THE TRANSMISSION OF RACIAL ATTITUDES AMONG WHITE SOUTHERNERS.

An historical consideration of the problem of the cultural education of the southern white person would examine those influences which have built up through time the accepted white philosophy of race; another approach is through a study of the forces which transmit that philosophy to the individual born into the society. The latter approach is used here in an effort to find how the white child finds his place in relation to the Negro. Because racial learning is but one aspect of social learning and not a thing apart from it, an understanding of the ways in which the child learns his racial role necessarily involves or presupposes knowledge of the mechanisms of social learning itself. Learning that one is white is part of the process of learning the identity of the self and the symbols and expectations appropriate to the position of that sell. The racial role is but one of many which the individual must learn, and behavior proper to these roles is socially defined.