How It Feels To Be a Negro

Most white folks suppose that all colored folks are low class. Not so. U. S. Negroes "differ socially among themselves as far as the poles," have at least six classes: lower-lower, upper-lower, lower-middle, middle-middle, upper-middle, upper. Upper-class Negroes describe their inferiors as "the common, ignorant sort of niggers." It is his class, rather than his race, which determines a Negro's behavior, personality, ambitions.

Basing their investigations on this fact, two sociologists--one white, one Negro--last week made a report on what it means to be born a Negro in the U. S. They had studied some 30 Negro adolescents of all classes in Natchez and New Orleans, summed up their findings in eight case studies (Children of Bondage--American Council on Education, Washington, D. C. --$2.25).

The authors were Dr. John Dollard, of Yale's Institute of Human Relations, and Allison Davis, head of the social studies department at Dillard University, now lecturing at University of Chicago. Allison Davis, a lightskinned, upper-class Negro, has degrees from Williams and Harvard, studied at the London School of Economics, won so many honors at Williams that he got a prize for winning prizes.

Authors Dollard & Davis sketched in their background with a few statistics: e.g., in Natchez the average Negro family's income is less than $400 a year; one child in three is a bastard. A Pullman porter rates as middle-middle class; a family with $250 a month is upper-middle class; more than three-fourths of Negroes are lower class; a Negro's social standing rises according to the lightness of his skin, the straightness of his hair. Case histories:

"Frightened Amazon." Dark, skinny Julia "Raddie" (for rowdy) Wilson, 16, is a member of a family sinking from lower-middle to lower class. Her father, a river roustabout, onetime bootlegger, consorts with prostitutes, quarrels violently with his family, once was axed by Julia's older sister. Her mother whipped Julia regularly from babyhood. "As a child, she was a favorite with the 'across-the-tracks' gang of boys and girls. They fought with rocks, knives and sometimes with pistols. At 14 she saw a boy badly stabbed by another in an argument over her at a school picnic. She married at 16. and had a fist-and-chair fight with her husband the first time she saw him after their marriage."

Julia "will do anything--fight a man, curse a teacher, or kiss a boy in the schoolyard." But she is sexually scared and she quit her husband as soon as she learned that her supposed pregnancy was only a stomachache. A golddigger, she says: "When you get a sucker, bump his head.'' Of white folks: "I hate white people. I just like to beat on white people."

"Self-Made Man." Medium-brown Chester Olivier, 16, is also lower-middle class, the son of a Creole artisan who deserted his wife and four children for a mistress. But Chester is on the way up. Prodded by his ambitious mother, smart Chester is now a junior in a private prep school, active in dramatics, vice president of his class, goes to dances with lightskinned, upper-class girls, teaches Sunday school in the Methodist Church (higher in the social scale than his mother's Spiritualist Church), was recently voted "fifth most popular Negro in New Orleans."

Chester had his first affair (with a Creole cousin) at nine, now has a young married woman as his mistress. Ashamed of his family (his brother is a prize fighter), Chester is often depressed, fears that poverty may prevent him from going to college and becoming a doctor. Once a white man chased him with a gun because, while hawking newspapers, Chester refused to stop yelling: "Louis K.O.'s Braddock." Chester says he hates white people. When white folks humiliate him, he "sees red," but is afraid to fight back.

Authors Dollard & Davis' conclusion: Negroes are doubly bedeviled by class and caste anxieties; one way to alleviate Negro problems is for society to visit less punishment on Negro children, more sympathetic understanding.

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