Dynamics of Desegregation; 11; Conformity and the Crutch

whats happening? It's just calling us out. The dynamics of desegregation. The dynamics of desegregation. In his book The Nature of Prejudice, Psychologist Gordon Allport writes,

Prejudice may become a part of one's life tissue, suffusing character because it is essential to the economy of a life. It is not always acting this way, for some prejudices are merely conformative and essentially unrelated to the personality as a whole. These words of Gordon Allport are crucially important for understanding our nation's present desegregation process, for they tell us that there are two basically different types of prejudice. One type is conformity, simply going along with the intolerant crowd. But the other type involves deeply rooted prejudice, with an insecure individual uses prejudice like a crutch, a pun which to limp through life, conformity and the crutch.

With these two types in mind, the question arises as to which type of prejudice better describes the typical white southerners feelings toward the Negro. Are most white southerners merely conforming to the demands of an intolerant culture, or do most of them actually possess more crutch type bigotry? The answer to this question is by no means academic, it has vital consequences for what we may expect in the future. Suppose a site really does have more crutch type prejudice. More individuals who in Allport's terms have allowed prejudice to become a part of their life tisher. This were true, then the desegregation process is obviously going to have very tough sledding throughout its course, since such individual structure their whole lives around prejudice and resistance to racial change. But if white southerners typically toward the Negro largely consist of conforming individuals, then desegregation can be accepted more easily.

Before we can answer this question, no, we need to look more carefully at these two prejudice types. The crutch type personality has been the object of intensive research by a social psychologist in recent decades. One of their principal conclusions is that the basic problem of the crutch type individual is a lack of insight into his own behavior and feelings. A refusal to look inside of himself, stemming largely from his training as a child. The crutch type person refuses to accept his own emotions and he tries hard to deny their his. For example, a child as a child, a crutch type individual may frequently have been punished by a stern father, and in turn felt intense hatred for him. But being unable to express this hatred for fear of further punishment, the crutch type found these aggressive emotions threatening and unacceptable. He denied them and instead began to see in others his own aggressive feelings.

Thus, he learned early to see in others on psychological terms to project onto others his own unacceptable feelings and emotions. If he felt hatred for his father, then he would see hatred not in himself but in the dangerous outside world around him. Of course, you and I can remember having had aggressive feelings toward our parents at one time or another, particularly when they found it necessary to punish us. But the significant feature of the crutch type person is that he is difficulty remembering such times. He is denied that these feelings ever existed. Indeed, if you ask crutch types to describe their parents, they will typically paint a picture of absolutely perfect and loving parents. While most of us have a differentiated image of our parents, we can see them as human or some false, as well as many virtues. Now, caring over this idealized picture of his parents through other authorities, the crutch type person tends to view the world in good, bad, up and down power terms. He is generally outwardly submissive, even in a sequest, toward those he views as authorities with power over him, likewise he is aggressive toward those he sees as being beneath him in status.

Now, this dual attitude toward authority, really two sides of the same coin, you see, has led social psychologists to call the crutch type individual an authoritarian personality. Now, we can see how prejudice is needed as a crutch by these people. Lacking insight into their inner feelings, they project their own hatred, their sexual impulses, greed and ambition, on to others. But they view as being beneath them, and it grows as seen as too happy, go lucky, too lazy, too sexually uninhibited, and traits that are sometimes attractive to him. So also are Jews seen as too hardworking, too greedy, too ambitious, other traits that sometimes attract him. Now, six people, you see, are not just prejudice against these two groups, they're frequently against many groups that are different from their own. Indeed, one investigator gave a questionnaire that measured prejudice to a sample of crutch type students, included in it, two groups that don't even exist, the Pyreneens and the Wallunians.

And you guessed it, crutch types didn't like them either. And in sharp contrast to this deeply rooted generalized prejudice, the conforming begot needs prejudice only as a means of getting along with these friends as a sort of social inference ticket. He wants very much to be liked and accepted by people around him. And if people around him are any Negro, he adopts their attitudes. But notice the two important differences between the conformity and the crutch varieties of intolerance. First, the individual who is prejudiced for conformity reasons will have in tip of the only for those groups that it is fashionable to dislike. Of course, the groups that is fashionable to dislike, very according to the part of the nation you happen to be in, in the West, the Chinese and Japanese Americans, in the Midwest Scandinavians and Polish Americans, and in the Southwest, the Spanish Americans, and now in Florida, Cuban Americans. The conformity begot's prejudice will not spread and generalize to a great variety of groups, as in the case of the crutch type.

