Maribel Morey, Miami Institute for the Social Sciences
What does it mean to fund, to write, to produce knowledge for a white Anglo-American world order?
The type of white Anglo-American supremacy I research and write about is so pervasive, so condoned at the national level in the U.S. and globally—so condoned by most of the institutions we work with, much of the education we have received—that many of us cannot see it for what it is, white supremacy. For many of us, it is just natural to appeal to a white Anglo-American audience in the academe, in policy, in funding. But it is no accident that Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and most presidents and titans of industry in the U.S. and globally have been fellow white Anglo-American men. They are beneficiaries of national and global political economies, many ways in their making, that privilege the work and interests of white Anglo-American men such as themselves. That is white supremacy—white domination—over the rest of us.
But many of us do not see (or do not want to see) so much of white Anglo-American dominance in finance, the academe, and policymaking as white supremacy. Because what does it mean for us if the very world we exist in—from the Republican to the Democratic Party in the U.S., the Right and the Left, and elites in the academe, philanthropy across the Global North—if it’s all a glass box of white Anglo-American supremacy? That feels, well, rather, suffocating. Plus, why call this out, and in the process, risk ostracizing the nice white people—The more ‘benevolent,’ and quite powerful, white liberals who are our colleagues in the academe, in philanthropy, in policymaking. Why acknowledge their inclusion in the making of a global white world order that needs to be addressed? Well, because we owe it to ourselves to be honest about the deep work ahead of us, if we are indeed trying to ‘decolonize,’ to wrestle with our legacies in white supremacy. We need to not only point the finger at obvious violent forms of white supremacy, but also the forms that seem, well, normal and expected to us.
One way of crawling out of the white supremacy that seems normal to us is to question the purposes and aims of government, finance, the academe, and philanthropy when they govern, fund, and study us, ‘the Other’—the Global Majority in the Global North and South.
For example, within the world of the academe and public policymaking, how do dominant scholars and policymakers discuss and define equality with us, the Global Majority? What alternative forms of knowledge, of governance, perhaps suppressed, could have led and could lead towards more equitable, sustainable national and international political economies?
With that in mind, I discuss my book forthcoming in October 2021 with University of North Carolina Press: White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s An American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order.
Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944)
Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944) is, according to U.S. sociologist Aldon D. Morris, “the most famous and influential study of race every produced.” Supporting the significance of Myrdal’s book in the U.S., political scientist Naomi Murakawa writes that it has been “the touchstone book of racial politics,” with historian Daryl Michael Scott concurring that An American Dilemma was “the era’s most important study of black life” in the United States.
Commissioned and financed by Carnegie Corporation of New York, and written by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma runs the length of nearly 1,500 pages across two volumes. It outlines the many facets of white Americans’ anti-Black discrimination from employment, housing, voting, and police and court practices to patterns of direct violence and intimidation such as lynching and riots.
Throughout the volumes, Gunnar Myrdal relays that these anti-Black discriminatory policies and behavior run counter to Americans’ national egalitarian ideals: the “American Creed.” The author subsequently encourages his white American readers to correct their anti-Black discrimination to meet such ideals. Even more, Myrdal stresses that white Americans could make use of an increasingly strong and centralized national government in the United States to expedite Black Americans’ integration into white American life.
Gunnar Myrdal’s analysis of anti-Black discrimination as a moral problem in the hearts and minds of white Americans—to be solved by appealing to these dominant white Americans to mobilize the national government to assimilate Black Americans (and other racialized minorities) into dominant white American life—remains a powerful tool for Americans to discuss the best means and ends for racial equality in the country.
In the 1940s and well into the 1960s, An American Dilemma dominated discussions on Black Americans in the United States not only among social scientists but also policymakers. Most famously, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 made explicit mention of An American Dilemma in its school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education (1954) with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter saying to an American journalist years earlier that “Myrdal’s book was ‘indispensable’ for understanding the race problem.”
