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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 - I. The Approach - 2. Encountering the Negro Problem - 1. On the Minds of the Whites - 2. To the Negroes Themselves
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Chapter 2. Encountering the Negro Problem 27’
gerated. Neither should it be minimized. It is the writers conclusion that
even in those Northern states with few Negroes, the Negro problem is
always present though relatively quiescent. Nearly everybody in America
is prepared to discuss the issue, and almost nolx)dy is entirely without
opinions on k. The opinions vary. They may be vague and hesitating or
even qjuestioiniiiiig,, or they may be hardened and articulate. But few Amer-
icans are unaware of the Negro* problem.
So it seems always to have been. Wandering around the stacks of a good
American library, one is amajzedi at the huge amount of printed material on
the Negro problem. A really complete bibliography would runj up to
several hundred thousand titles.^ Nobody has ever mastered this material
exhaustively, and probably nobody ever will. The intellectual energy spent
on the Negro problem in America should, if concentrated in a single
direction, have moved mountains.
This does not imply that the Negro problem approaches the status of a
dominant issue. It is not now a main divider of opinions in national politics,
although it was so in the decades before and after the Civil War. There
were other periods in American history, however, when it was in the back-
ground, perhaps never so much as in the decades before the First World
War. But as a secondary problem and as a peculiar influence on all the
/dominant national issues, it has always held a rank among the most
(Conspicuous. Through the generations, it has disturbed the religious
moralists, the political philosophers, the statesmen, the philanthropists,
the social scientists, the politicians, the businessmen and the plain citizens.
A number of factors underlie the present trends—^such as the danger of
continued and, after the Second World War, intensified economic disloca-
tion with its serious effects on Negro employment j
the rising tension
around democracy as a form of government and a way of life j
and, finally,
the rising educational level and intensified group consciousness and discon-
tent of the Negro people themselves. All this makes it probable that the
Negro problem in America is again going to mount high in relative impor-
tance among national issues.
2. To THE Negroes Themselves
To the Negro himself, the problem is all-important. A Negro probably
seldom talks to a white man, and still less to a white woman, without
consciousness of this problem. Even in a mixed white and Negro group
of closest friends in Northern intellectual circles, and probably even in an
all-Negro group, the Negro problem constantly looms in the background
of social intercourse. It steers the jokes and the allusions, if it is not one
of the dominant topics of conversation. As an inescapable overtone in social
relations, ^^race” is probably just as strong as sex—even in those most
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