Gunnar Myrdal - An American Dilemma (1944)

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White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually 'cause' each other.

Gunnar Myrdal
Education means an assimilation of white American culture. It decreases the dissimilarity of the Negroes from other Americans.

Gunnar Myrdal
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.

Gunnar Myrdal
America has had gifted conservative statesmen and national leaders. But with few exceptions, only the liberals have gone down in history as national heroes.

Gunnar Myrdal
The objective of an educational campaign is to minimize prejudice—or, at least, to bring the conflict between prejudice and ideals out into the open and to force the white citizen to take his choice

Gunnar Myrdal
In this sense the Negro problem is not only America's greatest failure but also America's incomparably great opportunity for the future. If America should follow its own deepest convictions, its well-being at home would be increased directly. At the same time America's prestige and power abroad would rise immensely.

Gunnar Myrdal
The breakdown of discrimination in one part of the labor market facilitates a similar change in all other parts of it. The vicious circle can be reversed.

Gunnar Myrdal
The treatment of the Negro is America's greatest and most conspicuous scandal. It is tremendously publicized, and democratic America will continue to publicize it itself. For the colored peoples all over the world, whose rising influence is axiomatic, this scandal is salt in their wounds.

Gunnar Myrdal
On the one hand, the negroes' plane of living is kept down by discrimination from the side of the whites while, on the other hand, the white's reason for discrimination is partly dependant on the negroes' plane of living.

Gunnar Myrdal
Of all the calamities that have struck the rural Negro people in the South in recent decades—soil erosion, the infiltration of white tenants into plantation areas, the ravages of the boll weevil, the southwestern shift in cotton cultivation—none has had such grave consequences, or threatens to have such lasting effect, as the combination of world agricultural trends and federal agricultural policies initiated during the thirties.

Gunnar Myrdal
The study of women's intelligence and personality has had broadly the same history as the one we record for Negroes. As in the case of the Negro, women themselves have often been brought to believe in their inferiority of endowment.

Gunnar Myrdal