Rank Orders of Discrimination of Negroes and Whites in a Southern City

A modified version of Myrdal's "Rank Order of Discrimination Hypothesis" was tested in Jacksonville, Florida. No significant inverse relationship was found between white and Negro scales. Negroes ranked political disenfranchisement lower and segregation in public facilities higher than Myrdal postulated. Whites showed more resistance to equal job opportunities than predicted. D ESPITE the tentative and cautious manner in which Myrdal originally advanced his hypothesis of the rank order of discrimination, the validity of his admittedly impressionistic observations has been widely accepted but rarely tested by students of race relations. Among the possible reasons for this uncritical repetition of an hypothesis as if it were an empirically verified conclusion are: that it seems reasonable to other observers, and, (along with the theory of accumulation) it offers implicit reassurance that there is a relatively easy and gradual process through which discrimination could be abolished. Although Myrdal appeared quite confident of the accuracy of his impressions, he explicitly recommended that his hypothesis should be subjected to empirical verification. Yet Tumin, reviewing research on segregation and desegregation through 1956, reports only two studies in which sociologists attempted to do this.' Banks, in 1950, studied the rank order of sensitivity to discrimination among Negroes in Columbus, Ohio, using a sample of 200.2 He did not attempt to determine the whites' rank order of discrimination. The conclusion was that Myrdal's rank order hypothesis is by and large an accurate portrayal of the sensitivity of this sample of Negroes to discrimination. Economic discrimination did drop to third place, behind discrimination in legal matters and disenfranchisement, instead of ranking first as Myrdal postulated. Sensitivity to barriers against sex relations ranked in fifth rather than last place, with etiquettes governing personal relations dropping to the sixth and last