come from being with a person day-in, day-out.
In our country, the kind of contact that rubs away race consciousness is possible only in rare places, and at rare times. But it exists, in scattered pockets of resistance to the norm. One of them is the Negro college, where white people can become so immersed in a Negro environment that they are oblivious, at least temporarily, of race. The fact that they live on an island, against which waves of prejudice roll from time to time, means that they slide back and forth from overconsciousness on some days to a blissful racial amnesia on others.
A white student, after she had spent several months living, eating, studying, playing in a totally Negro college environment, visited a nearby white college and returned saying: “How pallid they all seemed—all those white faces and sharp noses!” This is a startling example of race consciousness in reverse, but it is encouraging to see how quickly one can change the temper of racial awareness by an inundation of sense experiences.
Once the superficiality of the physical is penetrated and seen for what it is, the puzzle of race loses itself in whatever puzzle there is to human behavior in general. Once you begin to look in human clashes for explanations other than racial ones, they suddenly become visible, and even where they remain out of sight, it is comforting to know that these nonracial explanations exist. Disease began to lose its eeriness with the discovery of bacteria, although the specific problem of identifying each bacterial group remained.
So long as evil exists—and it exists in poisonous heaps, South and North—the raw material for mystery will be here. We can make the most—if we want to—of white mobs in Oxford, mass Negro indignation in Albany, blazing churches in Birmingham, gunfire on rural porches, and the sheer wonder of blackness and whiteness. But the specialness of the Southern mystique vanishes when one sees that whites and Negroes behave only like human beings, that the South is but a distorted mirror image of the North, and that we are powerful enough today, and free enough, to retain only as much of the past as we want. We are all magicians. We created the mystery of the South, and we can dissolve it.
Is the Southern White Unfathomable?
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