And yet, even as An American Dilemma relatively quickly became a celebrated text among many Americans, it also has had its critics and relatively early on. Predictably, there were steadfast proponents of racial segregation who balked at Myrdal’s suggestion that white Americans should expedite Black Americans’ assimilation into white American life.
Though it was not simply segregationists who found fault with Myrdal’s central argument in An American Dilemma. There were also those who, compared to Myrdal’s thesis in An American Dilemma, were more firm foes of white supremacy and viewed the book as further justifying white rule in the United States. In this vein, for example, Ralph Ellison expressed his ambiguity about An American Dilemma in a review he wrote in 1944 though left unpublished for two decades. Here, Ellison explained that Black Americans “must, while joining in the chorus of ‘Yeas’ which the book deservedly evoked, utter a lusty and simultaneous ‘Nay.’” This is because while the study confirmed Black Americans’ humanity to white Americans and explained how Black subjugation as a result of the latter’s anti-Black discrimination (rather than as many white people had liked to believe, any inferiority among Black people), Ellison reasoned that Myrdal reconfirmed for white Americans the inferiority of Blackness. And Myrdal did this, Ellison noted, by suggesting in An American Dilemma that racial equality required Black Americans to assimilate into white American life, and in the process, to acquiesce to white Americans’ denigration of Blackness and privileging of whiteness.
Indeed, to Ellison’s point, Myrdal had written in An American Dilemma that it is to the advantage of Black Americans “as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into American culture, to acquire the traits held in esteem by the dominant white Americans.” And Myrdal did not simply see this as a practical option. Rather, Myrdal generally devalued Black culture, noting in An American Dilemma his “observation that peculiarities in the [Black] community may be characterized as social pathology.”
To this key element of Myrdal’s definition of racial equality in An American Dilemma, Ellison commented: “It does not occur to Myrdal that many of the [Black] cultural manifestations which he considers merely reflective might also embody a rejection of what he considers ‘higher values.’” Considering that white culture and personality were not, according to Ellison, any bit superior to Black culture and personality, Ellison lamented Myrdal’s assumption that Black Americans’ equality in the U.S. required acquiescing to white Americans’ belief in their cultural superiority.
Other early critics of An American Dilemma such as U.S. scholars Oliver C. Cox, Herbert Aptheker, Doxey Wilkerson, and Charles V. Hamilton along with Trinidadian scholars and activists C.L.R. James and Stokely Carmichael saw in An American Dilemma an effort to help leading white Anglo-Americans re-justify their dominance as an imperial power both within and beyond the United States.
In Caste, Class and Race (1948), for example, Cox referred to the emphasis on U.S. democracy in An American Dilemma’s title and retorted: ““We shall not discuss the concept from which the book derives its title, for it seems quite obvious that none of the great imperialist democracies either can or intends to practice its democratic ideals among its subject peoples.” To Cox, Myrdal’s emphasis that dominant whites in the U.S.—once shown the gap between their democratic ideals and discriminatory treatment and public policies on Black people—would rectify their policies and behavior was as naïve as expecting European imperial powers in Africa to do the same after being shown comparable data about their treatment of Africans.
In a similar way, Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton argued in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967) that “there is no ‘American dilemma’ because black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the interest of the colonial power to liberate them.”
As Carmichael, Hamilton, Cox and other strident critics of white supremacy since then such as Samuel DuBois Cook and Harold Cruse long have noted—and contrary to Myrdal’s message in An American Dilemma—white Americans have not necessarily felt moral stress in their discrimination of Black Americans. And even when some do, for example, Cruse argued in 1967 that the “relationships between groups in America, and on the international plane, are actuated by the power principle, not by morality and compassion for the underdog classes.”
While never publicly critical of An American Dilemma, W.E.B. Du Bois was privately sympathetic to this critique of Myrdal’s work as further justification for white Anglo-American domination. Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis writes of Du Bois: “If he never publicly questioned the Myrdalian concept of moral tension and its muting of economics, there is ample evidence that, privately, he concurred with the sharp criticisms of An American Dilemma made by Marxist scholars such as Herbert Aptheker, Oliver Cox, and Doxey Wilkerson, who largely dismissed Myrdal’s American Creed as the opiate of the white liberals.”
