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Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Introduction - 3. A White Man’s Problem - 4. Not an Isolated Problem
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Hi Introductiom
The Negro was brought to America for the sake of the white man^s
profit. He was kept in slavery for generations in the same interest. A civil
war was fought between two regional groups of white Americans. For two
years no one wanted Negroes involved in the fighting. Later on some two
hundred thousand Negro soldiers fought in the Northern army, in addi-
tion to all the Negro laborers, servants, spies, and helpers in both armies.
But it was not the Negroes’ war. As a result of the war, which took a toll
of some half million killed and many more wounded, the four million
Negro slaves were liberated. Since then the Negro’s ^^place” in American
society has been precarious, uncertain and changing; he was no longer so
necessary and profitable to the white man as in slavery before the Civil War.
In the main, however, the conflicting and vacillating valuations of the white
majority have been decisive, whether the issue was segregation in the
schools, discrimination with reference to public facilities, equal justice and
protection under the laws, enjoyment of the franchise, or the freedom to
enter a vocation and earn an honest living. The Negro, as a minority, and a
poor and suppressed minority at that, in the final analysis, has had little
other strategy open to him than to play on the conflicting values held in the
white majority group. In so doing, he has been able to identify his cause
with broader issues in American politics and social life and with moral
principles held dear by the white Americans. This is the situation even today
and will remain so in the foreseeable future. In that sense, ^^this is a white
man’s country.”
This stress in the formulation of our problem, it must be repeated, is
motivated by an ambition to be realistic about the actual power relations in
American society. It should not be taken as a doctrinaire approach. In the
degree that the Negro people succeed in acquiring and institutionalizing
footholds of power in society with the help of interested white groups
—
for example, if they can freely use their votes, as they can in the North, or
press themselves into the industrial labor market and the trade unions
—
they will increasingly be able to act and not only to react. Under all
circumstances, in fact even in slavery, the attitudes and activities of the
Negro people do, to a certain extent, influence the attitudes and policies of
the white majority group in power, as account is taken by the whites of the
Negro’s reactions. Even if the prevailing power situation is reason enough
to look for the primary responsibility for what happens in the valuations of
the white people, these same valuations are themselves the product of a
two-way interracial relationship.
4. Not an Isolated Problem
Closely related to the thesis that the Negro problem is predominantly
a white man’s problem is another conclusion, which slowly dawned upon
the author, though it undoubtedly is not news t<^ many of his American
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