>>> Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk 10/11/00 01:14PM >>>
In message <s9e448a6.062 at mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>, Charles Brown <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> writes
>I don't know anybody radical who thinks Gunnar Myrdal had any
>special insights on race in the U.S.
Well, more fool them.
I would say that Myrdal was pretty important in developing the liberal critique of racism (i.e. Weberian idealist, rather than Marxist materialist). An American Dilemma, though wrong in its method, is nonetheless a pretty remarkable document, both for its empirical sweep and for what it says about the way that a part of the establishment in the US was trying to distance itself from explicitly racial thinking.
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CB: We tend to think we are experts on this topic, with W.E.B. Dubois and others. To us, Myrdal is not that impressive ,and the liberal establishment, though making a few strides in that period, was and is more part of the problem than with special insights for the solution.
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The problem with Aptheker's pamphlet against Myrdal is that he criticises him by contrasting Myrdal's liberal opinions with a more radicalised version of the same attitudes. So, for example, Aptheker jumps on some fairly peripheral comments of Myrdal's to the effect that the Southern ideology was in its own way an American ideology. Aptheker busts a gut insisting that, no, on the contrary, Southern racism was wholly alien to America's democratic traditions!
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CB: Seems appropriate to bust Myrdal on this. Whatever democratic traditions U.S. has, Southern homegrown ideology was certainly the antithesis of them.
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Less attractively, Aptheker casts aspersions on Myrdal's national origins, calling into question his insights as an outsider.
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CB: In this case, I tend to agree that Myrdal's being an outsider is a hinderance to his getting it. Can't think of any important way in which he has turned out to be correct. Not too many opponents of racism today rely on Myrdal's analysis.
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Having said that, of course it was indicative, and pertinent that Myrdal chased all the Communist Party supporters out of the project (having ripped off whatever they had to offer). -- James Heartfield