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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Introduction - 1. The Negro Problem as a Moral Issue - 2. Valuations and Beliefs
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implications have an important place in our inquiry. While on the one
hand, to such a moralistic and rationalistic being as the ordinary American,
the Negro problem and his own confused and contradictory attitudes
toward it must be disturbing; on the other hand, the very mass of unsettled
problems in his heterogeneous and changing culture, and the inherited
liberalistic trust that things will ultimately take care of themselves and
get settled in one way or another, enable the ordinary American to live
on happily, with recognized contradictions around him and within him,
in a kind of bright fatalism which is unmatched in the rest of the Western
world. This fatalism also belongs to the national ethos.
The American Negro problem is a problem in the heart of the American.
It is there that the interracial tension has its focus. It is there that the
decisive struggle goes on. This is the central viewpoint of this treatise.
Though our study includes economic, social, and political race relations,
at bottom our problem is the moral dilemma of the American—the conflict
between his moral valuations on various levels of consciousness and
generality. The “American Dilemma,” referred to in the title of this book, is the
ever-raging conflict between, on the one hand, the valuations preserved on
the general plane which we shall call the “American Creed,” where the
American thinks, talks, and acts under the influence of high national and
Christian precepts, and, on the other hand, the valuations on specific planes
of individual and group living, where personal and local interests;
economic, social, and sexual jealousies; considerations of community prestige
and conformity; group prejudice against particular persons or types of
people; and all sorts of miscellaneous wants, impulses, and habits dominate
his outlook.
The American philosopher, John Dewey, whose immense influence is
to be explained by his rare gift for projecting faithfully the aspirations and
possibilities of the culture he was born into, in the maturity of age and
wisdom has written a book on Freedom and Culture, in which he says:
Anything that obscures the fundamentally moral nature of the social problem is
harmful, no matter whether it proceeds from the side of physical or of psychological
theory. Any doctrine that eliminates or even obscures the function of choice of values
and enlistment of desires and emotions in behalf of those chosen weakens personal
responsibility for judgment and for action. It thus helps create the attitudes that
welcome and support the totalitarian state.1
We shall attempt to follow through Dewey’s conception of what a social
problem really is.
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