Abstract
There is a “Negro problem” in the United States and most Americans are aware of it, although it assumes varying forms and intensity in different regions of the country and among diverse groups of the American people. Americans have to react to it, politically as citizens and, where there are Negroes present in the community, privately as neighbors.
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Notes
Similar exceptions can be noticed in every lower class culture. There has been, for instance, in most industrial countries in recent decades, a “proletarian” branch of literature, which draws its themes and its inspiration from life in the lower classes. This literature is often, characteristically enough, appreciated more by members of the higher classes than by the proletarians themselves. Generally pastoral romanticism, which has been a part of urban civilization since the time of the ancient Greeks, has idealized lower class life. The tendency is tainted with sentimentality, and this is frequently displayed by people who show a particular interest in Negro culture. Among the radically inclined, this romanticism serves to express their sympathy for the underdog; among conservatives it serves as a rationalization for continuing the inequalities. To Negroes it serves as an expression of their protest and their “race pride.” As usual it appeals much more to upper and middle class Negroes than to lower class Negroes. The sentimentality involved in idealizing lower class traits has, of course, nothing to do with scientific observation. The residuum of truth in the tendency is, however, that even if generally the result of adverse living conditions are bad, exceptionally they may be good – “good” and “bad” defined according to our value premise of placing the general American culture “higher.”
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© 1962 Harper Collins Publishers, Inc.
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Myrdal, G. (1962). An American Dilemma. In: Hughey, M.W. (eds) New Tribalisms. Main Trends of the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26403-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26403-2_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-66666-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-26403-2
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