Asbury's Condescending Attitudes

I'm writing my paper on the way that O'Connor's characters view race relations. It is obvious that Asbury believes his intellect to be superior to everyone he knows. He insults the intelligence of his mother, his sister, and his late father's and he does'nt even seem to have any respect for Goetz or his other intellectual friends from New York. His project to "work in the dairy with [black people] and find out what their interests were" (551) to write a play about them was clearly an attempt to prove to the whole world that he was more accepting of other cultures than his mother. He is clearly too self-absorbed to realize that he is manipulating Randall and Morgan in order to appear that he has a familiar relationship with black people. Later, when Asbury thinks that he is on his death bed he invites them both to smoke cigarettes and it becomes apparent that he has made hardly any effort at all to understand them or know them. He attributes some sort of value to the act of relating to them, but I think that his feelings of superiority keep him from becoming close to anyone. Asbury's failure to befriend Randall and Morgan shows that his condescending attitude makes him the biggest fool of the story. The fact that he believes himself to be superior to everyone makes him unable to appreciate his mother, his sister, his father, or anybody else that he knows.