Dynamics of Desegregation; 14; A Dream Deferred

The dynamics of desegregation. What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? What happens to a dream deferred? What are the effects on Negro Americans of 350 years of oppression? 350 years of denial of the American dream of equality? Langston Hughes has poetically suggested some answers to dry up like a raisin in the sun, to fester like a sore, to sag like a heavy load or to explode. Let's try to answer these questions from the less poetic viewpoint of social science research. From 1619 to 1863, Negroes endured slavery.

Since then, over the past century, they have endured second-class citizenship. The wounds from this tragic history are deep and extensive. They mark both races, of course, for when people violate their own highest religious and national ideals, both the violator and the victim suffer. White America experiences guilt. Indeed, many foreign observers have been particularly impressed with the degree of guilt over race relations they encounter in the United States. This is precisely with the great Swedish social scientist Guna Miradal meant, but the title of his classic work on race relations, the American dilemma. He pointed out that America has the loftiest national standards for intergroup contact in the whole world, that we Americans by and large accept and believe in these standards, yet we still do not live up to them. Our guilt, our American dilemma, Miradal maintain, is that we do not practice what we ourselves believe.

For Negro America, the wounds of oppression have such vast personal and social significance that they color virtually all facets of daily living. The personal reactions to racial discrimination are, of course, as numerous as there are Negro Americans for, each personality is a unique entity unto itself. But two key problems created on the individual level for all Negroes concern self-identity and self-esteem. The problem of self-identity is the search for answers to the all-important questions, who am I? What am I like as a person? And how do I fit into this world? These are not easy questions for any of us to answer, of course, but they are particularly difficult for Negro Americans. After all, we learn who we are and what we are like largely by carefully observing how other people react to us. Think a minute what this means for the Negro.

When he attempts to gain an image of himself on the basis of his typical contacts with white Americans, he receives a rude jolt. While he is totally American in every conceivable meaning of the term, he finds that most Americans are white and that somehow the mirror color of his skin puts him into a special category. The Negro looks around him and except for athletics and entertainment, he sees very few Americans with his skin color who possess key roles in his society. Little wonder then that the question, who am I, raises special difficulties for him? But then any problems are unusually focal doing certain periods in everyone's life. These periods, these identity crises, if you will, often occur, for instance, in the preschool years, and then later in the teenage years, then again in young adulthood. Note that all three of these ages have additional meanings for Negroes. Negro parents report great anxiety and ambivalence over telling their preschool children what it means to be a Negro in American society.

Should they shield them from the truth as long as possible? Or should they begin to prepare them at an early age for the blows that are sure to come? These are the harsh alternatives that face concerned Negro parents. In the team, sex becomes an issue. This is a period of great stress and strain for all Americans. But for the Negro child in the north who has close friendships with white children, it frequently means a sudden parting of past. After puberty, the Negro child no longer gets invited to his white friends' parties. From there, the deep racist fears over miscegenation, harbored by white parents, have entered the scene. In young adulthood, many ambitious Negroes face yet another identity shock. Employment discrimination may keep them from the job for which they're qualified. Housing segregation may restrict them from finding a nice home for their families and so forth.

In short, careful preparation in school and the armed forces may falter on the rock of racial barriers. These identity problems lead to additional problems of self-esteem. For years, Negro Americans had little else to judge themselves by than the second class status assigned them in America. And along with this inferior treatment, their ears were filled with the den of white races, egotistically insisting that Caucasians are innately superior to Negroes. Consequently, many Negroes consciously or unconsciously accepted in part these claims of their inferiority. Naturally, such conditions are hardly conducive to a healthy respect for either yourself or your group. In the terms of social psychology, many Negroes developed self-hate, hatred for both themselves and other Negroes. But the sweeping changes of recent years have altered this situation sharply.

The old wounds of confused identity and damaged self-esteem have not entirely healed, perhaps. But the findings of social science and the rulings of the Supreme Court here at home and the emergence of proud new African nations abroad are all potent medicines. It is difficult for white Americans to grasp the full personal significance of these events for Negro Americans. But consider the case of the Negro today. All of his life, he's been bombarded with white supremacy ideas and restrictions. Moreover, he has shared much of the naive American conception of Africa as the dark continent of wild and naked savages. Now, though, he's greeted with evidence from all sides, scientific, legal, political, but the white supremacist are wrong. With television, he sees white races like Forbes. Desperately defying his national government in their losing battle to maintain Jim Crow.

