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784

(1944) [MARC] Author: Gunnar Myrdal
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Note: Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.

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784 An American Dilemma
to participate. So the Negro protest and the white expectation harmonize
and accumulate in their effects to narrow the range of Negro thinking.
This vicious circle of caste operates upon the finest brains in the Negro
people and gives even to the writings of a Du Bois a queer touch of un-
reality as soon as he leaves his problem, which is the American Negro
problem, and makes a frustrated effort to view it in a wider setting as an
ordinary American and as a human being. A corresponding and comple-
mentary feeling of queerness is felt by the foreign observer when he turns
over the leaves of the hundreds of recent books and articles by white
Americans on American democracy and its implications. In this literature
the subject of the Negro is a void or is taken care of by some awkward,
mostly un-informed and helpless, excuses. This is, of course, seen clearly
by the Negro intellectual. Ralph Bunche remarks:
. . . consciously or unconsciously, America has contrived an artful technique of
avoidance and evasion. For example, American newspaper editorials carry glowing
praise for the tenets of liberty and equality upon which the society is founded, but
ignore completely the inconsistent Negro status. One author has recently written a
book entitled American Problems of Today and yet barely mentions the Negro in one
or two incidental passages.-
The tragedy of caste is that it does not sfare the integrity of the soul
either of the Negro or of the white man. But the difference in degree of
distortion of world view is just as great as the difference in size between
the American Negro community and the rest of the world.
Negro thinking is almost completely determined by white opinions
negatively and positively. It develops as an answer to the popular theories
prevalent among whites by which they rationalize their upholding of
caste. In this sense it is a derivative, or secondary, thinking. The Negroes
do not formulate the issues to be debated j
these are set for them by the
dominant group. Negro thinking develops upon the presuppositions of
white thinking. In its purest protest form it is a blunt denial and a refu-
tation of white opinions. Accommodation may oend the denial toward
qualified denial or even qualified agreement. But Negro thinking seldom
moves outside the orbit fixed by the whites’ conceptions about the Negroes
and about caste.
Restricted and focused in this way, the problem of housing becomes to
Negroes a problem of residential segregation and their share in public
housing projects. Education becomes Negro education. Politics concerns
Negro disfranchisement and what the Negroes will get out of the
kaleidoscopic and unintelligible chance play of strange national and world
events. The fight between the C.I.O. and the A.F. of L. is a question
of whether Negroes will be allowed into the labor unions. World trends
in agricultural economics and American agricultural policy are seen only
in terms of cotton and the Negro sharecropper.

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