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American Dilemma, An

An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy was Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal's influential study of race relations in the United States. The Carnegie Corporation commissioned the project in 1937. After years of ethnographic fieldwork, economic analysis, and historical research, this 1,500-page book was published in 1944 to considerable international acclaim. Myrdal later received a Nobel Prize, in part for this, his best-known work. Its impact on U.S. race relations has been mixed.

Contributors

Newton D. Baker and Frederick P. Keppel provided the original impetus for the study, believing, by the mid-1930s, that a comprehensive study of the role of the “Negro” in American life was pressing. Baker, the son of a Confederate officer and a Carnegie trustee, and Keppel, the acting president of the Carnegie Corporation, proposed to name an impartial scholar, and they tapped Myrdal as much for his impeccable international reputation as a scholar and Swedish politician as for his status as a foreigner whose opinion might be taken as neutral.

Myrdal, sensing that his study had enormous political implications, originally applied to Keppel to work with a team of three: a white northerner, a white southerner, and a black man, the combination of whose perspectives he imagined he could render as impartial. But the Carnegie Corporation encouraged Myrdal, at the outset of the project, to work only with black political scientist (and later civil rights leader) Ralph Bunche, then chair of the Political Science Department at Howard University.

Sharp disagreements between the two over the necessary means of solving the “American dilemma” led to Bunche's departure after a year of collaboration. Bunche believed that transracial working-class solidarity would provide the means of agitating for antidiscrimination laws. Myrdal believed the issue should be pursued by elites, and mainly cites Bunche in An American Dilemma as a kind of native informant on issues of black leadership and what Myrdal describes as black anti-elitism. Not crediting him specifically as a collaborator, Myrdal only makes occasional reference to “the Negro intellectual Ralph Bunche” who “testifies” or offers “descriptive commentary” in the body of the text. He cites Bunche's scholarly work repeatedly in the footnotes.

Argument

Myrdal posited a set of cultural norms and habits he called the “American Creed.” The Creed is a composite of democratic values: egalitarianism, faith in the rule of law, and a fundamental commitment to fairness. He argued that the American Creed was in fundamental tension with the legal system of U.S. racial segregation and its underlying ideological prejudices. Locating the “Negro problem” as primarily being a problem located in white consciousness rather than black experience, Myrdal systematically unpacked white assumptions about race-based inferiority.

With 47 chapters and 10 appendices, Myrdal intended his study to be as comprehensive and authoritative as possible. Myrdal investigated not only a range of historical topics, such as chattel slavery and Reconstruction, but how those histories were taught (or incorrectly taught) in U.S. public schools. He considered the role of social practices, like occupational discrimination and lynching, as sites through which white Americans ingested an idea of racial inferiority without being explicitly taught. Using the interwoven concepts of caste, class, and color, Myrdal posited the existence of a fixed caste system in the United States, which was distinguished from the class system by reliance on a race-based hierarchy, as well as by the caste system's greater durability. Myrdal argued against the use of the term race, which he believed had biological implications that contributed to the diffusion of bigotry.

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