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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 9. Economic Inequality - 3. The Value Premises - 4. The Conflict of Valuations
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Chapter 9. Economic Inequality 21 $
But it lacks nothing in scientific preciseness and definiteness. An inquiry
into the Negro problem in America which shrinks from this valuation is
devoid of social perspective and, indeed, interest. Discrimination will be
our central concept for our analysis of both the utilization of Negro
productivity and the distribution of goods and services for Negro consump-
tion.
4. The Conflict of Valuations
By formulating these value premises, and particularly the third one,
demanding fair play, we again confront the split in American personality
and the ambivalence in American social morals. Our central problem is
neither the exploitation of the Negro people nor the various effects of this
exploitation on American society, but rather the moral conflict in the heart
of white Americans.
In passing we might glance at some of the standard rationalizations by
which the American white man tries to build a bridge of reason between his
equalitarian Creed and his nonequalitarian treatment of the Negroes. It
should be understood that the popular theories are based upon what the
ordinary white man conceives to be his own observations and upon what
he believes to be common knowledge. We shall first refer to the folklore
in the South.
Sometimes a mere reference to custom is advanced as a reason for
economic discrimination against Negroes. A report on teachers’ salaries
prepared by a university in one of the Border states reads:
An additional argument in favor of the salary differential is the general tradition
of the South that negroes and whites are not to be paid equivalent salaries for
equivalent work. The attitude may be considered wrong from whatever angle it is
viewed, but the fact remains that the custom is one that is almost universal and one
that the practical school administrator must not ignore.®
For not a few, this moral logic that "what was and is, shall be and ought to
be” seems sufficient.
Interestingly enough, only rarely will a white man in the South defend
economic discrimination in terms of white people’s interest to have cheap
labor available.® Nearest to such a motivation come oblique statements like:
"This’ is a white man’s country” 5
or more expressively: "We don’t have
money enough to pay our white workers decent wages” 5
or, in regard to
discrimination in the school system: "The appropriations do not suffice
even to give the white children good schools.”
Such statements are common in the whole South. They are made even
by intellectuals. Often there is a further rationalization behind such pro-
nouncements to the effect that "Negroes are the wards of the white people”
—^an American version of the doctrine of English imperialism about "the
’‘Tn this, economic discrimination is different from social discrimination. See Chapter 2S.
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