The Victims of Caste
The Negro Personality.
by Bertram P. Karon.
Springer Publishing Co. 184 pp. $4.50.
Many of us have known in our own lives what it feels like to be socially depreciated: considered unworthy of ordinary social rewards, excluded from places where others have unquestioned access. But most of us have not known what it feels like to be on the wrong side of a caste line. Dr. Karon’s excellent book tells us that there are important differences. An individual who has grown up inside the pale is likely to feel that people go out of their way to make trouble for him; he will fail—or refuse—to recognize real anger; he will tend to deny the existence of his own aggression, even when it is unmistakably present, and will deliberately suppress his own strong anger. His emotions become deadened and are quickly converted to their opposites without apparent cause. He is confused about his work motivations—usually he works only when prompted and not out of any inner desire—and he fears close contacts with other men. These are wounds, Dr. Karon argues, that the Southern caste system inflicts on Southern Negroes.
Dr. Karon, moreover, is to be congratulated for a remarkable job of imaginative thinking, as well as for his meticulous scientific procedure, careful statement of findings, and painstaking concern with minimizing bias. The book’s entire design is connected systematically to general problems and propositions in both sociology and psychology, and its questions and findings are put into clear relation to significant social problems. At the same time, Dr. Karon makes explicit the inadequacies in his design, the gaps in his sample, the variability in the weight of his findings, and the biases which might have prejudiced the outcome.
What we learn from Dr. Karon’s study more completely than ever before, is how the internal lives of those on the “wrong” side of the caste line are structured: their readinesses and resistances; where they will play touch and go with their environments and where they will relate themselves meaningfully; what they dare and what they fear. The villain of the piece, for Dr. Karon, is the caste system—not age, nor education, nor industrialization, nor rural-urban residence, nor population density, nor any single factor which by itself might help to explain differences in social behavior. Dr. Karon shows the limited relevance of such typical variables.
Unfortunately, however, he does not go on to suggest the specific factors within the caste system which are responsible for the psychological injury upon Southern Negroes. We can only speculate as to what they might be—a congeries of threats, degradations, forced emotional withholdings, insults, inculcated sense of inferiority, daily confrontation of unfavorable self-images, lack of motivational support by the regular environment, and perhaps others. Dr. Karon leaves us in some ways, with regard to the personality damage suffered by the Southern Negro, about where Durkheim left us with regard to suicide. The caste system is to Karon what representations collectifs were to Durkheim : the nexus of relevant factors, but with the components unexamined. Thus it might be suggested that The Negro Personality ends just where it should begin: at the very point where, once the ordinary sociological sources of variation have been assigned their proper place, the cultural pattern and the personality structure begin to interact. Why, for instance, should Negroes’ emotions be deadened, or why should they deny their own aggression? If we ask how such differences might be accounted for—what is it about the varying ways Negroes and Whites are exposed to the educational system—we would be led, it seems to me, to some version of a social-psychological set of variables: self-images, ego threats, motivational supports, and the like. I cite this list as a kind of schedule of future research.
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Dr. Karon diagnoses the damages to Negro personality by a projective test (devised by Tomkins and Horn and known as the Picture Arrangement Test) which is, in almost every way, objectively self-scoring. If his test is indeed a reliable measure, Dr. Karon’s findings must shock us, both in what they imply about the inner life of Southern Negroes, and in what they suggest generally about man’s emotional life under conditions of severe repression. But how shall we satisfy ourselves on this? How does one know when he has truly detected fear of one’s own anger?
The peculiar characteristic of most of the traits which distinguish Negro from White is that they result in non-behavior, in disguised action, subverted emotions, and calculated withdrawals. The crucial evidence would thus be that Negroes did not perform the decisive actions which others, less wounded, did perform. But to go one step further: when we are dealing with disguises and pretenses, so clever that they deceive even the pretender, where then is the evidence that at bottom there is so much more than meets the eye? Projective tests are, it seems to me, insufficient for getting at such information. Some day, some Negroes will have to tell some Whites, in ways more decisive and clear than projective tests now show, and in ways so shocking that they are recognized by Negro informants as well as by their White listeners as unmistakable truth, what it is they really feel. But this can probably be done only by the most alienated, atypical, “non-Negro” Negroes; and the message can probably be heard only by those Whites whom most other Whites won’t believe. Perhaps, hopefully, such drastic circumstances of truth-saying and truth-hearing may not be required.
Yet Dr. Karon’s work, as it stands, is precisely the kind of closely reasoned scientific investigation which may help open frontiers in constitutional interpretation. It took the various courts a total of more than fifty years to absorb the evidence that separate schools are not equal schools. Perhaps it will not take subsequent courts as long to absorb the evidence that nominally desegregated schools within a functionally segregated community hardly meet the spirit of the 14th Amendment, much less its letter. Perhaps, in other words, the Court in the future will take more direct account than it has in the past of the substantial evidence afforded by such social scientific studies as The Negro Personality.
In another way, this work speaks eloquently to all of us concerned with the raising of children in today’s society. We steer, or try to steer, precarious and uncharted courses between teaching what is conducive to social success and what is needed for the free and generous emotional expression which most of us recognize as important to the health and integrity of the psyches of our children. Yet somehow a frightening number of these children seem to be ending up as organization men, mannered and success-minded, but incapable of crying and raging when they need to.
Have we not made them afraid of their own emotions? Have we not demanded that they defer their emotions in the interest of social reception, their educational careers, their community relations? Dr. Karon’s work warns us, sympathetically yet strongly, that “if you cannot control your anger in a world where you are constantly being provoked, and where the direct expression of anger brings inevitable disasters, you are lost.” He is here speaking of the Southern Negro under caste repressions. But the corollary implication is equally undeniable: that if you cannot express your anger when you are provoked, then you are lost, for systematic repression of anger brings disorder and death to the capacity to feel.
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