Imagine the effect such teachings have had upon Negro students alone! A young scholar-scientist of inter-national reputation, a banker, economic adviser to the Swedish government and a member of the Swedish senate, is invited by one of the wealthiest groups in the United States to come in and publicly air its soiled democratic linen. Perhaps the wisest attitude for democrats is not to deplore the ambiguous element of democratic writings, but to seek to understand them. Groups of Negroes had discovered the effectiveness of protest and what Myrdal shows to be the Negro’s strongest weapon in pressing his claims: his hold upon the moral consciousness of Northern whites. Much of it is inarticulate, and Negro scholars have for the most part ignored it through clinging, as does Myrdal, to the sterile concept of “race.”. Here was a science whose role, beneath its illusionary non-concern with values, was to reconcile the practical morality of American capitalism with the ideal morality of the American Creed. § 105. Not that we expect the Left to have at its disposal the funds-some $300,000-that went into the preparation of this elaborate study. But it has failed even to state the problem in such broadly human terms, or with that cultural sophistication and social insight springing from Marxist theory, which, backed by passion and courage, has allowed the Left in other countries to deal more creatively with reality than the Right, and to overcome the Right’s advantages of institutionalized power and erudition. It is unlikely in this mechanist-minded culture that such a powerful force would go “unused.”. United States Information Agency staff photographer. Not that the nature of the problem was not understood. Myrdal sees Negro culture and personality simply as the product of a `”social pathology.” Thus he assumes that “it is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into American culture, to acquire the traits held in esteem by the dominant white Americans.” This, he admits, contains the value premise that “here in America, American culture is ’highest’ in the pragmatic sense….” Which, aside from implying that Negro culture is not also American, assumes that Negroes should desire nothing better than what whites consider highest. For at the end of the Civil War, the North lost interest in the Negro. For it is by making use of the positive contributions of such documents and rejecting their negative elements that democracy can be kept dynamic. It is only partially true that Negroes turn away from white patterns because they are refused participation. Within its far more rigid framework the New Deal moved in the same democratic direction. For in our culture the problem of the irrational, that blind spot in our knowledge of society where Marx cries out for Freud and Freud for Marx, but where approaching, both grow wary and shout insults lest they actually meet, has taken the form of the Negro problem. There was a conflict between the values that Americans professed to hold dearly and the specific ways that black Americans were treated. For this period of democratic resurgence created by the war, An American Dilemma justifies the desire of many groups to see a more democratic approach to the Negro. America was committed to the ideals of Sincerity is not a quality that one expects of political parties, not even revolutionary ones. This time it was rationalized by projecting into popular fiction the stereotype of the Negro as an exotic primitive, while social science, under the pressure of war production needs, was devoted to proving that Negroes were not so inferior as a few decades before. In Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1886, Charles Postel demonstrates how taking stock of these movements forces us to rethink some of the central myths of American history. Dismissing the New Deal point of view as the eclectic creation of a capitalism in momentary retreat, what was influencing the Communists, who emphasized the unity of theory and practice? An American Dilemma: A Summary . In our society it is not unusual for a Negro to experience a sensation that he does not exist in the real world at all. Navigate parenthood with the help of the Raising Curious Learners podcast. Topics Blacks, Ethnology-America, African-Americans Collection opensource Language English. Perhaps it took the rise of fascism to free American social science of its timidity. But he also uses it to deny the existence of an American class struggle, and with facile economy it allows him to avoid admitting that actually there exist two American moralities, kept in balance by social science. Not because he might be overawed by its broad comprehensiveness; nor because of the sense of alienation and embarrassment that the book might arouse by reminding him that it is necessary in our democracy for a European scientist to affirm the American Negro’s humanity; not even because it is an implied criticism of his own Negro social scientists’ failure to define the problem as clearly. Following World War I, under the war-stimulated revival of democracy, there was a brief moment when the moral nature of the problem threatened to come alive in the minds of white Americans. Encyclopedic in its effort to cover all aspects of black life, An American Dilemma was a volume of over 1,000 pages that included analyses of major demographic, political, economic, and cultural forces that shaped the black experience in the United States. Or, in the case of the New Deal, to attribute its failure to its desire to hold power in a concrete political situation, while the failure of the Communists could be laid to “Red perfidy.” But this would be silly. Myrdal proves this no idle Negro fancy. There is, however, a danger in this very virtue. Despite its projection of a morality based upon Marxist internationalism, it had inherited the moral problem centering upon the Negro which Myrdal finds in the very tissue of American thinking. But for the most part, both New Deal and the official Left concentrated more upon the economic aspects of the problem, important though they were, than upon those points where economic and psychological pressures conflicted. But with all this he can only conclude that “the Negro’s entire life and, consequently, also his opinions on the Negro problem are, in the main, to be considered as secondary reactions to more primary pressures from the side of the dominant white majority.”. 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