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Social Distance

Although Park hoped for the eradication of racial differences through full assimilation in the very long run, he did not think of it as a process that had much relevance to the analyses of race relations in his America. The concept of "social distance," which Park derived from Simmel, seemed to him of much greater importance for an understanding of contemporary race relations. This concept refers to the degree of intimacy that prevails between groups and in- dividuals." The degree of intimacy measures the influence which each has over the other." The greater the social distance between individuals and groups, the less they influence each other reciprocally. Such terms as race consciousness or class consciousness, Park argues, refer to social distance be- tween groups of people. They "describe a state of mind in which we become conscious of the distances that separate, or seem to separate, us from classes and races whom we do not fully understand." In American race re- lations in particular, a fixed and conventional social distance assures that the Negro is "all right in his place." As long as he keeps his place and his dis- tance, a great deal of warmth between the subordinate and the superordinate may obtain. The lady of the house may be on the closest terms with her cook, but these relations can be maintained only as long as the cook keeps her "proper distance." Similarly, interpersonal relations between Negroes and whites may be more personal in the South than they are in the North, because the southern white is assured that the Negro will know precisely how to keep the proper distance.

Park thought that what is ordinarily called prejudice "seems . . . to be [the] more or less instinctive and spontaneous disposition to maintain social distance." Prejudice in this sense was to Park by no means pathological; it was a universal human phenomenon. Men, he argued, come into the world with certain predispositions and they acquire others in later life. "A man with- out prejudices is a man without conviction, and ultimately without character." Friendships and enmities are correlative. "As it seems impossible to conceive of a world without friendship, so it seems improbable, in such a world, that life should go without enmities, for those two things are, in some sense and some degree, correlative, so that the bias with which we view the qualities of our friends makes it difficult if not impossible to do justice to the virtues of our enemies." Prejudice and social distance are therefore ineradicable aspects of human association.

Race prejudice, like caste or class prejudice, is in this view "merely one variety of a species." It can be looked at as "a phenomenon of status." "Every individual we meet inevitably finds a place in our minds in some cate- gory already defined." Every person we encounter is categorized and assessed according to his imputed status in the established order of things. And so, in racially divided American society, Negroes are assigned inferior status and they are enjoined to maintain the proper distance toward those who have superordinate status.

Racial prejudice and social distance, Park argued forcefully, must not be confused with racial antagonism and conflict. The former operate when the subordinate accepts his inferior status; the latter arise when he is not longer willing to do so. Writing in 1928, Park penned these prophetic words: "There is probably less racial prejudice in America than elsewhere, but there is more racial conflict and more racial antagonism. There is more conflict because there is more change, more progress. The Negro is rising in America and the meas- ure of the antagonism he encounters is, in some very real sense, the measure of his progress." Race prejudice refers to the normal process of categorizing individuals according to the position they occupy in the traditional order. "Prejudice is not on the whole an aggressive but a conservative force." Racial conflicts and antagonisms, on the other hand, indicate that the traditional order is weakening so that the customary accommodations are no longer effective and social distance in no longer maintained effectively. Racial conflicts are harbingers of change in the racial status order. As previous accommodations break down under the impact of antagonism and conflict, they prepare the way for a new accommodation between contending racial status groups in which the previously inferior group achieves more nearly equal status. Once this has been accomplished, the basis may have been laid for a fusion of the previously distinct groups through racial assimilation and the eradication of social dis- tance between them. Hawaii's racial situation is a case in point. The race re- lations cycle from accommodation to conflict to new accommodation and pos- sibly to assimilation is to Park only a special case of the general process of social change.

From Coser, 1977:360-362.