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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Appendices - 5. A Parallel to the Negro Problem
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1078 An American Dilemma
In personal relations with both women and Negroes, white men generally prefer a
less professional and more human relation, actually a more paternalistic and pro-
tective position—somewhat in the nature of patron to client in Roman times, and
like the corresponding strongly paternalistic relation of later feudalism. As in Germany
it is said that every gentile has his pet Jew, so it is said in the South that every white
has his “pet nigger,” or—in the upper strata—several of them. We sometimes marry
the pet woman, carrying out the paternalistic scheme. But even if we do not, we tend to
deal kindly with her as a client and a ward, not as a competitor and an equal.
In drawing a parallel between the position of, and feeling toward, women and Negroes
we are uncovering a fundamental basis of our culture. Although it is changing, atavistic
elements sometimes unexpectedly break through even in the most emancipated indi-
viduals. The similarities in the women’s and the Negroes’ problems are not accidental.
They were, as we have pointed out, originally determined in a paternalistic order of
society. The problems remain, even though paternalism is gradually declining as an
ideal and is losing its economic basis. In the final analysis, women are still hindered in
their competition by the function of procreation j
Negroes are laboring under the yoke
of the doctrine of unassimilability which has remained although slavery is abolished.
The second barrier is actually much stronger than the first in America today. But the first
is more eternally inexorable."
*Alva Myrdal, Nation and Family (1941), Chapter 22, “One Sex a Social Problem,”
pp. 398-426.
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