Killers of the Dream

by Lillian Smith

Years ago in one of my college classes, the professor shared an experiment on operant conditioning done so long ago that neither of us could find the reference.

A group of psychology researchers put four monkeys in a cage with fruit at the top of a pole. When the monkeys tried to climb the pole to get the fruit, they received a mild electric shock. After all the monkeys, we’ll call them Gen1, were conditioned not to climb the pole, the researchers removed one of the monkeys and added a new one, we’ll call Gen2. When the Gen2 monkey tried to get the fruit, the remaining Gen1 monkeys pulled them away from the pole. 

The researchers continued to replace Gen1 monkeys. The same thing happened every time a new Gen2 monkey tried to get the fruit. When all the Gen1 monkeys were replaced, the researchers replaced one of the Gen2 monkeys with a new, Gen3 monkey. 

Even though the Gen2 monkeys had never received a shock, when a Gen3 monkey tried to get the fruit, the Gen2 monkeys pulled them away from the pole. This same scenario played out over subsequent generations of monkeys.

I was reminded of this experiment when I started reading Killers of the Dream by Lillian Smith. The book was originally published in 1949 and reissued in 1994. Smith, a white woman from the South, delves into the roots of racism. 

Other writings have definitively documented that racism stems from the White man’s need to justify enslavement of the Black man. Since the legal end of slavery, the White man’s need to justify the history of slavery and ongoing disparate treatment of Black people perpetuates racism. 

Smith goes deeper into the psyche of the White Southerner. She talks about the internal conflicts raging in White Southerners who depended on Black slaves for help in raising their children and maintaining their households as well as running their businesses. The children grew up loving the Black ’nannies’ with whom they spent a great deal of time and, at the same time, were being taught, through the words and examples of the White adults around them, that the Black women that nurtured them were inferior. Southern tradition dictated that they not love or respect their Black caregivers but, at the same time, they had an innate love of the women that cared for them. The way to reconcile this internal conflict was to give into the lessons of Southern tradition. Standing up against that tradition carried more negative consequences than a child could handle. 

This is where those monkeys in the cage comes in. Each successive generation of Southern children caved into that tradition even after the legal abolition of slavery. The notion of Black people being inferior became ingrained in the beliefs of generation after generation. Laws may have pushed the idea into a corner so its influence was covert, but the influence still whispered to many people. 

The cover blurb describes the book as: 

draw[ing] on memories of [Lillian Smith’s] childhood to describe the psychological and moral cost of the powerful, contradictory rules about sin, sex, and segregation—the intricate system of taboos—that undergirded Southern society.

I’ve been told that this book influenced Martin Luther King. They did write to each other and admired each other’s work. It gave me a deeper understanding of why racism is so pervasive and seems impossible to fully eradicate. Highly recommend!