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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - I. The Approach - 2. Encountering the Negro Problem - 6. The Convenience of Ignorance - 7. Negro and White Voices
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An American Dilemma
and observed how strictly formal and ruled by mental inhibitions the) are.
It is also astounding to observe that at such meetings Negro members, by
relating simple and obvious facts in the local situation, can reveal things
unknown to the whites present. Even when true friendliness is the basis
for the approach, the awkwardness and anxiety shown in these interracial
contacts is often apparent.
The ignorance about the Negro is not, it must be stressed, just a random
lack of interest and knowledge. It is a tense and highstrung restriction and
distortion of knowledge, and it indicates much deeper dislocations within
the minds of the Southern whites. The blind spots are clearly visible in
stereotyped opinions. The ^Tunction” of those stereotypes is, in fact, to
serve as intellectual blinds.® Thinking and talking in terms of stereotypes
appear to be more common in the Negro problem than in other issues and
more dominant in the regions of America where the race problem is
prominent.
The stereotypes are ideological fragments which have been coined and
sanctioned. They are abstract and unqualified, as popular thinking always
tends to be. They express a belief that ^^all niggers” are thus and so. But,
in addition, they are loaded with pretention to deep insight. It is because
of this emotional charge that they can serve to block accurate observation
in everyday living and detached thinking. They are treated as magical
formulas. It is amazing to see the stern look of even educated people when
they repeat these trite and worn banalities, inherited through the genera-
tions, as if they were pointing out something new and tremendously impor-
tant, and also to watch their consternation and confusion when one tries
to disturb their conventional thoughtways by ^‘outlandish” questions.
7. Negro and White Voices
What is at the bottom of this elaborated escape psychology? Has the old
Negro fighter and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois struck a vein of truth when
he remarks:
Nor does the paradox and danger of this situation fail to interest and perplex the
best conscience of the South. Deeply religious and intensely democratic as are the
mass of the whites, they feel acutely the false position in which the Negro problems
place them. Such an essentially honest-hearted and generous people cannot cite the
caste levelling precepts of Christianity, or believe in equality of opportunity for all
men, without coming to feel more and more with each generation that the present
drawing of the color-line is a flat contradiction to their beliefs and professions.
He certainly expresses the opinion of enlightened Negroes. Booker T.
Washington said, in essence, the same thing when, in discussing white
people^s prejudice against and their fear of the Negro, he explained that
they
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