Conforming individual wants to take the path of least resistance. He needs to be liked not to hate. So he would never be caught showing animosity toward a group that is not generally looked down upon in his culture. Second, conformity prejudice is not deeply rooted in childhood experiences, but is only an attempt at living up to what others expect. Thus, once the culture and the opinions of friends change, and consequently what is expected of him by others is altered, the conforming begot, unlike the crutch type, sheds his begotry with relative ease. He moves right on in conforming, of course, but the customs and culture he is conforming to have changed. Obviously, this characteristic of these people is vital to desegregation, a process which is, in fact, rapidly changing the culture and people's behavior and attitudes. To understand how these two types of prejudice people fit into the present southern scene,

unless here were two southern segregationists would say about the desegregation of the public schools in their town. First, here are crutch type. It's a terrible thing that courts force in us to let the niggas barge into our white schools. It seems like everybody's out to get us. The whole world is just a jungle full of swindlers. Well, I'm not going to stand for it. I'm fighting back. I don't care what other people are going to do, but I'm not going to send my kids to school with those lazy, good-for-nothing people, or have anything to do with all these crazy changes taken place nowadays. Now, let's hear another segregationist at the same time, and with the same complaint. Notice the subtle differences, however, for this one is a conformist. It's unfortunate that our little town has had to let the niggas into the white schools.

Things were going along pretty well, the way they were, and most of us didn't like the idea of integration at all. But do you know something? What really surprised me was the calmness with which these changes were accepted by the people around here. It's not that they like this desegregation business. I don't believe they do. But that show hasn't been in a shouting or yelling about it the way I thought that'd be. Both of these types can be found in the south, but we return to our original question. Which of these types is the more typical of the vast majority of white southerners? Fortunately, both for the south and for the future of the desegregation process, it appears that the conformity type of prejudice southerner is much more common than the crutch type. Be it social science evidence supporting the importance of conformity and southern attitudes on race has been steadily accumulating in recent years.

It comes from several different research leads, one of which is the study of anti-Semitism. Recall that the crutch type bigot tends to be prejudiced against many different groups. His projection of his own unacceptable feelings is likely to spread to Jews and other groups as well as to the Negro. So if the south contained a larger percentage of individuals with crutch type intolerance, it should also reveal a regionally greater amount of anti-Semitism as well as anti-Negro prejudice shouldn't. But actually, a variety of studies demonstrate that the south together with the far west is less, not more, anti-Semitic than other sections of the nation. For instance, national public opinion polls over the years have repeatedly found fewer anti-Semitic responses in the south than in the rest of the nation. And a study of World War II rumors noted that anti-Semitic rumors were only one-third as prevalent in the south as in the nation at large. And more recently, an intensive investigation by the end defamation league of Benebrith,

of private social clubs and organizations throughout the entire nation concluded that there was less exclusion of Jews from such clubs in the south than in any other region. Now, some have argued that this Lord anti-Semitism just simply a reflection of the fact that very few Jews live in the south. But such loose reasoning ignores the Midwest, which also has very few Jews and yet ranks with the northeast in intensity of anti-Semitism. Consequently, a number of social psychological studies have found many white southerners who are quite tolerant of Jews, but at the same time sharply prejudiced against Negro's. These data suggest special conformity pressures in the south to be anti-Negro. A second line of evidence involves direct measures of the crutch type personality. Although further investigations needed, it appears that there is no greater percentage of crutch types in the south than elsewhere in the country.

And nor is there any evidence that the kind of child training believed to lead to the crutch type syndrome of traits is any more prevalent in the south than in other sections. Now, of course, this uninsightful type of individual does exist in the south as the behavior of certain of the region's politicians makes San Alfred abundantly clear. The south's heightened prejudice against the Negro cannot be explained in terms of having an unusually great number of such people in its population. Now, a final line of evidence comes from research on conformity itself. One study of four small southern towns established that those whites who were more conforming in other aspects of the culture also tended to be the most anti-Negro. Women, as an illustration, tended to be both more conforming in general and more prejudiced against Negro's than were men. Likewise, white solenders who were less conforming and who had had experiences outside of the south tended to be the least anti-Negro.

