ROBERT C. WEAVER
THE NEGRO AS AN AMERICAN
JUNE 13 1963
[Robert C Weaver was the first black cabinet member,
Johnson's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.]
When the average well-informed and well-intentioned white
American discusses the issue of race with his negro counterpart there
are many areas of agreement. There are also certain significant areas
of disagreement.
Negro Americans usually feel that whites exaggerate progress;
while whites frequently feel that negroes minimize gains. Then there
are differences relative to the responsibility of negro leadership.
It is in these areas of dispute that some of the most subtle and
revealing aspects of negro-white relationships reside. And it is to
the subtle and less obvious aspects of this problem that I wish to
direct my remarks.
Most middle-class white Americans frequently ask, "Why do negroes
push so? They have made phenomenal progress in 100 years of freedom,
so why don't their leaders do something about the crime rate and
illegitimacy?" To them I would reply that when negroes press for full
equality now they are behaving as all other Americans would under
similar circumstances. Every American has the right to be treated as
a human being and striving for human dignity is a national
characteristic. Also, there is nothing inconsistent in such action
and realistic self-appraisal. Indeed, as I shall develop, self-help
programs among non-whites, if they are to be effective, must go
hand-in-glove with the opening of new opportunities.
Negroes who are constantly confronted or threatened by
discrimination and inequality articulate a sense of outrage. Many
react with hostility, sometimes translating their feelings into overt
anti-social actions. In parts of the negro community a separate
culture with deviant values develops. To the members of this
subculture I would observe that ours is a middle-class society and
those who fail to evidence most of its values and behavior are headed
toward difficulties. But I am reminded that the rewards for those who
do are often minimal, providing insufficient inducement for large
numbers to emulate them.
Until the second decade of the twentieth century, it was
traditional to compare the then current position of negroes with that
of a decade or several decades ago. The depression revealed the basic
marginal economic status of colored Americans and repudiated this
concept of progress. By the early 1930's negroes became concerned
about their relative position in the nation.
Of course, there are those who observe that the average income,
the incidence of home ownership, the rate of acquisition of
automobiles, and the like, among negroes in the United States are
higher than in some so-called advanced nations. Such comparisons mean
little. Incomes are significant only in relation to the cost of
living, and the other attainments and acquisitions are significant for
comparative purposes only when used to reflect the negro's relative
position in the world. The negro here--as he has so frequently and
eloquently demonstrated--is an American. And his status, no less than
his aspirations, can be measured meaningfully only in terms of
American standards.
Viewed from this point of view what are the facts?
Median family income among non-whites was slightly less than 55
percent of that for whites in 1959; for individuals the figure was 50
percent.
Only a third of the negro families in 1959 earned sufficient to
sustain an acceptable American standard of living. Yet this involved
well over a million negro families, of which 6,000 earned $25,000 or
more.
Undergirding these overall figures are many paradoxes. Negroes
have made striking gains in historical terms, yet their current rate
of unemployment is well over double that among whites. Over
two-thirds of our colored workers are still concentrated in five major
unskilled and semi-skilled occupations, as contrasted to slightly over
a third of the white labor force.
Despite the continuing existence of color discrimination even for
many of the well prepared, there is a paucity of qualified negro
scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and highly-trained clerical and
stenographic workers. Lack of college-trained persons is especially
evident among negro men. One is prompted to ask why does this exist?
In 1959 non-white males who were high school graduates earned on
the average, 32 percent less than whites; for non-white college
graduates the figure was 38 percent less. Among women a much
different situation exists. Non-white women who were high school
graduates earned on the average some 24 percent less than whites.
Non-white female college graduates, however, earned but slightly over
one percent less average annual salaries than white women college
graduates. Significantly, the median annual income of non-white
female college graduates was more than double that of non-white women
with only high school education.
Is it any wonder that among non-whites, as contrasted to whites,
a larger proportion of women than of men attend and finish college?
