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21 Soc. F. 218 (1942-1943)
The Modern Caste School of Race Relations

handle is hein.journals/josf21 and id is 234 raw text is: RACE, CULTURAL GROUPS, SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION I Contibuon to. ths al. ofod o t hre o, ds (i) original discsso, sugeston plans, pormad the- orie; () spe alprojects, working programs, conferences and meetings, and progress in any distinctive apect of the field; (3) special results of study and research THE MODERN CASTE SCHOOL OF RACE RELATIONS OLIVER C. COX Wiley College URING the last decade a prolific school of writers on race relations in the United States, led mainly by social anthropolo- gists, have relied religiously upon an ingenious, if not original, caste hypothesis. Professor W. Lloyd Warner is the admitted leader of the movement, and his followers include scholars of considerable distinction.' We propose here to examine criti- cally the position of this school. I See the leading hypothesis: W. Lloyd Warner, American Caste and Class, American Journal of So- ciology, XLII (September, 1936), 234-37. See also, by the same author, Social Anthropology and the Modern Community, ibid., XLVI (May, 1941), 785-96; W. Lloyd Warner and W. Allison Davis, A Comparative Study of American Caste, in Edgar T. Thompson (ed.), Race Relations and the Race Problem (Durham, N. C., 1939), 219-40; W. Allison Davis and John Dol- lard, Children of Bondage (Washington, D. C., 1940); W. Lloyd Warner, Buford H. Junker, and Walter A. Adams, Color and Human Nature (Washington, D. C., 1941); W. Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, Mary R. Gardner, and W. Lloyd Warner, Deep South (Chi- cago, 1941); John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven, 1937); Buell G. Gallagher, Ameri- can Caste and the Negro College (New York, 1938); Donald Young, Research Memoranda on Minority Peoples in the Depression (New York, 1937); Robert Austin Warren, New Haven Negroes (New Haven, 1940); Kingsley Davis, Intermarriage in Caste Societies, American Anthropologist, 43 (September, 1941), 376-95; Robert L. Sutherland, Color, Class and Personality (Washington, D. C., 1942); Edward A. Ross, New-Age Sociology (New York and London, 1940); William F. Ogburn and Meyer F. Nimkoff, Sociology (Boston, 1940); Robert L. Sutherland and Julian L. Woodward, Introductory Sociology (J. B. Lippincott Co., 1940); Stuart A. Queen and Jennette R. Gruener, Social Pa- thology (New York, 1940); Alain Locke and Bernhard J. Stern, When Peoples Meet (New York, 1942); and others. THE HYPOTHESIS Strictly speaking, the school has no hypothesis, but we shall quote liberally so that the authors might have an opportunity to speak for them- selves about the things which they believe. The school is particularly interested in race relations in the southern states of the United States; and its members believe that they have struck upon an unusually revealing explanation of the situation. In the South, they maintain, Negroes form one caste and whites another, with an imaginary rotating caste line between them. The white caste is in a superordinate position and the Negro caste in a subordinate social position. The following definition of caste has been most widely accepted. Caste... describes a theoretical arrangement of the people of a given group in an order in which the privi- leges, duties, obligations, opportunities, etc., are un- equally distributed between the groups which are con- sidered to be higher and lower.... Such a definition also describes class. A caste organization ... can be further defined as one where marriage between two or more groups is not sanctioned and where there is no opportunity for members of the lower groups to rise into the upper groups or of members of the upper to fall into the lower ones.2 A class system and a caste system are antitheti- cal to each other .... Nevertheless they have ac- commodated themselves in the southern com- munity. . . . The caste line is represented as running asymmetrically diagonally between the two class systems of Negroes and whites as in figure I. 2 W. Lloyd Warner, American Journal of Sociology, XLII, 234.

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