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problems essentially unrelated to it or related to it only peripherally.
Thus, in those areas where the issue of race is exploited by political
leaders for demagogic purposes, it becomes exceedingly difficult to
deal directly and constructively with such basic problems as how to
provide the best education possible for all children, how to achieve
better law enforcement, how to raise the level of well-being for
the community as a whole, and how to strengthen democracy at
home and abroad.
As a result of the development of a false sense of superiority and
feelings of guilt, anxiety, and fear in members of the dominant
group, it is extremely difficult for persons who are reared in an en
vironment in which prejudice and discrimination are socially sanc
tioned to acquire a genuinely democratic outlook. Such an environment
tends to foster either a bullying or a paternalistic attitude in members
of the dominant group. In the former instance it tends to encourage
government by fear, by the denial of freedom of speech and press, by
the restriction of the ballot to keep the minority from wielding its
proportionate political power, and by the denial in practice if not in
law of equal protection of the law to members of the minority group.
In the latter instance it tends to encourage a condescending attitude on
the part of the dominant group and results in the substitution of charity
for justice. Such paternalism fails to take into account the real needs
of the members of the minority for an opportunity to become mature
and independent. It ignores the right of the minority to have a real
voice in the determination of its own destiny.
In all of these ways, then, racial prejudice and discrimination exact
their toll both in the development of individuals, whether they be the
victims or the primary perpetrators of these evils, and in the general
health of the community as a whole. The Christian sees in the inev
itably resulting spiritual and social impoverishment and corruption
the judging action of God upon the racial sin of our society. The white
Christian sees in the rise of aggressive Negro leadership which de
mands equal rights and equal status a divine chastisement upon the
pride and cumulative injustice of the whites in their dealings with
the Negroes. He sees, moreover, in the churches’ loss of moral leader
ship and inability to minister spiritually to the victims of racial and
economic injustice God’s judgment upon their failure to serve as the
conscience of society in protesting against injustice and in providing
an example of brotherhood in their own life. The sensitive Negro
also sees God’s judgment as falling upon his own apathy, his resent
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Biblical Faith and Social Ethics