Overdeference

When the question of expulsion was agitated, Lord Finch stepped forward and made attempts to speak in Steele's behalf, but being embarrassed by modesty and overdeference to an assembly in which he had not yet been accustomed to hold forth, he sat down in visible confusion, saying so as to be over hear, "It is strange I can't speak for this man, though I could readily fight for him."

In such situations, whites often reflect their consciousness of group membership by overdeference which is as embarrassing to Negroes as condescension.

Fifty years later, she even blamed her mother for overdeference to the doctors when she was ill with polio.