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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 36. The Protest Motive and Negro Personality - 5. Negro Aggression - 6. Upper Class Reactions
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764 An American Dilemma
caste and direct it upon other Negroes.^^ This means that the caste protest
turns inward upon the Negro community. The lack of police protection in
the Negro community and the leniency toward Negro offenders if they
restrict their activity to other Negroes makes this outlet for aggression
even more inviting.® There are no reasons to assume that Negroes are
endowed with a greater innate propensity to violence than other people.**
The excess of physical assaults—and of altercations—^within the Negro
community is rather to be explained as a misplaced aggression of a severely
frustrated subordinate caste.’*
This outlet is, however, prohibited in the Negro middle and upper
classes where respectability is a supreme norm and lighting and squabbling
are severely censored. Hindered by caste, prudence, and respectability from
taking it out on either the whites or on other Negroes in blows and scold-
ings, they have to store up their aggression. This is probably another cause
of their greater sensitivity. Some few find an outlet in organizational
activity for the Negro cause.
6. Upper Class Reactions
Caste solidarity is founded upon the entirely negative principle that all
Negroes find themselves enclosed together behind the same caste bar and
bruise their heads against it. Caste does not allow any Negro, when he has
raised himself above the rest—and even if he then hates them—to leave the
group. This is a background against which the relation between the different
classes in the Negro community should be viewed. It is convenient to dis-
tinguish these relations, as seen by the minute upper class, from the
conception held by the Negro masses.
As has already been indicated, there are many upper class Negroes who
try to escape from race and caste.’^ They have arranged a little isolated
world for themselves and want to hear as little as possible about their
being Negroes or the existence of a Negro problem. They make it a point
not to read Negro papers or Negro books j
they keep themselves and their
children apart from ^‘common Negroes.” They try to share the conservative
political opinions of the whites of similar class status j
they often over-do
this considerably. They despise lower class Negroes, and they balance the
account by despising lower class whites too.
In a sense this is a type of accommodation. It relinquishes the Negro
protest but it does not accept the inferiority doctrine, at least not in so far
as it applies to themselves. When people who hold this attitude play up
class, it is instrumental in allowing them to play down caste. To preserve
their attitude they keep as far as possible from interracial situations where
the reality of caste would become acute. But, since whites of their class do
* Sec Part VL
**
See Chapter 6.
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