Object Of Loyalty Research Articles

Race Consciousness Among American Negroes

Race consciousness has been defined as a collective sentiment in which race becomes the object of loyalty and idealization. Through race consciousness the members of a race become a historic group, acquiring a past, aware of a present, and aspiring to a future. Race consciousness is essentially a characteristic of minority groups, more specifically, of oppressed minority groups, and takes the form of a feeling of solidarity among group members. It has been studied as manifested in immigrant groups in the United States, but not as manifested by Negroes, where the sentiment is unusually intense due to the larger numbers of Negroes and the greater discrimination they suffer. In spite of the similarities between the development of race consciousness in immigrant groups and in the Negro, there are several very important differences. First, the immigrant has a background of Old World culture, his loyalty to which is an indication of his race consciousness. In addition, he comes to the United States with a group of his own people and settles near people from the same region, even the same town, not infrequently the same street, from which he has come. In such a situation race is an entity with a host of loyalty-inspiring connotations. This is not the case