Journal 4/13

In American Denial, you learned about Swedish economist, Gunner Myrdal, and his research in the American Deep South in the 1930's. He concluded that Americans believe in equality and freedom, but then continue to discriminate against others (in this case due to race), and that the tension between these two beliefs created an American dilemma (in fact, he called his study The American Dilemma). Do you believe that this is still true today? Why or why not?

It is, to some degree. Racism is no longer one of the central pieces of the problems between people- this is illustrated by the creation of things like “micro aggressions”, which are basically just watered-down racist statements. They mostly consist of stereotyping and sort-of offensive ideas spouted out of ignorance. Open racism is less common, so people needed to come up with a term to define a much less harsh version of it. I’d call that progress. The dilemma has largely been solved by decades of interaction between African- Americans and whites after segregation ended, in which children of different races learned together, played together, and were raised in a society that embraced interactions between different races more so than in years past. Those children grew up to be more tolerant than their parents, and they raised children that were most likely even more tolerant of different kinds of people. So, we’ve gotten closer to bridging the gap between the true nature of America’s social structure and the ideals it was created upon- even though there are other things to fix outside of race relations. Mr. Myrdal would be delighted to see how far the country has come.