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

AMERICAN DILEMMA, AN

AMERICAN DILEMMA, AN. Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987), a Swedish sociologist, was chosen by the Carnegie Corporation in 1938 to make a large-scale study of American race relations. After a five-year research effort, which involved the hiring of seventy-five assistants, Myrdal published the two meaty, densely documented volumes of An American Dilemma in 1944. The "dilemma" of the title was that white Americans said they believed in human freedom and equality—were actually fighting for these principles at the time in World War II—yet systematically denied freedom and equality to their own African American population.

The book became a classic as the most thorough study of American racism undertaken up to that time; it was something of a bible to the early civil rights movement in the 1950s. Myrdal was impressed by Americans' idealism and felt confident that if they fully understood their racial situation they would revolt against its injustice and reform it. He emphasized that as black Americans were released from segregation and given greater opportunities, they would demonstrate that their subordination had been environmental, not hereditary or intrinsic.

After 1960, however, as the civil rights movement became more militant and as racial issues underwent more intensive study, the reputation of An American Dilemma declined rapidly for its relative neglect of economic-power and social-class issues.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jackson, Walter A. Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1937–1987. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Southern, David. Gunnar Myrdal and Black-White Relations: The Use and Abuse of "An American Dilemma," 1944–1969. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

PatrickAllitt

See alsoCivil Rights Movement ; Race Relations .