The lack of economic rewards for higher education goes far in
accounting for the paucity of college graduates and the high rate of
drop-out among non-white males. It also accounts for the fact that in
the North, where there are greater opportunities for white-collar
negro males, more negro men than women are finishing college; whereas
in the South, where teaching is the greatest employment outlet for
negro college graduates, negro women college graduates outnumber men.
There is much in these situations that reflects the continuing
matriarchal character of negro society--in a situation which had its
roots in the family composition under slavery where the father, if
identified, had no established role. Subsequent and continuing
economic advantages of negro women who found steady employment as
domestics during the post Civil War era and thereafter perpetuated the
pattern. This, in conjunction with easy access of white males to
negro females, served to emasculate many negro men economically and
psychologically. It also explains, in part, the high prevalence of
broken homes, illegitimacy, and lack of motivation in the negro
community.
The negro middle-class seems destined to grow and prosper. At
the same time, the economic position of the untrained and poorly
trained negro--as of all untrained and poorly trained in our society--
will continue to decline. Non-whites are doubly affected. First,
they are disproportionately concentrated in occupations particularly
susceptible to unemployment at a time when our technology eats up
unskilled and semi-skilled jobs at a frightening rate. Secondly, they
are conditioned to racial job discrimination. The latter circumstance
becomes a justification for not trying, occasioning a lack of
incentive for self-betterment.
The tragedy of discrimination is that it provides an excuse for
failure while erecting barriers to success.
Most colored Americans still are not only outside the mainstream
of our society but see no hope of entering it. The lack of motivation
and anti-social behavior which result are capitalized upon by the
champions of the status quo. They say that the average negro must
demonstrate to the average white that the latter's fears are
groundless. One proponent of this point of view has stated that negro
crime and illegitimacy must decline and negro neighborhoods must stop
deteriorating.
In these observations lie a volume on race relations. In the
first place, those who articulate this point of view fail to
differentiate between acceptance as earned by individual merit and
enjoyment of rights guaranteed to everyone. Implicit, also, is the
assumption that negroes can lift themselves by their bootstraps, and
that once they become brown counterparts of white middle-class
Americans, they will be accepted on the basis of individual merit.
Were this ture, our race problem would be no more than a most recent
phase in the melting pot tradition of the nation.
As compared to the earlier newcomers to our cities from europe,
the later ones who are colored face much greater impediments in moving
from the slums or from the bottom of the economic ladder. At the same
time, they have less resources to meet the more difficult problems
which confront them.
One of the most obvious manifestations of the negro's paucity of
internal resources is the absence of widespread integrated patterns of
voluntary organizations. The latter, as we know, contributed greatly
to the adjustment and assimilation of european immigrants. Both the
negro's heritage and the nature of his migration in the United States
militiated against the development of similar institutions.
Slavery and resulting post-civil war dependence upon whites
stifled self-reliance. Movement from the rural south to northern
cities was a far cry from immigration from europe to the new world.
This internal migration was not an almost complete break with the
past, nor were those who participated in it subjected to feelings of
complete foreignness. Thus the negro tended to preserve his old
institutions when he moved from one part of the nation to another; the
immigrant created new ones. And most important, the current
adjustment of non-whites to an urban environment is occurring at a
time when public agencies are rapidly supplanting voluntary
organizations.
Although much is written about crime and family disorganization
among negroes, most literate Americans are poorly informed on such
matters. The first fallacy which arises is a confusion of what racial
crime figures reflect. When people read that more than half the crime
in a given community is committed by negroes they unconsciously
translate this into an equally high proportion of negroes who are
criminals. In fact, the latter proportion is extremely small.
In a similar vein, family stability, as indicated by the presence
of both husband and wife, which is very low among the poorest
non-whites, rises sharply as income increases.
Equally revealing is the fact that, in all parts of the country,
the proportion of non-white families with female heads falls as
incomes rise. A good, steady pay check appears to be an important
element in family stability. Those negroes who have been able to
improve their economic position have generally taken on many of the
attributes of white middle-class Americans.
But poverty still haunts half of the negroes in the united
states, and while higher levels of national productivity are a sine
qua non for higher levels of employment in the nation, they alone will
not wipe out unemployment, especially for minorities. The labor
reserve of today must be trained if it is to find gainful employment.