From such a critical perspective, shared by Du Bois and others, Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma served to help leading white Anglo-Americans reconfirm the superiority of whiteness over Blackness, and to accept Black Americans’ equality on their own terms and at their discretion when they felt that it was expedient to bridge the gap between their egalitarian ideals and discriminatory treatment of Black people.
In simplest terms, White Philanthropy amplifies the significance of these critics’ perspectives on An American Dilemma, by confirming with historical evidence their claims that An American Dilemma was an exercise in white Anglo-American domination. More specifically, I illustrate how the book was part of Carnegie Corporation President Frederick Keppel’s efforts in the 1920s and 1930s to finance social science studies that would help white policymakers in the Anglo-American world address perceived problems in their governance of Black people. Unpacking the text itself, I argue Myrdal ultimately complemented his funder’s intentions for the project by keeping white Americans as his principal audience and guiding them towards a national policy program on Black Americans that would keep intact white domination. Because for Myrdal as Carnegie Corporation, international order rested on white Anglo-Americans’ continued ability to dominate effectively.
In White Philanthropy, I present new and original research on Carnegie Corporation founder Andrew Carnegie’s vision for international peace; how this gilded age steel tycoon’s vision for global peace related to his advocacy of vocational and industrial education for Black people; and how, once Carnegie passed away in 1919, his assistant James Bertram translated for fellow board members at Carnegie Corporation his former employer’s expectations for international peace along the color line (for example, in interpreting the Corporation’s charter).
Assuming the presidency of Carnegie Corporation in 1923, former Columbia College Dean Frederick Keppel incorporated into this vision of the Corporation mandate his own anxieties about the explosive nature of Black nationalism for continued white supremacy across the Atlantic and his affinity for the developing social sciences as a useful tool for helping white policymakers re-calibrate white supremacy and Black subordination in their territories.
I thus show how President Keppel’s decision to finance An American Dilemma (1944)—and before it, The Poor White Study (1932) in South Africa and An African Survey (1938), organized via Chatham House in London—were in line with Carnegie Corporation’s priorities in the Anglo-American world, and more specifically, part-and-parcel of Keppel’s own developing interest in financing social scientific studies on white and Black people as a means of helping white policymakers across the Atlantic find new equilibriums in white domination over Black people. Because for this Carnegie Corporation president, much like the Corporation’s founder Andrew Carnegie—and later—Myrdal, international peace rested on white Anglo-Americans’ effective domination across oceans.
Indeed, Myrdal—who was in routine dialogue with President Keppel who had commissioned him to head the study—largely delivered on his funder’s intentions for the US study. Inspired by its experience funding The Poor White Study, and especially An African Survey, Carnegie Corporation intended the U.S. study to provide white Americans with means of coordinating policies on Black people across geographic regions in the country, much as An African Survey was intended to achieve for white imperial and colonial leaders throughout Africa. In line with Carnegie Corporation’s expectations, Myrdal maintained white Americans as his principal audience and guided them towards means of establishing a national policy program on Black Americans that would reinforce the legitimacy of white domination on this part of the ocean, again, much as An African Survey was intended to achieve on the other side of the Atlantic.
The biggest point of disagreement between funder and grantee—between Keppel and Myrdal—centred around the question of whether the white South was critical for a national policy program on Black Americans. For Keppel, white Southerners were crucial while, for Myrdal, the influence and power of this group did not match that of another group of white Americans he deemed best suited and capable of shepherding such a national policy program: white Americans in the North and New Deal government.
Ultimately, Myrdal explained in An American Dilemma that the American Creed could inspire all white Americans, and particularly white Northerners and New Dealers, to mobilize the federal government to further assimilate Black Americans into white American life along the lines of white Americans’ priorities, described by Myrdal as a “rank order of discriminations.” Once white Americans started this work of self-correcting themselves toward their moral ideals, Myrdal argued that they would be solving the so-called race problem, and in the process, re-justifying and re-stabilizing their domination in the United States. As Myrdal found particularly important to emphasize during the Second World War, he furthermore argued in An American Dilemma that white Americans needed to solve their so-called race problem because white Anglo-American leadership (and particularly white American leadership) across oceans was critical for international order during and after the Second World War.