Young southern veterans, for instance, who served in the desegregated armed forces, form a group that had seen the outside world. They tended to be considerably less anti-Negro when compared with non-veterans of the same age and the same education. This study, by the way, was repeated in four small northern towns and these conformity findings from the south were not true for the north. In short, in the south, conformity leads to anti-Negro prejudice and non-conformity leads to tolerance. Why should conformity be so important in the attitudes of white southerners toward Negro southerners? Well, the answer to this question takes us back way back into the dark tragic history of the region. Its entanglement with slavery or lost war, poverty and segregation. For our psychological purposes, suffice it to say that the legacy of this tragic history is still to be found in the Jim Crow system of racial separation and the rigorous pressures that keep both white and Negro southerners obeying the oppressive system.

In many ways, this racist legacy of the past is dissipating. As the modern south races into the 20th century world of urbanization and industrialization, its traditions from the 19th century naturally weaken. But while crumbling, the segregationist wall and the state of mind imprisoned by it are still real forces in the life of any southerner. Now, when translated into individual terms, these remnants of a white supremacy culture require the white southerner, even when he possesses a personality just predisposed toward tolerance, to support segregation and to be prejudiced against Negro's. Of course, with each new generation, more white southerners firmly reject these pressures, but then you become to some extent an outcast.

When a white southerner's parents and siblings are racially prejudiced, when his teachers and peers at school are racially prejudiced, when his limited world accepts racial discrimination as the way things must be done, when his non-conformity means certain social ostracism. Then his anti-Negro attitude, you see, need not be a part of a crutch type personality, but merely a reflection of what his culture expects and demands of him. What then on the implications of this pattern of southern conformity for the future of desegregation? Well, one primary implication involves the importance of changing the South's racist norms rather than trying to change white southerners themselves. For its success, you see, the desegregation process needs to evolve a new system of race relations for conforming southerners to follow.

Indeed, this is precisely what the desegregation process is doing, and it relentlessly step by step destroys the old Jim Crow system of segregation. Once the racist system southerners are now following his destroyed, once the expectation that you must act like a white supremacist is altered, the conforming bigot will become a conforming integrationist. Now, the relentless progress of desegregation also affects some crutch types in the South, as you'd mentioned. They're not completely blind to the racial changes going on about them, and they can at least sense the inevitability of the process, even if they don't change their attitude toward it. I always remember preacher, a small denominational second little rock that I interviewed, right during the 1957 school desegregation crisis there. He was a staunch, and he was a sincere segregationist. But as we finished the research interview, he told me that there was one thing he said about race relations that bothered him.

I was happy to hear there was something that was bothering him, and I eagerly asked them what it was. And he said, son, I was a little younger then. He said, son, see that beautiful old, pull it up there in the front of the church? Well, he said a hundred years ago, a preacher used to get up in that same pulpit. He used to deliver some of the most brilliant Christian defenses of slavery you ever heard, son. But if I stood in that pulpit today and delivered those defenses of slavery he used to give, why'd be laughed clear out of this church? Now, I said today, I'm delivering brilliant, absolutely brilliant Christian defenses of segregation in that same pulpit. But you see what worries me, son? A hundred years from now. Well, another preacher gets up in that beautiful old pulpit and delivers my brilliant defenses of segregation. I'm afraid he'll be laughed out of the church too.

Now, armed with these insights, we can begin to see the true genius behind the Negro's non-violent sit-in and freedom ride protest. These demonstrations did not attack prejudiced attitudes directly, but instead attacked the root of the problem, the discriminatory system itself. Always well dressed, well groomed and dignified, these young Negroes determinedly demanded that they be judged and treated according to the universalistic standards of decorum and decency rather than the size particularistic standard of skin color. Their protest have uniquely challenged the conforming bigot, for they have uniquely challenged the system you see to which the conforming bigot adheres. Now, this perspective also reveals her important it is for white, as well as Negro southerners to defy the system openly. In this connection, let me describe to you a classic experiment on conformity conducted by the eminent social psychologist Solomon A. Ashton of Swarthmore College.

