarities bother whites; all of them are
taken into account—consciously or unconsciously—^when whites act in regard
to Negroes. Since the whites are the dominant group, it is important for
Negroes to determine what whites find peculiar about their culture. In this
chapter, we shall not attempt to describe all the ways in which the Negro
community differs from the white community, but only those non-institu-
tional differences in Negro culture which whites find most unusual or
disturbing. We shall start from our conclusion in Chapter 6 that these
differences have no basis in biological heredity, that they are of a purely
cultural nature.
In this section, we shall sometimes be writing about Negro culture traits
as though they applied to all Negroes. This is, of course, incorrect, and it
angers many Negroes. There is a diversity of behavior patterns among
Negroes, perhaps as great as in white American society with all its diverse
national backgrounds. Negro communities range from the folk societies of
isolated rural Southern areas to the highly sophisticated wealthy night club
groups of Harlem. Much of the diversity among Negroes arises out of a
tendency of upper class Negroes to act in a manner just the opposite of lower
* See Chapter 30.
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