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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VIII. Social Stratification - 32. The Negro Class Structure - 3. Color and Class
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Chapter 32. The Negro Class Structure 697
South and the increased antagonism on the white side toward all Negroes
who were ^^out of their place’^ made the whites less inclined to draw a
distinction between light and dark Negroes.
But at the same time Emancipation broadened the basis for a Negro
upper class and increased the possibilities for this class relatively even
more than for the Negro masses themselves. What there was in the Negro
people of ‘^family background,” tradition of freedom, education and prop-
erty ownership was mostly in the hands of mulattoes. They became the
political leaders of the freedmen during Reconstruction, as well as their
teachers, professionals and business people. Compared with the newly
freed slave population they had a tremendous head-start. In the social
stratification of the Negro community their social distance toward the
Negro masses perpetuated itself. Darker Negroes who rose from the
masses to distinction in the Negro community by getting an education or
by conducting successful business enterprises showed an almost universal
desire to marry light-skinned women and so to become adopted members
of the light-colored aristocracy and to give their children a heritage of
lighter color. Blackness of skin remained undesirable and even took on an
association of badness.^^
Without any doubt a Negro with light skin and other European features
has in the North an advantage with white people when competing for jobs
available for Negroes.^^ It is less true in the South, particularly in the
humbler occupations. The whites continue to associate the nearness to their
own physical type with superior endowments and cultural advancement,
and the preponderance of fair-skinned Negroes in the upper strata seems
to give this prejudice a basis in fact. Perhaps of even greater importance
is the fact that the Negro community itself has accepted this color prefer-
ence.^® In conversation Negroes often try to deny or to minimize this fact.
But there are a number of indications which an observer cannot help
recording. For one thing, many individual Negroes will be found, when
speaking about themselves, to rate their own color lighter than it actually
is, but practically none to rate it darker.^® The desire on the part of Negro
women of all shades and in all social classes to bleach their skin and
straighten their hair—observed decades ago by Ray Stannard Baker and
William Archer^^—has been the basis for some of the most Important
Negro businesses and some of the largest fortunes. Cosmetics for such
purposes are most prominently advertised in the Negro press. The pictures
of the social lions displayed on the social pages of the Negro newspapers
give evidence in the same direction, as does listening to the undertones of
conversation In Negro society even when an outsider is present.
Cliques, clubs, and social life in general seem to be permeated by this
color preference.^® The color problem enters into the Negro home, where
children show differences in shades, and into the schools.^® In ^marriage
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