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33

(1944) [MARC] Author: Gunnar Myrdal
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Chapter 2. Encountering the Negro Problem 33
genial and free, perhaps even carefree, and had the distinctive mark of skeptical
openmindedness which accompanies social security and a lifelong experience of
unhampered cultural opportunities. Near the intended end of the party, my friend
announced the peculiar reason for my being in America at the present time and
invited the company to tell me their frank opinions on the Negro problem.
For a moment a somewhat awkward silence descended upon our party, a queer
feeling that our relation of human understanding was broken. An illusion was shat-
tered. Here wc had all been behaving on the understanding that we were men of
the world, members of that select cosmopolitan fellowship which senses no strong
local ties and whose minds meet in most broad topics of general and human interest;
and then suddenly my friend had violated this understanding by addressing all the
others as a local fraternity sharing a dark secret together, while I was marked off
as the stranger peeping in on them and their secret, the Negro problem.
The situation most urgently had to be redefined. The responsibility was shouldered
by an elderly, very distinguished doctor. He made a short speech (the discussion had
suddenly turned very formal) to the effect that in the South there was ‘‘no Negro
problem”; a static equilibrium had been reached, and was going to remain, and it
fitted the situation as a glove fits the hand. More particularly, he went on, the
relations between the two races in the South corresponded to their inherited abilities
and aptitudes. A long time ago those relations had been stratified into “folkways and
mores,” known and respected by both races and taken for granted, or rather as self-
evident, in view of the inferior endowments of the African race and the superior
qualities of the Anglo-Saxon master race. The doctor ended up by pointing out that
it was, in fact, inherent in this very notion of “mores,” that they could never be
questioned or disputed or even consciously analyzed. There could, indeed, by defini-
tion, never be a “problem” concerning the mores of society. The very question was
nonsensical. The mores were the ground everybody walked upon, the axioms of
social life, even more unquestioned than the religious truths and for more substantial
psychological reasons.
The doctor finished. Everybody agreed, and there was really nothing in the issue
to discuss. The few moments* stress was cased, and a measure of congeniality again
restored. I then reflected that the South was, as I was finding out, now on the way
to giving the Negroes a real chance in education. I referred to the continuous
improvement of public schools even for Negroes and to the growing number of
Negro youths who were permitted to acquire a higher education of a kind, even in
the South. It had occurred to me, I continued, that this tread in education—cleaving
many other primary causes of change unmentioned—represented a dynamic factor
of cumulative importance. If it was given time, and if the direct and indirect effects
in all spheres of life were allowed to accumulate, the resultant social change might
finally attain a momentum where it could seriously challenge, or at least move quite
a bit, the “folkways and mores’* our doctor had rooted so firmly, not only in tradi-
tion, but in the very nature of things and particularly in the biology of the races.
Yes, it might make it difhcult to keep the Negro in his place. It might, for instance,
make it much less easy to hold him disfranchised; in all certainty it would soon
render obsolete one of the principal arguments and constitutional instruments for
denying him the ballot—namely, his illiteracy.
After this remark, I did not need to say anything more for the next hour or two

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