Does Race Matter - Recent Developments

By Louis Andrews

Once upon a time it was expected that changes in laws would bring about racial equality. What is one to think when, despite these laws, racial differences in achievement have changed little in the last twenty-five years? An Associated Press bulletin from October 30th, 1997 is entitled “D.C. students post disappointing scores.” Recent reports indicate that a black male in Washington, D.C. has about an 85% expectation of being arrested at least once in his life. Despite over thirty years of legislation and affirmative action, the situation has in many ways worsened. What are we missing?

Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma was published by the Carnegie Foundation fifty-three years ago and is considered the most important book published on race relations in America. In fact, one could argue that it is the single most important study of American society published in the 20th Century. Myrdal was from Sweden, a mono-racial country where black-white relations were never a problem. Essentially, Myrdal argued that the problem with American black culture was pathological. The cause of this condition was simple: discrimination. Blacks were disadvantaged because whites would not allow blacks to participate fully in American life. Since the cause was simple the solution was equally simple: end discrimination. The origins and logic of the mores of the existing society were unimportant; it is not just (said the world-renowned egalitarian socialist) therefore it must be changed.

Some strongly disagreed with Myrdal’s diagnosis of pathology, including influential blacks in favour of change; but their criticisms went unheeded. For example, the black intellectual, Ralph Ellison, wrote a solicited review of An American Dilemma for The Antioch Review, but they refused to publish it because of its antagonistic approach. Ellison thought it absurd that anyone would believe that his black culture was created by discrimination. He wrote:

Can a people live and develop for over 300 years simply by reacting? Are American Negroes simply the creation of white man, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them? Men have made a way of life in caves and upon cliffs, why cannot Negroes have made a life upon the horns of the white man’s dilemma?

He argued that Myrdal’s view robbed blacks of dignity. Indeed many other ethnic groups in the United States had suffered discrimination, including the Chinese, the Irish and the Jews and yet neither Myrdal nor others were calling their cultures pathological.

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Does Race Matter - Recent Developments
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