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Chapter 28. The Basis of Social Inequality 603
Even the poor classes of whites in the North come to mistrust and
despise the Negroes. The European immigrant groups are the ones thrown
into most direct contact and competition with Negroes: they live near each
other, often send their children to the same schools, and have to struggle
for the same jobs. Obviously attitudes among immigrants vary a good deal.
Recent immigrants apparently sometimes feel an interest solidarity with
Negroes or, at any rate, lack the intense superiority feeling of the native
Americans educated in race prejudice. But the development of prejudice
against Negroes is usually one of their first lessons in Americanization.
Because they are of low status, they like to have a group like the Negroes
to which they can be superior. For these reasons, it should not be surpris-
ing if now, since new immigration has been restricted for a considerable
time, a study of racial attitudes should show that the immigrant groups
are on the average even more prejudiced than native Americans in the
same community.
I have an impression that the resentment against Negroes in the North
is different from that in the South, not only in intensity, but also in its
class direction. It does not seem to be directed particularly against the
rising Negroes. In the more anonymous Northern cities, the Negro middle
and upper classes do not get into the focus of public resentment as in the
South. More important is the Yankee outlook on life in which climbing
and social success are generally given a higher value than in the more
static Southern society, and the ambitious Negro will more often be re-
warded by approval and even by admiration, while in the South he is
likely to be considered ^^smart,” ^^uppity’^ or ‘‘out of his place.”
Otherwise, the North is not original in its racial ideology. When there
is segregation and discrimination to be justified, the rationalization is some-
times a vague and simplified version of the “no social equality” theory of
the South which we have already discussed. It is continuously spread by
Southerners moving North and Northerners who have been South, by
fiction and by hearsay. But more often the rationalizations run in terms
of the alleged racial inferiority of the Negro, his animal-like nature, his
unreliability, his low morals, dirtiness and unpleasant manners. The refer-
ences and associations to amalgamation and intermarriage are much less
frequent and direct. This does not mean that the Northerner approves of
intermarriage. But he is less emotional in his disapproval. What Paul
Lewinson calls “the post-prandial non-sequitur”—if a Negro eats with a
white man he is assumed to have the right to marry his daughter
—
practically does not exist in the North.
In this situation, however, not only is intermarriage frowned upon, but
in high schools and colleges there will often be attempts to exclude
Negroes from dances and social affairs. Social segregation is, in fact, likely
to appear in all sorts of social relations^. But there is much less social
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