In this landmark effort to understand African American people in
the New World, Gunnar Myrdal provides deep insight into the
contradictions of American democracy as well as a study of a people
within a people. The title of the book, An American Dilemma, refers
to the moral contradiction of a nation torn between allegiance to
its highest ideals and awareness of the base realities of racial
discrimination. The touchstone of this classic is the jarring
discrepancy between the American creed of respect for the
inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity for all and
the pervasive violations of the dignity of blacks.
The appendices are a gold mine of information, theory, and
methodology. Indeed, two of the appendices were issued as a
separate work given their importance for systematic theory in
social research. The new introduction by Sissela Bok offers a
remarkably intimate yet rigorously objective appraisal of Myrdal--a
social scientist who wanted to see himself as an analytic
intellectual, yet had an unbending desire to bring about change. An
American Dilemma is testimonial to the man as well as the ideas he
espoused.
When it first appeared An American Dilemma was called "the most
penetrating and important book on contemporary American
civilization" by Robert S. Lynd; "One of the best political
commentaries on American life that has ever been written" in The
American Political Science Review; and a book with "a novelty and a
courage seldom found in American discussions either of our total
society or of the part which the Negro plays in it" in The American
Sociological Review. It is a foundation work for all those
concerned with the history and current status of race relations in
the United States.
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