He sees his president, conferring with black heads of state with full pomp and circumstance. And he sees his nation wooing the all-important black delegates to the United Nations. He sees all this and his old wounds begin to heal. Though these old wounds are healing and Negroes are gaining a healthier new perspective on both themselves and the world, many segregationists remain blind to these sweeping changes. I remember once interviewing a segregationist lady in a South Georgia town. We were sipping, I believe, and not mint tulips on the veranda of a beautiful home. In a short distance away, a Negro gardener was busily clipping away at the same stretch of hedge for almost an hour. And he was obviously listening to our discussion of race relations. Now the lady, like most segregationists, acted totally oblivious of his presence. At the end of the interview, she called over the gardener by his first name and asked him in front of me if he wanted all this desegregation business.

The gardener, hired by the lady and needing to keep his job, managed to satisfy her and to maintain his principles at the same time with an ingenious answer. He said, no, ma'am, I don't want any trouble. I noticed he said only he didn't want any trouble, not that he didn't want desegregation. And that night, guess what? I spoke to the local NAACP group in the town and met, I'd met our mutual surprise, their vice president, the gardener. His personality wounds are healing, though his employer, I'm afraid, will be the last to sense it. Personality wounds are not the only results of racism. For racial discrimination also execs a heavy toll in social scars. Internally, our nation as a whole pays the price in terms of wasted talent, a restricted labor force, and increased social problems. Externally, our nation pays for racial discrimination in terms of strained relations with the emerging nations of Asia and Africa, who naturally look at our racial practices and wonder if we really mean what we say about democracy.

In short, our country competes with the totalitarian world of communism with one segregated arm tied behind it. The social scars of discrimination reflected on the Negro, directly, center around three interrelated problems. Bitter poverty, disrupted family patterns, and the uprooted life of a migrant far from home. The first of these, poverty, is not limited to Negroes of course, but it takes on a special meaning when it is due in part to the color of your skin. From his same work, montage of a dream deferred, Langston Hughes gives us a special insight into Negro poverty. Maybe now, I can have that white enamel stole by dreamed about when we first fell in love 18 years ago.

But you know, roaming in everything, then kids, cold water, flatten all that. But now my daughter's married and my son's most grown. Put school to work. Where we are moving, there ain't no stone. Maybe I can buy that white enamel stole. Another dream deferred. This historically rooted poverty among Negroes has led to the general stereotype of Negro Americans as always being from the lowest socio-economic parts of our society. Since World War II, however, there's been a rapid growth of the Negro middle class in all of our cities. For these people, who have overcome all of the handicaps of Jim Crow, some of the long deferred dreams of American prosperity are beginning to come true, including that white enamel stole. But many Negroes are still poor. The ramifications of this poverty are quite extensive. Take for instance family life.

It has traditionally been more difficult for the poorly educated Negro male to secure a steady employment than the poorly educated Negro female. In many areas of our nation, north as well as south, this is still true. With Negro females, always able to obtain jobs as domestics if nothing else is available. In addition, the unskilled Negro male often ends up in occupations that pay barely enough to support himself, much less a full family. Such conditions obviously make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for poor Negroes to follow the typical American family pattern, that is a stable unit with the husband providing a steady income for his whole family. Actually, you know, impaired family life among poor Negroes has its historical roots in slavery. Many slaveholders systematically separated slave couples, though mothers and children were usually kept together.

Naturally then, the Negro mother became the focal point of what family life could exist. This matriarchal pattern has been maintained to some extent since slavery, among lower-class Negroes by the woman's favored economic position. History and economics combine then to explain the prevalence of divorce, separation, and illegitimcy among very poor Negroes today. The Negro American has yet a third major social difficulty, that of migration. He is often a lonely, recent arrival to a big city, a stranger detached from his home moorings. Of course, many Americans today are uprooted migrants, but the Negro migrant tends to be unique in combining poverty with migrations of great distances. Often he's ill-prepared for the demands of city life, with only an inferior southern rural education and a few if any job skills. Consequently, he must fit on to the lowest rungs of the occupational ladder and live in the midst of the threatening city's corrupting vice and social disorganization.

