Myrdal, Gunnar

Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) was a Swedish economist and sociologist. He is most famous for his 1944 study of U.S. race relations entitled An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. In the book, Myrdal argued that white Americans faced a debilitating dilemma between their belief in national rhetoric that placed value on personal freedom and claimed that people are innately equal and their historic and ongoing ill-treatment of African Americans. This contradiction between racial oppression and the American rhetoric of equality prevented the United States from reaching its full potential, Myrdal thought, and created a sense of guilt within the white population. He remained optimistic, however, and insisted that if whites worked to eradicate racism and to provide true equality to blacks, then the United States would prosper socially, economically, and politically. Myrdal believed, moreover, that rectifying America's race problems was vital to the U.S.'s international reputation, as it would help American relations with developing nonwhite nations in Asia and Africa.

Myrdal's work had a profound impact on modern American race relations. Before Myrdal, many viewed race relations through the lenses of scientific racism and social Darwinism and believed that it was incumbent on African Americans to address their poverty, low social status, and subjugation to Jim Crow laws. An American Dilemma recast the plight of blacks and framed it as a problem that derived from the behavior of whites and whose solution lay within the white conscience. It created a new race relations paradigm that called on whites to acknowledge their culpability in oppressing blacks and to restructure and reengineer society so as first to ameliorate the condition of African Americans and then ultimately to provide them with social equality. This ideology was fundamental to the Civil Rights Movement and affected liberal thinkers in the academy, law, and politics. Indeed, Myrdal's ideas influenced Martin Luther King Jr., the 1953 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the civil rights legislative agenda of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Myrdal fundamentally affected the history of the American city by attacking urban racial segregation. Between 1890 and World War II, in what is known as the Great Migration, blacks moved in large numbers from the South to the North and West to escape the oppression of Jim Crow. Many found work as industrial laborers in the cities. Uncomfortable with this influx of blacks, white urbanites used violence, city ordinances, and restrictive housing covenants that forbade home sales to blacks to create a powerful system of segregation. After World War II, segregation persisted as whites increasingly moved to suburban areas whereas blacks remained in dilapidated city centers. Myrdal argued that segregation was socially disruptive because it created an inherently unequal situation. Segregation, he explained, kept blacks from freely competing in the job market and subjected them to legislation targeted specifically at black neighborhoods. Myrdalian ideology undergirded post–World War II efforts to integrate American cities and lay at the heart of integrationist victories such as the U.S. Supreme Court's 1948 Shelly v. Kraemer decision, which overturned restrictive deed covenants, and the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in real estate transactions.

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