This chapter, therefore, has a thesis and a purpose. If these beliefs, prejudices and faulty deductions can be made accessible for examination and analysis, many of them will be corrected. If a self-critical attitude toward these prejudices can be stimulated by typical examples, a considerable step will have been taken toward understanding and harmony.
The study of public opinion in race relations attempted by the Commission does not presume to set down definite laws of its working, or to tell all about how it works. The aim is merely to make apparent and objective its place and importance in race relations, to indicate some of the ways in which it has developed; how it expresses itself, how it affects both the white and Negro groups; how, in its present state, it is strengthened, weakened, polluted, or purified by deliberate agencies or even by its own action, and finally how it may be used to reduce, if not to prevent, racial unfriendliness and misunderstanding.
The following plan is employed in presenting this branch of the subject:
1. Beliefs regarding Negroes, which greatly influence the conduct of white persons toward them, are described as they apply in the local environment, and their origin and background are traced suggestively to their responsible literature and circumstances.
2. Types of sentiment which are variants of these basic beliefs are presented with a view to making them intelligible, and to classifying them according to resolvable factors of misunderstanding.
3. Since personal attitudes and beliefs are molded by traditions and heritages apart from the exclusive influence of literature, material collected through intimate inquiry is presented objectively to describe the processes by which they appear to be created and to grow. Replies to a searching questionnaire on attitudes and opinions express the result of painstaking self-analysis.
4. Negro opinion on these same issues is described and illustrated with a view to making it intelligible. Their views are listed and their interpretations of current white sentiment are explained as far as possible.
5. From the subjective aspect the study then turns to the instruments by which these opinions are formed and perpetuated and the individual attitudes created. The following are deemed the chief agencies: (a) the press, (b) rumors, (c) myths, (d) propaganda. Conscious and unconscious abuse of these instruments of opinion-making is pointed out and explained.
6. Finally, means are suggested by which public opinion may, where it is faulty, correct itself, and employ its own instruments in the creation of wholesome sentiments among Negroes with respect to whites, and among whites with respect to Negroes.