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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - I. The Approach - 2. Encountering the Negro Problem - 5. The Etiquette of Discussion
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38 An American Dilemma
generations hardly any public issue of importance has been free from a
heavy load of the race issue, and that the entire culture of the region
its religion, literature, art, music, dance, its politics and education, its
language and cooking—are partly to be explained by positive or negative
influences from the Negro.
If the Negro is a shunned topic in formal intercourse among whites in
the South, he enters all informal life to a disproportionate extent. He creeps
up as soon as the white Southerner is at ease and not restraining himself.
He Is the standard joke. It is interesting to notice the great pleasure white
people in all classes take in these stereotyped jokes and in indulging in dis-
cussions about the Negro and what he does, says and thinks. It is apparently
felt as a release. Ray Stannard Baker, surveying the South and the Negro
problem a generation ago, told a story, which the present writer has encoun-
tered several times and which seems to define the situation properly.®
A Negro minister 1 met told me a story of a boy who went as a sort of butler’s
assistant in the home of a prominent family in Atlanta. His people were naturally
curious about what went on in the white man’s house. One day they asked him:
“What do they talk about when they are eating?”
The boy thought a moment; then he said:
“Mostly they discusses us cullud folks.”
As Baker adds, the same consuming interest exists among Negroes. A
large part of their conversation deals with the race question. One gets the
feeling that the two groups are sitting behind their fences, publicly ignor-
ing each other but privately giving free rein to a curiosity emotionalized
to the highest degree.
The stories and the jokes give release to troubled people. It is no
accident that Americans generally are a story-telling nation, and that jokes
play a particularly important role in the lives of the Southerners, white and
black, and specifically in race relations. It should not surprise us that sex
relations are another field of human life with a great prolification of jokes.
There is much of human brotherhood in humor—a sort of fundamental
democracy in a plane deeper than the usual one. It usually conveys a notion
that we are all sinners before the Lord. When people are up against great
inconsistencies in their creed and behavior which they cannot, or do not
want to, account for rationally, humor is a way out. It gives a symbolic
excuse for inperfections, a point to what would otherwise be ambiguous. It
gives also a compensation to the sufferer. The ^^understanding laugh’^ is
an intuitive absolution between sinners and sometimes also between the
sinner and his victim. The main ^ffunction” of the joke is thus to create a
collective surreptitious approbation for something which cannot be approved
explicitly because of moral inhibitions. To the whites the Negro jokes
further serve the function of ^‘proving” the inferiority of the Negro. To the
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