Search Results

This chapter examines the content and context of what is termed “postwar liberalism”, which coupled a new commitment to anti-discrimination with a rejection of the more class-conscious and social democratic orientation of the New Deal. Postwar liberalism represents a new understanding of American liberalism that centrally featured a strong, principled stand against racial discrimination. Although presenting itself as articulating a long-standing truth, this paradigm in fact represented an important reconfiguration of the meanings of both liberalism and race. While representing a historic advance against deeply embedded norms of white supremacy, postwar liberals failed to recognize the immense significance of growing patterns of racial inequality that did not fit into their ideological frame. By making a dramatic, controversial, and highly public commitment to resolving the American dilemma, postwar liberals promoted a vision of American democracy that would prove immensely more difficult to approximate than they realized at the time.

Situated largely in the mid-century history of psychology and sociology, this chapter surveys the intellectual and institutional landscape in which racial individualism developed. In the 1920s and 1930s, social ecological, social anthropological, and political economic theories, which emphasized the causal importance of social systems or structures and had imprecise reformist implications, circulated alongside individualistic research on prejudice that often legitimized anti-prejudice education. Synthesizing much of this interwar work, Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) sought to bring together systemic and dispositional visions of the race issue. Though the influential volume thoroughly analyzed the political and economic sources of racial oppression, the shifting parameters of American liberalism ensured that Myrdal’s giant synthesis would be remembered for its combination of psychological and rights-based individualism. Turning to the postwar years, the chapter explains how scientism, behavioralism, and antiradicalism contributed to the elaboration of two individualistic frameworks for conceptualizing the race issue: psychological theories of prejudiced personalities popularized by both Gordon Allport and the authors of The Authoritarian Personality and a focus on discrimination among sociologists, especially those, like Robin M. Williams Jr., informed by structural functionalism.

This chapter focuses on the dynamic racial composition of the United States. It begins with a critical reexamination of the underlying theoretical orientation of An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal, who writes that the African-American problem is due to lack of assimilation or resistance to amalgamation into white American culture. It then discusses the factors that caused the changes in the racial composition of the United States and the important implications for the future. Finally, the chapter examines the limits of racial assimilation.

This chapter examines Ralph Ellison's critique of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma. Ellison rejected Myrdal's claim that black culture and psychology can be viewed as pathological by-products of white racism, and criticized the impact of sociology on naturalistic representations of race, questioning if “American Negroes are simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them?” Kenneth Warren praised Ellison's argument saying that he “was seeking a dynamic, even dialectical account of the Negro that would acknowledge the history of racial repression but not characterize black people as merely prisoners of a repressive environment.” Andrew Hoberek similarly highlights the extent to which Ellison echoed a version of postwar sociology concerned with issues of class rather than with issues of race.

Gandhi and King were true liberals. They questioned the contemporary interpretation of liberalism which, they thought, was articulated in a distorted form to defend racism and colonialism exploitation in the US and India respectively. In their political battle against such an ideological deviation, they simply applied the fundamental tenets of liberalism which remained their main plank. An attempt was made in the chapter to address ‘the distortions’ in contemporary articulation of certain major and also critical liberal values shaping the socio-political responses towards specific groups of people. Both Gandhi and King never came to terms with segregation which was contrary to the fundamental tenets of liberalism. Hence they believed that the difference among human beings were created and sustained artificially by reference to a deviant conceptualization of liberalism.

This chapter begins by discussing the US Supreme Court's decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case, which was influenced by Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Its critical assessment of American racial oppression and rejection of the typological view of race proved instrumental in striking down legalized segregation. In relation to the Brown decision, human geneticist Curt Stern published “The Biology of the Negro,” an article in which he claimed that not only would the Negro race be dissolved as the result of being hybridized into the dominant white population, but also race itself would become futile as the white and black races merged. The chapter also presents how the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) campaigned for the application of scientific knowledge in the fight against racial prejudice.

This chapter presents Gunnar Myrdal’s novel An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944) to illustrate the emergence of race novels and the values ascribed to literature about racial liberalism. Throughout the Cold War, race novels were as the primary tool of antiracism movements for discussing the notion of racial liberalism and to gain the support of white Americans against racial discrimination. This satirized the social and professional context of different race relations by dramatizing the failure of white Americans to help promote racial equality and the notion of the possibility that racial liberalism could be attained through philanthropy, academia, government, media, and race relations organizations.

The fourth chapter begins by chronicling the fieldwork of Allison Davis, Elizabeth Davis, Mary Gardner, Burleigh Gardner, and Saint Clair Drake in their community study of Natchez, Mississippi, from 1933 to 1935. It then evaluates the classic book that emerged from that research: Deep South (1941), along with Allison Davis’s memo to Gunnar Myrdal, which informed parts of Myrdal’s highly influential Carnegie Corporation study of American race relations: An American Dilemma (1944). Finally, the chapter explores the reception of Deep South among social scientists and the larger reading public. As many commentators understood, the book resulted in an unprecedented depth and breadth of ethnographic material on life within the southern United States. It breathed life into the world of Jim Crow, and it explained how racial caste and class intersected to stratify life in Natchez. Less appreciated was how Allison and Elizabeth transgressed racial mores in the academy by taking the lead in an interracial community study, with Allison serving as first author of the book.

The Introduction begins with a personal anecdote. Unaware of the complicated politics of racial impersonation, Gaines blackened a fellow student for her high school’s revival of the 1947 Broadway musical, Finian’s Rainbow. In the musical’s complicated plotline, magically becoming black for a day was the only corrective remedy to the racism of a white, Southern legislator terrorizing his constituents. Moving from the personal to a close reading of Finian’s Rainbow, the introduction establishes the postwar temporality and theoretical scaffolding for the rest of the book. The introduction establishes the link between these racial experiments in temporary blackness and the politics of American liberalism by considering Gunnar Myrdal’s influential sociological tome, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. In it, Myrdal concluded that the solution to the “Negro problem” “rested in the heart and mind of the [white] American.” This false conclusion enabled the genealogy of “empathetic racial impersonation” detailed in the rest of the book. It argues these racial experiments come into vogue when the United States, as an emerging, postwar superpower, attempts to understand its racial past, present, and future. It then unpacks how and why empathetic racial impersonation resurges during moments of racial and sociopolitical crisis.