These then are some of the worst of the wounds the Negro American has suffered, at the hands of 350 years of racial discrimination in America. Confused self-identity and lowered self-esteem, poverty, disrupted family life, and the trials of long-range migration. Now keeping these wounds in mind, let's evaluate some of the white supremacist claims concerning racial differences in intelligence, health, and crime. For the white supremacist you know, continues to insist that Negro Americans are born less intelligent, less healthy, and more criminal than white Americans. Well, to begin with, let's understand two things clearly. Two things that white supremacist conveniently overlook. First, white and Negro statistics cannot be properly compared unless certain controls are applied to the data.

For instance, we know that IQ scores and disease and crime rates all related to both poverty and migration. That is, poor migrants suffering from restricted opportunities can to score low on intelligence measures and have high rates of disease and crime regardless of their race. And, as we've seen, Negro Americans as a group are poorer and more often migrants than white Americans. Thus, it makes no sense to compare gross white and Negro data directly unless economic and migratory factors are controlled. That is, it is hardly a test of race as a factor, you see, to compare, for example, middle-class whites who are natives of a community with lower-class Negro migrants. Secondly, when we speak of race, we must remember that we are using it only in a socially defined sense and not in any strict biological or anthropological sense. For in America, we have an eye definition of race. No matter how Caucasian ones genes may be in origin, one trace of Negro heritage makes you Negro.

Synically, Negroes joke that this is proof that Negro blood must be powerful stuff to overcome any amount of Caucasian blood. But in fact, it has been reliably estimated by anthropologists that from 70 to 80 percent of all Negro Americans have some Caucasian ancestry. In other words, in a strict biological sense, we cannot make true racial comparisons for what we call Negroes are largely Negro Caucasian Milahos. Negroes 2 have shared, you see, in America's biological melting pot. Within these severe limitations, let's briefly look at the controversy over racial differences in intelligence test scores. It is true that the great majority of studies have shown that white children score somewhat higher on the average than Negro children.

But you notice the curves overlap greatly, indicating that many individual Negroes score higher than many individual whites. White supremacy races claim that this proves that Negroes as a group are innately less intelligent than Caucasians. But modern psychology explains the mean differences in terms of the wounds of racial discrimination we've been describing. Langston Hughes expresses these wounds in their human dimensions again in his montage of a dream deferred. This year, maybe, do you think I can graduate? I'm already two years late. Dropped out six months when I was seven, a year when I was eleven, then got put back when we come north. Get through high twenty is kind of late. But maybe this year I can graduate. Another dream deferred.

Modern psychologists do not say that some psychological racial differences may not exist. But they do say that racists have never rigorously demonstrated the validity of their claims that intellectual capacity is one of these differences. Psychologists reason that the average differences in IQ by race are due to the impoverished and restricted environments in which poor Negroes find themselves. And the predictions based upon this theory, the environmental theory, we call it, have been supported repeatedly by psychological research. For example, work done on an isolated Caribbean island providing poor education and few opportunities to the children of both races found that the intelligence test scores for both were almost equally low. While on the other way around, work done in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Negro and white children of similar social backgrounds and from the same integrated schools found intelligence test scores for both were equally normal.

Furthermore, educators have noted for a long time that in areas like the south where the quality of education and the range of opportunities are vastly different between the races, Negro and white children are actually not far apart when they first enter school. It's only after a few years of schooling have passed and their dreams are truly deferred that the poorer Negro children begin to slip down in their test scores. Thus, IQ tests are not infallible measures of innate ability, but a heavily dependent on the environment. The best demonstration of this perhaps is the classic research by the eminent social psychologist, Ajo Kleinberg. He measured the IQs of Negro children in New York who had migrated with their parents from the south. With each year, they remained in the better schools of New York, their IQs tended to rise.