Among non-whites this frequently involves more than exposure to
vocational training. Many of them are functionally illiterate and
require basic education prior to any specialized job preparation.
The very magnitude of these problems illustrates that society
must take the leadership in solving them. But society can only
provide greater opportunities. The individual must respond to the new
opportunities. And he does so, primarily, in terms of visible
evidence that hard work and sacrifice bring real rewards.
Many white Americans are perplexed, confused, and antagonized by
negroes' persistent pressure to break down racial segregation. Few
pause to consider what involuntary segregation means to its victims.
To the negro, as an American, involuntary segregation is
degrading, inconvenient and costly. It is degrading because it is a
tangible and constant reminder of the theory upon which it is based--
biological racial inferiority. It is inconvenient because it means
long trips to work, exclusion from certain cultural and recreational
facilities, lack of access to restaurants and hotels conveniently
located, and, frequently, relegation to grossly inferior
accommodations. Sometimes it spells denial of a job and often it
prevents upgrading based on ability.
But the principal disadvantage of involuntary segregation is its
costliness. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in education and
housing. By any and all criteria, separate schools are generally
inferior schools in which the cultural deprivations of the descendants
of slaves are perpetuated.
Enforced residential segregation, the most stubborn and universal
of the negro's disadvantages, often leads to exploitation and effects
a spatial pattern which facilitates neglect of public services in the
well-defined areas where negroes live. It restricts the opportunities
of the more successful as well as the least successful in the group,
augmenting artificially the number of non-whites who live in areas of
blight and neglect and face impediments to the attainment of values
and behavior required for upward social and economic mobility.
The most obvious consequence of involuntary residential
segregation is that the housing dollar in a dark hand usually commands
less purchasing power than one in a white hand. Clearly, this is a
denial of a basic promise of a free economy.
For immigrant groups in the nation, the trend toward improved
socioeconomic status has gone hand-in-hand with decreasing residential
segregation. The reverse has been true of the negro. Eli Ginzberg,
in his book, The Negro Potential, has delineated the consequences.
It must be recognized that the negro cannot suddenly take his
proper place among whites in the adult world if he has never
lived, played, and studied with them in childhood and young
adulthood. Any type of segregation handicaps a person's
preparation for work and life. . . Only when negro and white
families can live together as neighbors . . . Will the negro grow
up properly prepared for his place in the world of work.
Residential segregation based on color cannot be separated from
residential segregation based upon income. Both have snob and class
appeal in contemporary America. Concentration of higher income
families in the suburbs means that many of those whose attitudes and
values dominate our society do not see the poor or needy. But more
important, cut off by political boundaries, it is to their interest
not to see them.
Yet there are over 30,000,000 Americans who experience poverty
today. For the most part, we resent them and the outlays required for
welfare services. They are a group which is separate from the
majority of Americans and for whom the latter accept only the minimum
responsibility. Thus we have, for the first time, class unemployment
in the United States.
I happen to have been born a negro and to have devoted a large
part of my adult energies to the problem of the role of the negro in
America. But I am also a government administrator, and have devoted
just as much energy--if not more--to problems of government
administration at the local, the state and the national level.
My responsibilities as a negro and an American are part of the
heritage I received from my parents--a heritage that included a wealth
of moral and social values that don't have anything to do with my
race. My responsibilities as a government administrator don't have
too much to do with my race, either. My greatest difficulty in public
life is combating the idea that somehow my responsibilities as a negro
conflict with my responsibilities as a government administrator: and
this is a problem which is presented by those negroes who feel that I
represent them exclusively, as well as by those whites who doubt my
capacity to represent all elements in the population. The fact is
that my responsibilities as a negro and a government administrator do
not conflict; they complement each other.
The challenge frequently thrown to me is why I don't go out into
the negro community and exhort negro youths to prepare themselves for
present and future opportunities. My answer is somewhat ambivalent.
