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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 - 3. Facets of the Negro Problem - 2. The Anti-Amalgamation Doctrine
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56 An American Dilemma
toward real but illicit miscegenation. In spite of the doctrine, in some
regions with a large Negro population, cohabitation with a Negro woman
is, apparently, considered a less serious breach of sexual morals than illicit
intercourse with a white woman. The illicit relations freely allowed or only
frowned upon are, however, restricted to those between white men and
Negro women. A white woman’s relation with a Negro man Is met by the
full fury of anti-amalgamation sanctions.
If we now turn to the American Negro people, we can hardly avoid the
strong impression that what there is of reluctance in principle toward
amalgamation is merely in the nature of a reaction or response to the
white doctrine, which thus stands as primary in the causal sense and
strategic in a practical sense. It is true that white people, when facing the
Negro group, make an ideological application of the general Jim Crow
principle—“equal but separate” treatment and accommodations for the two
racial groups—and proceed from the assertion that both races are good to
the explanation that there is a value in keeping them unmIxed. They appeal
also to the Negroes’ “race pride” and their interest in keeping their own
blood “pure.” But this is a white, not a Negro, argument.
The Negro will be found to doubt the sincerity of the white folks’ inter-,
est in the purity of the Negro race. It will sound to him too much like a
rationalization, in strained equalitarian terms, of the white supremacy
doctrine of race purity. “But the outstanding joke is to hear a white man
talk about race integrity, though at this the Negro is in doubt whether to
laugh or swear.” ^ Even the Negro in the uneducated classes is sensitive to
the nuances of sincerity, trained as he is both in slavery and afterwards to
be a good dissembler himself. The Negro will, furthermore, encounter con-
siderable intellectual difficulties inherent in the idea of keeping his blood
pure, owing to the fact that the large majority of American Negroes actually
are of mixed descent. They already have white and Indian ancestry as well
as African Negro blood. And in general they are aware of this fact.
In spite of this, race pride, with this particular connotation of the unde-
sirability of miscegenation, has been growing in the Negro group. This is,
however, probably to be interpreted as a defense reaction, a derived second-
ary attitude as are so many other attitudes of the Negro people.*^ After
weighing all available evidence carefully, it seems frankly incredible that
the Negro people in America should feel inclined to develop any particular
race pride at all or have any dislike for amalgamation, were it not for the
common white opinion of the racial inferiority of the Negro people and the
whites’ intense dislike for miscegenation. The fact that a large amount of
exploitative sexual intercourse between white men and Negro women has
always been, and still is, part of interracial relations, coupled with the
further fact that the Negroes sense the disgrace of their women who are
* Sec Appendix 10, Section 4.
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