Introduction to the Science of Sociology

by Robert Ezra Park; E. W. Burgess

Finally, caste and the limitation of economic opportunity is contrary, if not to our traditions, at least to our political principles. That means that there will always be an active minority opposed to any settlement based on the caste system as applied to either the black or the brown races, on grounds of political sentiment. This minority will be small in parts of the country immediately adversely affected by the competition of the invading race. It will be larger in regions which are not greatly affected. It will be increased if immigration is so rapid as to make the competition more acute. We must look to other measures for the solution of the Japanese problem, if it should prove true, as seems probable, that we are not able or, for various reasons, do not care permanently to hold back the rising tide of the oriental invasion.

I have said that fundamentally and in principle prejudice against the Japanese in America today was identical with the prejudice which attaches to any immigrant people. There is, as Mr. Steiner has pointed out, a difference. This is due to the existence in the human mind of a mechanism by which we inevitably and automatically classify every individual human being we meet. When a race bears an external mark by which every individual member of it can infallibly be identified, that race is by that fact set apart and segregated. Japanese, Chinese, and Negroes cannot move among us with the same freedom as the members of other races because they bear marks which identify them as members of their race. This fact isolates them. In the end the effect of this isolation, both in its effects upon the Japanese themselves and upon the human environment in which they live, is profound. Isolation is at once a cause and an effect of race prejudice. It is a vicious circle—isolation, prejudice; prejudice, isolation. Were there no other reasons which urge us to consider the case of the Japanese and the oriental peoples in a category different from that of the European immigrant, this fact, that they are bound to live in the American community a more or less isolated life, would impel us to do so.

In conclusion, I may perhaps say in a word what seems to me the practical bearing of Mr. Steiner's book. Race prejudice is a mechanism of the group mind which acts reflexly and automatically in response to its proper stimulus. That stimulus seems to be, in the cases where I have met it, unrestricted competition of peoples with different standards of living. Racial animosities and the so-called racial misunderstandings that grow out of them cannot be explained or argued away. They can only be affected when there has been a readjustment of relations and an organization of interests in such a way as to bring about a larger measure of co-operation and a lesser amount of friction and conflict. This demands something more than a diplomacy of kind words. It demands a national policy based on an unflinching examination of the facts.

2. Conflict and Race Consciousness[216]

The Civil War weakened but did not fully destroy the modus vivendi which slavery had established between the slave and his master. With emancipation the authority which had formerly been exercised by the master was transferred to the state, and Washington, D.C., began to assume in the mind of the freedman the position that formerly had been occupied by the "big house" on the plantation. The masses of the Negro people still maintained their habit of dependence, however, and after the first confusion of the change had passed, life went on, for most of them, much as it had before the war. As one old farmer explained, the only difference he could see was that in slavery he "was working for old Marster and now he was working for himself."

There was one difference between slavery and freedom, nevertheless, which was very real to the freedman. And this was the liberty to move. To move from one plantation to another in case he was discontented was one of the ways in which a freedman was able to realize his freedom and to make sure that he possessed it. This liberty to move meant a good deal more to the plantation Negro than one not acquainted with the situation in the South is likely to understand.

If there had been an abundance of labor in the South; if the situation had been such that the Negro laborer was seeking the opportunity to work, or such that the Negro tenant farmers were competing for the opportunity to get a place on the land, as is so frequently the case in Europe, the situation would have been fundamentally different from what it actually was. But the South was, and is today, what Nieboer called a country of "open," in contradistinction to a country of "closed" resources. In other words, there is more land in the South than there is labor to till it. Land owners are driven to competing for laborers and tenants to work their plantations.

Owing to his ignorance of business matters and to a long-established habit of submission, the Negro after emancipation was placed at a great disadvantage in his dealings with the white man. His right to move from one plantation to another became, therefore, the Negro tenant's method of enforcing consideration from the planter. He might not dispute the planter's accounts, because he was not capable of doing so, and it was unprofitable to attempt it, but if he felt aggrieved he could move.

This was the significance of the exodus in some of the southern states which took place about 1879, when 40,000 people left the plantations in the Black Belts of Louisiana and Mississippi and went to Kansas. The masses of the colored people were dissatisfied with the treatment they were receiving from the planters and made up their minds to move to "a free country," as they described it. At the same time it was the attempt of the planter to bind the Negro tenant who was in debt to him to his place on the plantation that gave rise to the system of peonage that still exists in a mitigated form in the South today.

When the Negro moved off the plantation upon which he was reared he severed the personal relations which bound him to his master's people. It was just at this point that the two races began to lose touch with each other. From this time on the relations of the black man and white, which in slavery had been direct and personal, became every year, as the old associations were broken, more and more indirect and secondary. There lingers still the disposition on the part of the white man to treat every Negro familiarly, and the disposition on the part of every Negro to treat every white man respectfully. But these are habits which are gradually disappearing. The breaking down of the instincts and habits of servitude and the acquisition by the masses of the Negro people of the instincts and habits of freedom have proceeded slowly but steadily. The reason the change seems to have gone on more rapidly in some cases than others is explained by the fact that at the time of emancipation 10 per cent of the Negroes in the United States were already free, and others, those who had worked in trades, many of whom had hired their own time from their masters, had become more or less adapted to the competitive conditions of free society.