The prescience of Myrdal - Swedish economist and public servant Gunnar Myrdal

Public Interest, Summer, 1997 by Abigail Thernstrom, Stephan Thernstrom

It was of course too optimistic, but as Washington Post columnist Donna Britt has recently said, on the question of race even "'foolish' optimism beats the hopeless cynicism we're [currently] mired in." The voices of hope have become too few and far between. Kenneth Clark was a research assistant for Myrdal who subsequently became best known as the black psychologist whose work on the harmful effects of segregation was favorably cited by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. In 1992, Clark called "racial problems and prejudices ... much more deep-seated than [he] had thought 25 or 30 years ago"; he believed progress was only "on the surface." No significant gains. It was the logical corollary to the pessimism about white goodwill that has so informed civil-rights rhetoric. In her youth, Karen A. Phillips had helped integrate the white high school in her hometown of Ocilla, Georgia; "things opened up, but attitudes stayed the same," she said in 1994. It has become the conventional liberal view.

In December, 1995, black employees at the Library of Congress forced the closing of an exhibit about slave life on southern plantations. "I was so upset I couldn't look at the rest of the exhibit," reported an employee who had glanced at an 1895 photograph depicting an armed white man on a horse looking down on black cotton pickers. "It reminded me of the white overseers here at the Library ... looking down over us to make sure we're in the fields doing our work." Past and present, one and the same: It's an odd denial of historical change.

If Arnold Rose was wrong to think that by 1982 "informal" discrimination would be a "mere shadow," he was right to have seen immediate and enormous progress in looking back at An American Dilemma, 20 years after Myrdal had completed the manuscript. In 1962, the success of the civil-rights movement was still uncertain; the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were yet to come. But there had already been two decades of amazing racial change - now largely forgotten. It is often assumed that racial progress is both fragile and recent: a product of the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s and subsequent affirmative-action policies. In fact, by numerous measures the pace of change was most impressive in the years Rose contemplated. Deep economic and demographic shifts, accompanied by new white racial attitudes, started African Americans down the difficult road to equality - with the end not yet in sight.

Law and order

In the fog of gloom that now blankets the issue of race, the status of blacks in the closing years of the Great Depression, when Myrdal began his study, has been all but obscured. But if we are to avoid "hopeless cynicism," we must recall the world that Myrdal so vividly described. Traveling in the South, he was at first puzzled that the black men and women he met were so obviously afraid of him. "The Southern Negro," he observed, "seems to suspect a possible danger to himself ... whenever a white stranger approaches him." In fact, he soon discovered that blacks displayed the same fear around whites whom they knew.