I know that emphasis upon values and behavior conducive to success in
the dominant culture of America was an important part of my youthful
training. But it came largely from my parents in the security and
love of a middle-class family. (And believe me, there is nothing more
middle-class than a middle-class minority family!)
many of the youth which I am urged to exhort come from broken
homes. They live in communities where the fellow who stays in school
and follows the rules is a "square." They reside in a neighborhood
where the most successful are often engaged in shady--if not illegal--
activities. They know that the very policeman who may arrest them for
violation of the law is sometimes the pay-off man for the racketeers.
And they recognize that the majority society, which they frequently
believe to be the "enemy," condones this situation. Their experience
also leads some of them to believe that getting the kind of job the
residents in the neighborhood hold is unrewarding--a commitment to
hard work and poverty. For almost all of them, the precepts of ben
franklin are lily-like in their applicability.
Included in the group are the third generation of welfare
clients. It is in this area--where they learn all the jargon of the
social workers and psychologists--that they demonstrate real
creativity. It is in activities which "beat" the system that they are
most adept--and where the most visible rewards are concentrated.
All youth is insecure today. Young people in our slums are not
only insecure but angry. Their horizons are limited, and, in
withdrawing from competing in the larger society, they are creating a
peculiar, but effective, feeling of something that approaches, or at
least serves as a viable substitute for, security. In the process,
new values and aspirations, a new vocabulary, a new standard of dress,
and a new attitude toward authority evolve. Each of these serves to
demonstrate a separateness from the dominant culture.
As a realist, I know that these youth relate with me primarily in
a negative sense. They see me in terms of someone who has been able
to penetrate, to a degree, the color line, and to them I have bettered
the "enemy." If I should attempt to suggest their surmounting the
restrictions of color, they cite instances of persons they know who
were qualified--the relatively few boys or girls in their neighborhood
who finished high school or even college--only to be ignored while
white youths with much less training were selected for good jobs. And
such occurrences are not unique or isolated in their experience.
The example which will be an inspiration to the negro boys and
girls whose anti-social behavior distresses most whites and many
negroes is someone they know who has experienced what they have
experienced and has won acceptance in the mainstream of America. When
the Ralph Bunches, William Hasties, and John Hope Franklins emerge
from their environment, the achievements of these successful negroes
will provide models which have meaning for them.
This is reflected in the occupations which provide the greatest
incidence of mobility for slum youth. One thinks immediately of prize
fighting and jazz music. In these fields there is a well established
tradition of negroes, reared in the ghetto areas of blight and
poverty, who have gone to the top. For youth in a similar
environment, these are heroes with whom they can and do identify and
relate. And in these fields, a significant proportion of the
successful are non-whites. For only in those pursuits in which native
genius can surmount (if indeed it does not profit from) lack of high
level training does the dominant environment of the negro facilitate
large-scale achievement.
For many successful older colored Americans, middle-class status
has been difficult. Restricted, in large measure, to racial ghettos,
they have expended great effort to protect their children from falling
back into the dominant values of that environment. And these values
are probably more repugnant to them than to most Americans. This is
understandable in terms of their social origins. For the most part,
they come from lower-middle class families, where industry, good
conduct, family ties, and a willingness to postpone immediate rewards
for future successes are stressed. Their values and standards of
conduct are those of success-oriented middle-class Americans.
It is not that responsible negroes fail to feel shame about
muggings, illegitimacy, and boisterousness on the part of other
negroes. Many--particularly the older ones--feel too much shame in
this connection. Accordingly, some either repudiate the "culprits" in
terms of scathing condemnation or try to escape from the problem lest
it endanger their none too secure status.
These attitudes, too, are shifting. The younger middle-class
negroes are more secure and consequently place less stress upon the
quest for respectability. But few negroes are immune from the toll of
upward mobility. Frequently their struggle has been difficult, and
the maintenance of their status demands a heavy input. As long as
this is true, they will have less energy to devote to the problems of
the negro subculture. It is significant, however, that the sit-ins
and freedom marches in the south were planned and executed by negro
college students most of whom come from middle-class families.
