[Marxism] Thomas Sugrue reviews 4 books on race relations

[Sean Andrews]

On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 6:00 PM, Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> wrote:
>  By Thomas J. Sugrue
>

>  Obama's high-minded words echo those of Swedish economist Gunnar
>  Myrdal, whose 1944 book An American Dilemma still defines the basic
>  dynamics of racial politics in America. In a lengthy italicized
>  passage in his introduction, Myrdal provided the essence of his
>  argument for readers who did not want to slog through its 1,483
>  data-laden pages: "The American Negro problem is a problem in the
>  heart of the American. It is there that the interracial tension has
>  its focus. It is there that the decisive struggle goes on." For its
>  unflinching accounts of patterns of segregation, the rhetoric and
>  practice of Jim Crow, and pervasive racial violence, Myrdal's book is
>  indispensable. But the book's longest-lived contribution was its
>  argument--one that resonated with American religious and therapeutic
>  culture--that racial inequality was fundamentally a moral and
>  psychological problem that would be resolved only when Americans'
>  hearts and minds were untainted by prejudice.

I have a very different understanding of Myrdal's argument, but I
wasn't aware of these critiques.

Here's my take on him:

'Myrdal described America's Dilemma as being the conflict between the
values of the culture operating on general plane of what he referred
to as the "American Creed" and the "valuation on specific planes of
individual and group living."   In short, "the interrelations between
the material facts and people's valuations of and beliefs about these
facts are precisely what make the Negro [sic] a social problem."   A
good portion of Myrdal's study was of the material conditions of
African-Americans of the day and the way that they contradicted the
average American citizen's deeply ingrained belief that the society
they lived in was moral.  "This strain is increased," Myrdal wrote in
this 1937 study, "in the democratic America by the freedom left
open—even in the South, to a considerable extent—for the advocates of
the Negro, his rights and welfare. [ . . . .] They seek to fix
everybody's attention on the suppressed moral conflict."'

I'm not sure why Myrdal gets such a bad showing in the review--or why
he gets thrown in as some sort of champion of individualism as opposed
to institutional change.  American Dilemma was cited by the Supreme
Court in the Brown v. Board case and the central argument seemed to be
that the material conditions of African Americans belied the idea that
the society was "separate but equal."  Perhaps it would take a change
of heart for people to admit this, but the change of heart alone was
not the goal: it was to keep that American Creed and actually make the
material conditions reflect its beliefs. In so far as the struggle was
only, as the reviewer quotes, "in the heart of the American," it was
in regards to whether the evidence that they lived in a materially
unequal, racially segregated society would be allowed to change their
perception to the contrary.  Since a good chunk of the article is
devoted to people still trying to prove this basic argument, I don't
know how Myrdal can be faulted for trying to point it out in 1944.

Is the argument against him that he didn't point out the flipside of
this material problem, i.e. that it wasn't simply an inequality but
that white society benefited from this inequality, socially and
economically?  This would seem to be the full meaning of the terms
"oppression and exploitation" and I can certainly get behind the gist
of that argument.  But Myrdal is hardly the "Young Hegelian" he's made
out to be here.  And since he later denounced the "Nobel Prize in
Economics" and recommended its abolition because he had to share it
with the "reactionary" Hayek, it's really not fair to say he was some
sort of liberal individualist.  I must be missing something.

s