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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 - 8. The North and the South
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48 An American Dilemma
Northerner does not have his social conscience and all his political thinking
permeated with the Negro problem as the Southerner does.
Rather, he succeeds in forgetting about it most of the time. The North-
ern newspapers help him by minimizing all Negro news, except crime news.
The Northerners want to hear as little as possible about the Negroes,
both in the South and in the North, and they have, of course, good reasons
for that. The result is an astonishing ignorance about the Negro on the
part of the white public in the North. White Southerners, too, are ignorant
of many phases of the Negro’s life, but their ignorance has not such a
simple and unemotional character as that in the North. There are many
educated Northerners who are well informed about foreign problems but
almost absolutely ignorant about Negro conditions both in their own city
and in the nation as a whole.
This has great practical importance for the Negro people. A great many
Northerners, perhaps the majority, get shocked and shaken in their con-
science when they learn the facts. The average Northerner does not under-
stand the reality and the effects of such discriminations as those in which
he himself is taking part in his routine of life. To get ’publicity is of the
highest strategic importance to the Negro people. The Negro protection
and betterment organizations and many white liberals see this clearly and
work hard to articulate the sufferings of the Negroes.
There is no doubt, in the writer’s opinion, that a great majority of white
people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially
better deal if they knew the facts. But to understand the difficulty the
Negroes have to overcome in order to get publicity, we must never forget
the opportunistic desire of the whites for ignorance. It is so much more
comfortable to know as little as possible about Negroes, except that there
are a lot of them in Harlem, the’ Black Belt, or whatever name is given
to the segregated slum quarters where they live, and that there are still
more of them in the Souths that they are criminal and of disgustingly, but
somewhat enticingly, loose sexual morals; that they are religious and have
a gift for dancing and singing; and that they are the happy-go-lucky
children of nature who get a kick out of life which white people are too
civilized to get.
one note more should be added*, the Southerners are not entirely
difterent on this last point from the Northerners. 1 have become convinced
also that a majority even of Southerners would be prepared for much
more justice to the Negro if they were really brought to know the situation.
The younger generations of Southern whites are less indoctrinated against
the Negro than their parents were. But they are also farther away from
him, know less about him and, sometimes, get more irritated by what little
they see. We do not share the skepticism against education as a means of
mitigating racial intolerance which recently has spread among American
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