Now, performed in the 1930s, this crucial study has recently been repeated in Philadelphia with even more striking results. In short, the evidence strongly favors the environmentalistic explanation of the IQ mean differences between the races. A similar situation exists with many contagious diseases. Slum dwellers, regardless of their race, have, as you would expect, high rates of many contagious disorders. Consequently, poor Negroes, like poor whites, have high rates of such diseases. But race is further contingency that Negroes are more prone to her redditary illnesses than whites. Once again, though, we must look at the total picture. It is true that sickle selenemia is largely a Negro hereditary condition. But it is also true that both congenital hemolytic anemia and pernicious anemia are largely white hereditary conditions.

Moreover, races prefer to ignore other disorders of various origins that are reported to occur in significantly greater numbers among whites than whites. Disorders such as gallstones and cancer of the gallbladder, cancer of the lower lip, and fittingly enough, cancer of the skin. In other words, serious illness, hereditary or not, is not an exclusive preserve of any one race or group of people. Likewise, crime can hardly be thought of as a unique trait of any one group. Again, too, slum living and migration are related to many types of crime. Though poor Negroes have particularly high rates of escape crimes, such as gambling, drunkenness, and drug addiction. Now, the close relation you see between Negro crime and segregation is indicated by the fact that each of these crimes is an attempt to escape out of her restricted world of poverty and discrimination. Moreover, a number of all Negro communities like Bolliocle Homer and Mound Bayer and Mississippi are notable for their exceptional lack of crime over the years.

Finally, it should be added that precisely higher Negro crime compares with white crime rates. Very difficult by both serious deficiencies in crime statistics and by racial discrimination that all too often occurs at every step in the legal process in parts of both the North and the South. Our brief looks, then, at racial differences in intelligence test scores and disease in crime rates all suggest two general conclusions. On the one hand, there is no rigorous scientific evidence to support the racist claims that Negro Americans are born less intelligent, less healthy, or more criminal than white. As we've seen, no distinct racial comparisons can really be made in the United States, since the great majority of Negro Americans are actually mulejos. We've also seen that where hereditary differences can be conclusively demonstrated, as in the case of a number of enemies, some are found among Negroes, others among whites.

On the other hand, environmental factors are found to play a vital role in IQ scores, contagious diseases, and crime. And here, racial segregation discrimination are clearly contributory factors. The Negro child who loses interest in school once he senses that he will not be able to obtain his ambitions in a racially restricted labor force is an obvious illustration. Ironically, segregationists attempt to use these environmentally influenced differences between Negroes and whites as reasons why segregation must be continued. They insist on viewing Negroes as the cause rather than as the victims of the ghetto conditions under which many of them must live. By contrast, you see, social scientists emphasize that any differences in IQ means contagious diseases and crime that do exist between the races today are current under and resulted from segregation. Legal segregation in the south, subtle housing segregation in the north.

They conclude that any system which contributed such data should be eliminated. Segregationists who create IQ, disease, and crime differences with their system and then turn right around and use these differences as an excuse for the maintenance of segregation. Remind me of a story. These segregation seemed to me to be like the small boy who in cold blood picked up a double barrel shotgun and first murdered his father and then he whirl the gun around and again in cold blood murdered his mother. When he was inevitably brought to court to stand trial for the double murder, he had the gall of plead to the jury for mercy. Mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan. And what happens to a dream deferred? This is the question we've been attempting to answer. We have briefly surveyed the personality and social wounds inflicted by our racial system of segregation, a system that has for so long deferred the Negroes fulfillment of the American dream of equality. Tell me.

Why should it be my loneliness? Why should it be my song? Why should it be my dream deferred over long? Reactor was Oscar Farmer. Epitaph or Jim Crow is a presentation of the Commission on Extension Courses, Harvard University, an association with the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council, WGBH-DV Boston. The Commission on Extension Courses, Harvard University, an association with the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council, WGBH-DV Boston.

The Commission on Extension Courses, Harvard University, an association with the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council, WGBH-DV Boston. Studio production costs were provided in part with the assistance of grants from the Anti-Defamation League of Beneb Brits, the Commonwealth School Boston, and the Claudia B. and Maurice L. Stone Foundation. This is NET, National Educational Television. Thank you very much.

. . .