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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 4. Racial Beliefs - 7. Beliefs with a Purpose
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102 An American Dilemma
ential factor in making our actual condition what it is,” complains James
Weldon Johnson.’*^
The Negro’s situation being what it is and the unsophisticated white
man’s mind working as it does, the white man can honestly think and say
that his beliefs are founded upon close personal experience and hard facts.
He is not deliberately deceiving himself; but the beliefs are opportunistic.
The typical white individual does not fabricate his theory for a purpose.
The ordinary white American is an upright and honest fellow who tries
to think straight and wants to be just to everybody. He does not consciously
concoct his prejudices for a purpose.
But unscrupulous demagogues do it all the time with great profit. Many
other white individuals will occasionally find it to their private interests
to stretch their biased beliefs a little more in a direction unfavorable to the
Negro. Much of this might happen just on the margin of what is con-
sciously acknowledged. Practically no white people are sufficiently incited
by self-interest to scrutinize their beliefs critically. And so through the
generations^ strengthened by tradition and community coj^isensusy a fublic
opnion among whites is formulated which is ’plainly opportunistic in the
interest of the majority group. The individual in the group can remain
confident in his moral and intellectual integrity. He “sees” the facts for
himself. Tradition and consensus seem to him to be additional intellectual
evidence and moral sanction for what he already believes. They relieve
him of any duty he otherwise might have felt to criticize seriously his
observations and inferences. The recognition that the racial beliefs thus
have a social purpose opens up a perspective on the causal mechanism
behind their formation and gives us a clue for the further study of their
structure, to which we now proceed.
If white Americans can believe that Negro Americans belong to a lower
biological species than they themselves, this provides a motivation for their
doctrine that the white race should be kept pure and that amalgamation
should, by all means, be prevented. The theory of the inborn inferiority
of the Negro people is, accordingly, used as an argument for the anti-
amalgamation doctrine. This doctrine, in its turn, has, as we have seen, a
central position in the American system of color caste.*^ The belief in
biological inferiority is thus another basic support, in addition to the
no-social-equality, anti-amalgamation doctrine, of the system of segregation
and discrimination. Whereas the anti-amalgamation doctrine has its main
importance in the “social” field, the belief in the Negro’s biological inferi-
ority is basic to discrimination in all fields. White Americans have an
interest in deprecating the Negro race in so far as they identify themselves
with the prevailing system of color caste. They have such an interest,
though in a lower degree, even if their only attachment to the caste order
* See Chapter 3, Section a.
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