Middle-class negroes have long led the fight for civil rights;
today its youthful members do not hesitate to resort to direct action,
articulating the impatience which is rife throughout the negro
community. In so doing they are forging a new solidarity in the
struggle for human dignity.
There are today, as there always have been, thousands of
dedicated colored Americans who don't make the headlines but are
successful in raising the horizons of negroes. These are the less
well-known leaders who function at the local level. The teachers,
social workers, local political leaders, ministers, doctors, and an
assortment of indigenous leaders--many among the latter with little
formal education--who are effective have familiarized themselves with
the environmental factors which dull and destroy motivation. They
become involved with the total negro community. They demonstrate--
rather than verbalize--a concern for negro youth's problems. They are
trying to reach these young people, not by coddling and providing
excuses for failure, but through identification of their
potentialities and assistance in the development of these. Involved
are both genuine affection and sufficient toughness to facilitate and
encourage the development of self-reliance.
Those, white and black alike, who reach the newcomers in our
urban areas avoid value judgments relative to cultural patterns. When
they suggest thrift, good deportment, greater emphasis upon education
and training, they do so as a pragmatic approach. For them, it is not
a matter of proselytizing, but in a matter of delineating those values
and patterns of behavior that accelerate upward mobility in
contemporary American society. Such a sophisticated approach enables
them to identify deviations from dominant values and conduct which are
not inconsistent with a productive and healthy life in modern urban
communities. The latter are left undisturbed, so that there will be a
minimum adjustment of values and concepts and the maximum functional
effectiveness on the part of individuals who will not soon become
middle-class America.
What are the responsibilities of negro leadership?
Certainly the first is to keep pressing for first-class
citizenship status--an inevitable goal of those who accept the values
of this nation.
Another responsibility of negro leadership is to encourage and
assist negroes to prepare for the opportunities that are now and will
be opened to them.
The ultimate responsibilities of negro leadership, however, are
to show results and maintain a following. This means that it cannot
be so "responsible" that it forgets the trials and tribulations of
others who are less fortunate or less recognized than itself. It
cannot stress progress--the emphasis which is so palatable to the
majority group--without, at the same time, delineating the unsolved
business of democracy. It cannot provide or identify meaningful
models unless it effects social changes which facilitate the emergence
of these models from the environment which typifies so much of the
negro community.
But negro leadership must also face up to the deficiencies which
plague the negro community, and it must take effective action to deal
with resulting problems. While, of course, crime, poverty,
illegitimacy and hopelessness can all be explained, in large measure,
in terms of the negro's history and current status in America, they do
exist. We need no longer be self-conscious in admitting these
unpleasant facts, for our knowledge of human behavior indicates
clearly that anti-social activities are not inherent in any people.
What is required is comprehension of these--a part of society's
problems--and remedial and rehabilitation measures.
Emphasis upon self-betterment if employed indiscriminately by
negro leaders is seized upon by white supremacists and their
apologists to support the assertion that negroes--and they mean all
negroes--are not ready for full citizenship. This, because of the
nature of our society, negro leadership must continue to stress rights
if it is to receive a hearing for programs of self-improvement.
Black muslims, who identify the white man as the devil, can and
do emphasize--with a remarkable degree of success--morality, industry,
and good conduct. But, the negro leader who does not repudiate his or
his followers' Americanism can do so effectively only as he, too,
clearly repudiates identification with the white supremacists. This
he does, of course, when he champions equal rights, just as the black
muslims accomplish it by directing hate toward all white people.
Most negroes in leadership capacities have articulated the fact
that they and those who follow them are a part of America. They have
striven for realization of the American dream. Most recognize their
responsibilities as citizens and urge others to follow their example.
Sophisticated whites realize that the status of negroes in our society
depends not only upon what the negro does to achieve his goals and
prepare himself for opportunities but, even more, upon what all
America does to expand these opportunities. And the quality and
nature of future negro leadership depends upon how effective those
leaders who relate to the total society can be in satisfying the
yearnings for human dignity which reside in the hearts of all
Americans.
