about the quality of the white Southerner’s prejudice. The Yankee is rather businesslike in his matter-of-fact exclusion of the Negro from certain spheres of ordinary living. The British imperialist was haughty and sure of himself. But the violence, the passion, the murderous quality of the white Southerner’s feeling against the Negro has become a canon of American thought that is deep in our consciousness and our literature (and in European literature as well: Sartre’s La Putain respectueuse). And what is more significant, although the outward signs of this prejudice are clear enough, at its core, at the why of this crazy feeling, is a mystery.
When reporter John Bartlow Martin wrote The Deep South Says “Never” right after the Supreme Court school-desegregation decision, he implied in the book’s title itself that there was some ineradicable mystical hatred, so deep and so invisible in the white Southerner, that no blasts of social change could touch it. After I had lived a year or so in the Deep South, talking to and living next door to the same white people described by the author of that book, I began to suspect he was wrong. Six years later, I knew he was. Prejudice, discrimination, race hatred are real problems, to the point of viciousness, even murder. But their mystery, for those who will look hard, is gone.
I will not tangle with cause, because once you acknowledge cause as the core of a problem, you have built something into it that not only baffles people, but, worse, immobilizes them. Causation is not merely complex—it may be a problem impossible of solution, according to some of the new philosophers. Perhaps it is one of those metaphysical conundrums created by our own disposition to set verbal obstacles between ourselves and reality. Why not ignore cause as a general philosophical problem and concentrate on result? The point is devilishly, irreverently simple: if you can get a desired result, the mystery is gone. Stop fumbling with the cause of prejudice except for those aspects on which we can operate. A physicist may still not know what really is behind the transformation of matter into energy, but if he has figured out how to release this energy, his achievement is stupendous.
Atlanta is in the Deep South. Atlanta has as many crackpots, KKK sympathizers, country wool-hats, white supremacists, barbershop lynchers, vicious policemen as any Southern city. If the Deep South said “Never,” Atlanta, too, said “Never.” In 1958 it was tightly segregated. By 1963: the buses had desegregated; so had the public libraries, the rail and bus terminals, a number of theaters and restaurants downtown, the department store cafeterias, the opera, the municipal auditorium, the legitimate theater, the public schools, the colleges (public and private), several hotels, the plainclothes squad of the Police Department, the Fire Department, the baseball team, the tennis courts, the parks, the golf courses, the public swimming pools, the Chamber of Commerce, several professional organizations, the county committee of the Democratic Party, and even the Senate of the Georgia General Assembly!
These are all tokens, in relation to the total need, but they suggest what is possible. And now that they are won, obvious explanations can be advanced with great casualness: a flexible city administration, a layer of Negro intellectuals, a determined student movement willing to engage in civil disobedience, a band of white liberals who give a cosmopolitan salting to the country-style Talmadge ham. But none of this takes account of the fact that all the above forces are a minority of the population; that most of Atlanta’s population, the overwhelming majority of its 350,000 white people, still consider Negroes inferior and prefer a segregated society; and that all these people could have prevented most of the change—by riot, by election, by boycott—if they had cared enough. They stood by passively and accepted, with the puniest resistance, a series of important changes in the sociolegal structure of the city.
There is, then, a key to the traditionally mysterious vault of prejudice locked inside the mind of the white Southerner. He cares, but not enough. Or, to put it another way, although he cares about segregation, there are things he cares about more. The white Southerner has a hierarchy of desires, in which many other things are rated higher than segregation: monetary profit, political power, staying out of jail, the approval of one’s immediate peers, conforming to the dominant decision of the community. Desegregation came in varying degrees, to Atlanta and a hundred other places in the Deep South, in the face of persistent anti-Negro feelings in the community, simply because one or another of these desires, which stand higher in the Southerner’s value-scheme, was threatened and the white Southerner chose to surrender.
Except as an academic exercise, there is no need then to probe the fog that inescapably shrouds the philosophical question of causation in race prejudice. What needs to be done is to decide for each group of whites in the community which value is more important and to plan a web of multiple tactics—negotiation, boycott, lawsuit, voting, demonstration—that will effectively invoke these priorities. In a rough semiconscious way, the actions of the federal courts and of Negro leaders in the South have aimed at this; a more deliberate use of the hierarchy-of-value concept would bring even more dramatic results.
The white man in the South is subject to the same simplicities and the same complexities that surround the human species of any color any place; he has certain biological needs, which he will try to satisfy whichever way he can; on top of this he has certain wants which he has learned from his culture—and because these often conflict with one another he has an unconscious set of priorities that enables him to make choices. He is subject to economic pressure and ambition. Also, if Jungian theory is correct and the notions of modern role psychology are valid (and I believe they are), he needs approval from certain people around him and seeks to play out the role society has cast him in. Beyond all this, as beyond all the frontiers of human knowledge, there is mystery in the behavior of the human animal. But it’s time to clear from our minds that artificial and special mystique, so firmly attached to the Southern white, that has too long served as a rationale for pessimism and inaction.
But what of the black man—or woman? There is a strange and damnable unanimity among segregationists, white liberals, and Negroes on one fervent belief—the mystery of négritude—the irreducible kernel, after all sociological peelings, of race difference. The segregationist (White Citizen or Black Muslim) shouts this in all directions. The white liberal is subtle, sophisticated, and ingenious in the various ways he can express this: he sweetens it with sympathy or admiration or affection, he delights in the sheer thrill of a mystery. He cherishes it as a secret shared with his fellow liberals: “Yes, yes—we can never know what it is to be a Negro. No, no—they will never trust a white man, and we can’t blame them.” The Negro, robbed of other protection, clings to it, plays with it, turns it to his advantage when he can. Even the most perceptive of his literary leaders (James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison) use it with cunning, or with pride. And all of them, white liberal and Negro intellectual, fondle it and nurture it as men, having subdued a forest fire, might play with the last flames, too fascinated even in the midst of peril to put them out for good.
Physical difference is so gross a stimulus to human beings, cursed as they are by the gift of vision, that once it is latched onto as an explanation for differences in personality, intelligence, demeanor, it is terribly difficult to put aside. It becomes an easy substitute for the immensely difficult job of explaining personal and social behavior. Conservatives use it openly; liberals secretly, even unknowingly. It seems to be the hardest thing in the world to convince ourselves that once we’ve noted skin color, facial features, and hair texture, we have exhausted the subject of race—that everything beyond that is in our heads, put there by others and kept there by ourselves, and that all the brutal material consequences of centuries, from lynching to patronizing friendship, were spun from an original thread of falsehood.
The most vicious thing about segregation—more deadly than its immediate denial of certain goods and services—is its perpetuation of the mystery of racial difference. For there is a magical and omnipotent dispeller of the mystery; it is contact. Contact—but it must be massive, unlike those “integrated” situations in the North, and it must be equal, thus excluding maid-lady relationships of the South—destroys the man-made link between physical difference and behavior. Race consciousness is hollow, its formidable-looking exterior is membrane-thin and
