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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - XI. An American Dilemma - 45. America Again at the Crossroads in the Negro Problem - 5. The War and the Whites
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Chapter 45. America Again at the Crossroads 1009
Today it is becoming increasingly apparent to thoughtful Americans that we cannot
fight the forces and ideas of imperialism abroad and maintain a form of imperialism at
home. The war has done this to our thinking. ... So we are finding under the
pressures of this present conflict that long-standing barriers and prejudices are break-
ing down. The defense of our democracy against the forces that threaten it from
without has made some of its failures to function at home glaringly apparent. Our
very proclamations of what we are fighting for have rendered our own inequities
self-evident. When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations the mocking
paradoxes in our own society become so clear they can no longer be ignored.^^
The world conflict and Americans exposed position as the defender of the
democratic faith is thus accelerating an ideological process which was well
under way. In this dramatic stage of the American caste struggle a strategic
fact of utmost importance is this, that the entire caste order is extra-legal
if not actually illegal and unconstitutional. The legal order of the land
does not sanction caste but, on the contrary, is framed to guarantee equality
and to suppress caste. The only important exceptions are the Jim Crow
laws in the Southern states. But even they are written upon the fiction of
equality, although, if equality were enforced, they would not only lose in
efficacy as means of expressing caste subordination, but also become tremen-
dously burdensome economically for society and, consequently, the whites
would be robbed of one of their main interests in upholding them.
The whites are aware of the tremendous social costs of keeping up the
present irrational and illegal caste system. Among other things, this anomaly
is one of the main factors keeping the respect for law and order and the
administration of laws at such a low level in America. The whites investigate
these irrationalities and the consequent social wastage j
they build scientific
systems to explain their social causation, in fict, they know all about it and
deplore it. They have the political power to make caste legal and orderly,
whether with Negro consent or without it. But practically never will whites
be heard making such proposals, and still less will they seriously discuss
and plan for such a change. They cannot afford to compromise the American
Creed.
Caste may exist, but it cannot be recognized. Instead, the stamp of
public disapproval is set upon it, and this undermines still more the caste
theory by which the whites have to try to explain and justify their behavior.
And the Negroes are awarded the law as a weafon in the caste struggle.
Here we see in high relief how the Negroes in their fight for equality have
their allies in the white man’s own conscience. The white man can humiliate
the Negro j
he can thwart his ambitions j
he can starve himj he can press
him down into vice and crime j
he can occasionally beat him and even kill
him j
but he does not have the moral stamina to make the Negro’s subjuga-
tion legal and approved by society. Against that stands not only the Consti-
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