theatlantic | Writing the final manuscript, he synthesized the team’s
research on racial discrimination in the United States, but he also
injected his untested hypothesis about white Americans. The first pages
of An American Dilemma stated that the race problem in the United
States was a moral issue: “The Negro is a ‘problem’ to the average
American partly because of a palpable conflict between the status
actually awarded him and those ideals.” Americans not only felt this
tension, he argued, but also acted on it to create positive social
change in the country. In the final chapter, he emphasized to his
American readers the global significance of living up to their
egalitarian ideals. However, he offered no empirical support for his
conclusion that Americans experienced a moral dilemma at the sight of
racial discrimination.
Reviewing Myrdal’s book, Howard University’s E. Franklin
Frazier wrote: “One would certainly agree with the author in the sense
that all social problems are moral problems. But it might be questioned
whether the problem is on the conscience of white people to the extent
implied in his statement of the problem.” Echoing Frazier in his own
review of An American Dilemma, Yale University sociologist Davie
reflected: “Though the treatment of the Negroes is without a doubt the
greatest challenge to American democracy, the conscience of white
America does not appear to be as aware and disturbed as Myrdal thinks it
is from the rational moral standpoint.”
The University of North Carolina’s Campbell tested the
hypothesis on nearly three hundred students at an un-disclosed public
university in the South that was likely his own. “Gunnar Myrdal
performed a disservice to our understanding of segregated social systems
by his drastic simplification of the normative dimensions of the
issue,” he concluded. “It seems apparent that the American Creed simply
is not transmitted to many people as a set of values pertinent to racial
issues. Further, a segregated system provides its own set of
counter-norms, a rationale that justifies the system while it helps the
actor in the system to compartmentalize or re-interpret the American
Creed.” Yes, racial discrimination in the United States conflicted with
the American Creed. And yet, Campbell’s study suggested that Americans
did not necessarily experience any moral angst about the contradiction.
Late-twentieth-century sociologists peppered journal articles
with doubts about Gunnar Myrdal’s claims. Nevertheless, the American
public embraced this image of itself. Even today, with little reflection
on whether it is true or not, Americans like to echo Myrdal’s
hypothesis that they belong to a people whose moral compass drives them
to address racial discrimination. When he spoke at Selma, President
Obama perpetuated this theory. Over seventy years after the publication
of An American Dilemma and in this moment of heightened
reflection on racial discrimination in the United States, though,
perhaps it is time for the American public to question that idea.
Myrdal’s theory of Americans as a moral people who champion
racial equality may seem harmless. After all, much as Myrdal imagined,
it might motivate Americans to achieve these ideals, and it can burnish
the image of the United States abroad. But however comforting and
flattering that image might be, and however politically useful it may
prove on the domestic and global stages, it obscures harder truths. As
Campbell discovered, many Americans felt that segregation was either
irrelevant to, or consonant with, these basic principles. Instead of
assuming, like Myrdal, that Americans will inevitably feel compelled to
rectify racial discrimination to meet their egalitarian ideals, perhaps
making progress on issues of race requires acknowledging that absent
difficult discussions on what equality means in the U.S. and conscious
organizing to bring it about, nothing will change at all.
