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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 - 6. The North Moves Toward Equality - 7. Tension in the South
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Chapter 45. America Again at the Crossroads ion
a necessity. In this endeavor no national administration will dare to allow
unemployment to be too much concentrated upon the Negro.
The average white Northerner will probably agree with a policy which
xholds open employment opportunities for Negroes, because, as we said, he
is against economic discrimination as a general proposition. There is also
—
together with all opportunistic ignorance and unconcernedness—a bit of
rational defense for the distance he preserves between his political and his
private opinion. In the individual shop where he works or the residential
section where he lives, he sees the danger in admitting a few Negroes, since
this will bring an avalanche of Negroes on his shop or his neighborhood.
This danger is, of course, due to the fact of the Negroes general exclusion.
It is part of the vicious circle holding the Negro down.
If government policy prevents general discrimination, however, there
will be no avalanche of Negroes on any one white employer or group of
employers. The Negroes, who comprise less than 10 per cent of the popula-
tion, must be given their chance in private enterprise or be supported by
public funds. “Buck-passing” is no longer possible when the problem comes
to be viewed nationally. And the planning and directing agencies will be
compelled to make the white public see the problem nationally in order to
get public support for the policy they must pursue. As private relations
are increasingly becoming public relations, the white Northerner will be
willing to give the Negro equality.
These are the reasons why we foresee that the trend of unionization,
social legislation, and national planning will tend to break down economic
discrimination, the only type of discrimination which is both important and
strong in the North. Other types of discrimination will then tend to
decrease according to the law of cumulative causation whSch has been fre-
quently referred to in this book.
7. Tension in the South
The situation in the South is different. Unlike the white Northerner,
who is most inclined to give the Negro equality in public relations and
least inclined to do so in private relations, the white Southerner does not
differentiate between public and private relations—^the former as well as
the latter have significance for prestige and social equality. Moreover, he
is traditionally and consistently opposed to Negro equality for its own sake,
which the Northerner is not. He may be privately indulgent much more
than the white Northerner, but he is not as willing to give the Negro equal
treatment by public authority. This is one of the romantic principles behind
the legal inequity in the South. But the Southerner is a good American, too,
and the region has been becoming rapidly “Americanized” during the last
generation.
The ordinary conservative white Southerner has, therefore, a deeper
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