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Appendix 3. Note on Principle of Cumulation 1067
prejudice. A rise in employment will tend to increase earnings; raise standards of living;
and improve health, education, manners and law observance and mce versa\ a better
education is assumed to raise the chances of a higher salaried job, and vice versa and so
all the way through our whole system of variables. Each of the secondary changes has its
effect on white prejudice.
If, in actual social life, the dynamics of the causal relations between the various
factors in the Negro problem should correspond to our hypotheses, then—assuming
again, for the sake of simplicity, an initially static state of balanced forces any change
in any one of these factors, independent of the way in which it is brought about, will,
by the aggregate weight of the cumulative effects running back and forth between
them all, start the whole system mozfing in one direction or the other as the case may
be, with a speed depending upon the original push and the functions of causal inter-
relation within the system.
Our point is not simply that many forces are “working in the same direction.”
Originally we assuyied that there was a balance between these forces, and that the
system was static, until we introduced one push coming in at one point or the other.
When the system starts rolling, it is true that the changes in the forces—though not all
the forces themselves—^work in one direction; but this is because the variables are
assumed to be interlocked in such a causal mechanism that a change of any one causes
the others to change in the same direction, with a secondary effect upon the first variable,
and so on.
We may further notice that the “balance” assumed as initial status was not a stable
equilibrium at all—of the type which is tacitly assumed in the notions of “maladjust-
ment,” “adjustment,” “accommodation,” “social lag”—and, further, that in our
scheme of hypotheses there Is not necessarily assumed to exist any new “balance,” or
“equilibrium,” or “harmony,” toward which the factors of the system “adjust” or
“accommodate.” In the utilization of this theoretical model on problems of actual social
reality, the initial state of labile balance, which we assumed for simplicity in our demon-
stration, will, of course, never be found. What we shall have to study are processes of
systems actually rolling in the one direction or the other, systems which are constantly
subjected to all sorts of pushes from outside through all the variables, and which are
moving because of the cumulative effect of all these pushes and the interaction between
the variables.
The individual factors into which we split the Negroes’ plane of living can, of course,
be split again, and it is the purpose of scientific analysis to do so. The causal relations
between the sub-factors, and between them and all other factors, will be assumed to be
ruled by the same cumulative principle. White race prejudice, here assumed as the
“cause” of discrimination, is not a solid and static factor. To begin with, it depends
upon discrimination itself. If, for some reason—for example, the demand of the
employer during a war emergency, or the ruling of a trade union—^white workers
actually come to work with Negroes as fellow workers, it has been experienced that
prejudice will often adjust to the changed amount of discrimination. White prejudice
itself can be split into a great number of beliefs and valuations; to a degree, both of
these two types of factors are dependent upon each other, as we hinted at in Appendix i
and, consequently, are under the rule of the cumulative principle.
Throughout this treatise on the Negro problem the model of dynamic causation
and the implied skepticism toward the idea of stable equilibrium—is kept steadily
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