American Dilemma, An

American Dilemma, An (1944).Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy ranks among the most important studies of American race relations. The “American Negro Problem,” Myrdal argued, lay not in African Americans' imagined inferiority, but in white Americans' inability to reconcile the contradiction between a generalized belief in equality and a powerful “group prejudice” against blacks. For twenty years, this two‐volume work represented the conventional wisdom of the American political establishment about the nation's “race problem.” It is cited prominently in Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision outlawing racial segregation in public education.

The impact of An American Dilemma was enhanced by the sponsorship of the Carnegie Foundation, which in 1938 had commissioned Myrdal, a distinguished Swedish sociologist, to conduct a study of racial issues in America. Along with his scholarly reputation, Myrdal's most important qualification was that, like Alexis de Tocqueville a century earlier, he was an outsider who could presumably analyze American race relations with greater objectivity than an American could.

After 1964, as the civil rights and Black Power movements gained strength, some critics came to agree with the African American writer Ralph Ellison that Myrdal's analysis had been flawed. In their view, An American Dilemma considered African Americans primarily in their role as the victims of white racism rather than as full‐fledged participants in the creation of American culture.
See also African Americans; Black Nationalism; Civil Rights Movement; Democracy in America; Racism; Social Science; World War II.

Bibliography

David W. Southern , Gunnar Myrdal and Black‐White Relations: The Use and Abuse of “An American Dilemma”, 1944–1969, 1987.
Walter A. Jackson , Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987, 1990.

Ben Keppel