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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - X. The Negro Community - 44. Non-Institutional Aspects of the Negro Community - 1. “Peculiarities” of Negro Culture and Personality
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962 An American Dilemma
is a love of the gaudy, the bizarre, the ostentatious.* The lower and middle
class Negroes have their lodges with all their pomp and ceremony. If
they can afford it, they wear colorful clothing of unusual style. Their social
gatherings are made expensive by good food, display and excellent enter-
tainment. The Negro’s reputation for conspicuous display is, of course,
exaggerated, because most Negroes do not have the money to be ostenta-
tious: so many of them wear the cast-off clothing of white people and live
in tiny shacks and flats. White people often generalize about the Negro
race from a single observation: a Negro racketeer driving a gaudy, expen-
sive car will cause thousands of white people to remark about the ostenta-
tiousness of Negroes. What there is of color and pomp in their lodges and
social gatherings is a sort of lag in acculturation, a misguided attempt to
gain status by conspicuous consumption. Negroes have no more of this than
do immigrant white groups and even many poor native white groups.
Some of what appears exotic to whites is simply a result of the development
of unique culture traits: a group which is kept so forcibly isolated as are
the Negroes is bound to initiate a few such traits even though the great
bulk of their behavior patterns are those which are common to all Amer-
icans. An example of such a trait is that which has come to be known as
a ^^zoot suit”: a man’s suit with broad-seated and narrow-cuffed trousers and
a long suit-coat, usually worn with a wide-brimmed hat. This suit, inci-
* This trait, as well as the connected Negro trait of audaciousness, is characteristic of
white Southerners too, and it may be that Negroes have taken on the trait from the whites.
“White southerners employ many of the same defense mechanisms characteristic of the
Negro. They often carry a ‘chip on the shoulder* ^
they indulge freely in self-commiseration}
they rather typically and in real Negro fashion try to overcome a feeling of inferiority by
exhibitionism, raucousness, flashiness in dress, and an exaggerated self-assertion. An air of
belligerency, discreetly employed when it can be done without risk, is one means of release
for the individual who feels himself the underdog. A casual observation of the conduct of
southern law-makers in the chambers of Congress will be sufiicient to demonstrate that
southern legislators, taken as a group, are more abusive, indulge in personalities and more
rough and tumble repartee than the legislators from any other section. What spice there is
in the Congressional Record is furnished by the southerners, whether it be a Cole Blease,
a Heflin or a ‘Cotton Ed’ Smith delivering one of the notorious diatribes against the Negro,
(including a discourse on how permanent is the odor of the Negro), or a Huey Long giving
one of his opponents a ‘dressing down’ with enough insulting innuendo to have caused
gun-play in the old days (and enough even today to have gotten Huey’s nose punched now
and then, it was rumored). The southerner is proficient too, at conjuring up arguments to
show how shabbily the South has been treated. Like the Negro, the white South holds out
its hands for alms and special privilege. A Georgia planter, bitterly anti-New Deal, was not
at all moved by the assertion that a lot of northern money was being sent South in relief
and other New Deal activities. ‘We ou^hta be gittin’ some of it back} they stole enough from
us in the war,’ he drawled. It is well-known in the inside circles of some of the national
academic societies that southern members put in special claims for representation among the
oflice-holders on the grounds that ‘the South is discriminated against,* and they often got
recognition.” (Ralph J. Bunche, “Memorandum on Conceptions and Ideologies of the Negro
Problem,” unpublished manuscript prepared for this study [1940], pp. 71-73.)
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