Caste and Class in a Southern Town

by John Dollard

An extraordinary powerful exposition of social patterns in a small town, Caste and Class in a Southern Town has become a benchmark in social science methodology and a classic in American studies. Now fifty years after its original publication, John Dollard’s most famous work offers timeless insights and remains essential to those interested in race-related social issues.

In 1937, W. E. B. Du Bois observed, "Dr. Dollard’s study is one of the most interesting and penetrating that has been made concerning the South and is marked by courage and real insight. . . . Dr. Dollard’s book marks a distinct advance in the study of the Southern scene."

 

Genres: Sociology, American, Race, Psychology, Nonfiction, History

484 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1988

Reviews

[Candace · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable sociological study and clear delineation of our American caste structure. This book changed my thinking more than any I have read. It made me come to grips with the horror of our history. It should be required reading for us all.

[Tisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably not the book for everyone, but for some reason I love reading sociological studies. This was an interesting look at the race situation in the deep south during the Great Depression.

[Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting study, notable in its broad scope compared with previous works, but must be read paired with Davis, Gardner & Gardner's Deep South, which describes much superior contemporaneous work. I want to be clear that Dollard's work is good and the book is worth reading, but it is limited by some fundamental flaws and thus has a limited scope and application both within its time (despite its being a real advance in scope at the time of its publication) and as an aid to understanding systematic racism today.

Dollard (a Yale psychologist) is sincere, but used relatively little care to place himself within Indianola, Mississippi, his Southerntown, smaller than Davis et al's Natchez in the same state. He seems not to have done much work beforehand to understand societal structures and continually makes blunders. He is honest about this, but they are indeed blunders, affecting his work and his placement within the town. As a result, he is treated by his "subjects" as a Yankee who needs to understand some things about the South, or as someone to be avoided. He knows he misses many things, but does not know the shape or impact of what he misses. He is honest about this, but it cannot be overcome.

In his preface to the 1949 edition, he notes that he made no attempt to be comprehensive with regards to class, nor did he take a data-driven approach, nor did he embed himself, nor can his five months compare against years of embedded life, all of which he describes as major strengths of Deep South. What we have in Dollard's book is driven by his interest in gathering, he writes, "Negro life histories," motivated by his Freudian approach to analysing the individual within society. He expanded his work somewhat beyond this, after realising in place that he could not contextualise individual life histories of black Indianola residents within the wider society without a larger view. Like his blunders, this is another indication of his lack of preparation, or lack of real understanding of the South following his preparation.

What we have is a series of sympathetic anecdotes, with generalities built from those, existing references, and his "impressions." He is not dogmatically Freudian in the text, and I am not one to be able to assess this work on this basis in any case, but one way in which perhaps it comes through is that he tends to treat everything people say to him as having some grain of truth in some direction they indicate. This reads strangely, and makes him seem too credulous. Here I mean some amount of literal truth in the words they say, not subconscious truth or revealing-societal-structures truth.

For example, a white person will say something like "blacks are lazy" and he'll discuss the speaker's bias, but then discuss the degree to which perhaps blacks really are lazy, and repeat unquestioned, multiple times, the blacks' laziness trope. He'll follow a "blacks feel less pain" anecdote with other anecdotes from whites that seem to confirm this. Another example: a white person will say that yes, black sharecroppers get cheated, and yes he himself cheats them, but in fact they expect it and want it that way, part of the proof being that none have left his land. Dollard discusses this with blacks, who agree they expect to be cheated, and they say what can they do? Dollard does *not* follow this up by immediately discussing (a) the systems of control that accompany any challenge to white assertions of authority, especially when it comes to money, (b) white sharecroppers are much more assertive about being cheated, and are also paid much better when they do sharecrop, (c) the system of underpay and overdebt that keeps blacks tied to their employers legally, (d) the centuries of violence that keep blacks in place and the degree to which white landowners tried to keep blacks from leaving the South during the Great Migration, (e) many other things.

We might say that Dollard's personal touch, and extensive quoting of people and the general value of the remaining life-history structure, make the content still valuable. And I do agree, as I said in the first para, that the book is worth reading. But know that Dollard missed far more than he contributed, and while honest, had a limited ability to self-correct. During a 1975 interview with Dollard (who died in 1980) published in Southern Cultures Summer 2004 issue, when discussing this work, he continued to use "Negro" although acknowledging that "black" is the current accepted alternative, since it's "the term of respect that I learned." My god, man, could you not grow the fuck up?

Deep South is much more comprehensive, while yes being less intimate, and is a much more important book for understanding systematic racism of the time and continued systematic racism up to today and beyond. If you read one book (but don't, read many more), read Deep South. Read this book only if you are also reading books that fill in Dollard's many gaps: the Great Migration, blacks being underserved by banks, state and federal finance institutions, blacks being underserved by law enforcement, blacks being unable to vote, the long violent backlash to Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the failure of blacks to have any sort of voting power until the 1960s, and so on.

[JW · Rating 3 out of 5]

A study of Black life in a small Black Belt town in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s. The prose is text book dry, but fascinating. Dollard makes this place lost in time come to life, along with a long gone era of the social sciences. This edition includes his 1957 preface, which makes explicit how established support for the Civil Rights Movement was a component of the Cold War.
A charming detail of this edition is that it was printed back when footnotes actually were at the foot of the page.