In the foreword to An American Dilemma, written just as he retired as president of Carnegie Corporation, Keppel—while showing some concern that Myrdal had not sufficiently allured white Southerners in the text—celebrated Myrdal’s text alongside the previous two social scientific studies in white rule that the Corporation had funded during the span of his tenure as president: The Poor White Study and An African Survey. After all, and even as the two men disagreed on the relative importance of the white South for a national policy program on Black Americans, Myrdal had both fulfilled and surpassed his obligation as director: by proposing means for white Americans to come together toward such a national policy program and to stabilize white Anglo-American rule at the international level.
That said, one must acknowledge that An American Dilemma has played an important discursive role in the U.S.: After all, it is a book written by a white European man whom leading white Anglo-Americans long have treated as authoritative. And Myrdal has conveyed to leading white Americans who trust his knowledge production that anti-Black discrimination runs against U.S. egalitarian ideals. So in this way, An American Dilemma in the U.S.—as An African Survey in a colonial African context—has been a powerful tool in helping Black and other racialized groups on either side of the Atlantic further substantiate to an audience of white Americans and Europeans that their claims for more equitable treatment deserve to be heard.
I thus suggest acknowledging that An American Dilemma indeed has played an important discursive role in the U.S., akin to An African Survey in colonial Africa. Though for a more egalitarian future—assuming we aim for a world beyond white Anglo-American supremacy leaving the rest of us dependent on its bouts of benevolence—we need to find inspiration, not in such texts such as An American Dilemma, or An African Survey—that are only thinly-disguised efforts to continue white rule both within and beyond the U.S., but rather—in those individuals who resisted the making of this white Anglo-American world order, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Oliver C. Cox, Ralph Ellison and others, including Tuskegee Institute’s African history professor during the 1920s, Simbini Mamba Nkomo. As Du Bois, Garvey, Cox, Ellison—and Nkomo—showed through their lives and work (and as many others today show through their lives and work) there are indeed avenues towards more equitable and sustainable national and global communities: We just have to acknowledge white supremacy in all its forms, even in the forms that seem comfortable and normal; learn from our histories; and believe in our collective abilities to govern each other, to lead each other with full dignity and respect at the national, regional, and global levels.
References
Aptheker, Hebert, 1946 The Negro People in America: A Critique of Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma,” International Publishers, New York.
Carmichael, Stokely and Charles V. Hamilton, 1967, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, Random House, New York.
Cook, Samuel DuBois., 1964, Review of “The Negro in America: The Condensed Version of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. By Arnold Rose,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 49, no. 3.
Cox, Oliver C, 1948, Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics. Doubleday & Company, New York.
Cruse, Harold. 1967, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership, New York Review Book, New York.
Ellison, Ralph, 1964, Shadow and Act, Random House, New York.
Jackson, Walter, 1990, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938-1987, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC.
Lewis, David Levering, 2000. W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, Henry Holt and Company, New York.
McLemee, Scott and Paul Le Blanc, eds., 1994, C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C.L.R. James, 1939-1949, Haymarket Books, Chicago.
Morris, Aldon D, 2015, The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology, University of California Press, Oakland, CA.
Murakawa, Naomi, 2014, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, Oxford University Press, New York.
Myrdal, Gunnar, 1944, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Harper & Brothers, New York.
Scott, Daryl Michael, 1997, Contempt & Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC.
Southern, David W, 1987, Gunnar Myrdal and Black-White Relations, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, LA.
Maribel Morey is a scholar of 20th century U.S. history, philanthropy, legal history, history of the social sciences, African American Intellectual History, and the Founding Executive Director of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, a nonprofit organization centering the work of Global Majority scholars in the social sciences as means both for improving the integrity and rigor of these fields and for building more inclusive national and international political economies.