Now, the experiment involved eight students who sat in a row, guessing aloud one after the other, the lengths of lines they were looking at. Now, the first seven students were assistants of the experimenter, while the eighth student, seated last, was a genuine subject who thought the other seven would just subjects like himself. Now, on many of the guesses, the seven assistants, as pre-instructed by the experimenter, deliberately gave an obviously incorrect estimate. Thus, the real subject you see, seated eighth, and watched by the other seven, faced unanimous pressure to conform by making a similarly incorrect estimate. On about 33% of said's guesses, he yielded to the group. Like the others, he would estimate, for instance, a five-inch line as being four inches. But later, when asked to serve the unanimity of the group by having just one of his seven assistants give the correct estimate, the subjects yielded to the group pressure only 10%, rather than 33% of the time.

Once unanimity no longer existed, you see, even when there was only one supporting colleague, the subject could better withstand the pressure of the majority to conform. Now, if you'll allow me to carry through this analogy to the day's crisis in the south, obvious five-inch lines are being widely described as four inches. From all directions, the loud and conspicuous spokesman of the white south, proclaim that desegregation can be stopped, that niggros would be happy, where it not for those wild-eyed agitators who keep coming down here from the north, that somehow the whole trend of history can just be avoided. Many white southerners face what appears to be solid unanimity, submit, just like as your students, to the distortion. But when respected sources, ministers, newspaper editors, even if you'll permit me to add college professors, break the segregationist unanimity,

we may expect a dramatic shift in the behavior and attitudes of conforming southerners. This is why it is difficult to overestimate the importance of a liberal columnist like Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, whose throughout the desegregation process has continuously related, in plain and unambiguous language, the hard truths that segregationists attempt to deny and to suppress. Now, still another implication of the crucial role of conformity in southern race relations, concerns the acceptance of desegregation after it has been accomplished. As we noted earlier, the conforming bigot does not need racism in the same sense that the crutch-type bigot needs it. And hence in time, the many conforming southerners can far more easily adjust themselves to the changing racial scene.

Indeed, Tom Payne recognized this phenomenon and discussed it in the opening paragraph of his revolution stirring document of 1776, Common Sense. A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and an attempt to change it raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. Tom Payne's acute perception of two centuries ago helps us to understand the acceptance of desegregated schools in Oklahoma during the 1950s. Like other white residents of southern and border states, white Oklahomaans are developed in Payne's words, a long habit of not thinking segregation wrong. And they raised a formidable outcry in defense of custom right after the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation decision.

In fact, the public opinion poll in 1954 concluded that the vast majority of white Oklahomaans sternly objected to the desegregation of public schools. Yet, after just a few years with firm political leadership, these same people had accepted without serious incident desegregated education throughout most of their state. In Payne's words again, the tumult soon subsided. Time makes more converts than reason. It seems safe to surmise that Oklahoma School desegregation's success was due largely to the existence of a large number of conforming individuals who were perfectly able to shift their behavior when the situation shifted. This suggests a label for these conforming people.

Latent liberals. In intergroup relations, they're liberals. In the sense that they are, as we've seen, neither anti-Semitic nor crutch type in personality. They are latent, however, in their intergrouped liberalism, since they still comply with the pressures around them to be anti-Nigra. They comply that is until such time as in Oklahoma when the racial practices change. But let's not confuse this latent liberal with the cherry-southern notion of the moderate. This slip-return moderate usually refers to relatively well-educated white southerners who wish to be polite segregationist. But they include in their number crutch types as well as latent liberals. We've been looking at the desegregation process from a personality perspective. We've noted two polar varieties on a continuum of prejudice, the uninsightful crutch type and the conforming latent liberal.

The evidence available suggests strongly that the south's greater intolerance of the Negro is due to its white supremac culture. And the many latent liberals who continue to conform to this culture, rather than any unusually large percentage of crutch types in its population. This optimistic conclusion, by the way, is one final cheerful implication. Some cynics have argued that successful racial desegregation in the south will require an importation of tens of thousands. Clinical psychologists and psychiatrists with their leather couches to give intensive therapy for millions of bigoted southerners. Fortunately, for desegregation, for psychologists and psychiatrists, and of course for southerners themselves, this will not be necessary. A thorough repatting of southern interracial behavior you see will be sufficient therapy in itself for the latent liberals.

The actor, Bill Cabin. Epitaph for Jim Crow is a presentation of the Commission on Extension courses, Harvard University, 75 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In association with the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council, WGBHTV Boston. Studio production costs were provided in part with the assistance of grants from the Anti-Defamation League of Benebris, the Commonwealth School Boston, and the Claudia B. and Moricelle Stone Foundation. This is NET, National Educational Television.

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