Monday night PBS stations aired “American Denial: The Roots
of Racism”, 50 minutes, directed by Llewellyn W. Smith, as part of its “Independent
Lens” independent documentary film series.
The film gives the history of Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and his
visit to the United States, starting in 1938, at the behest of Carnegie, to
study race. The end result was
eventually the book “The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern
Democracy” in 1944.
Myrdal was shocked when he visited black neighborhoods, and
learned one could not understand behavior until willing to walk in their
shoes. Myrdal had originally focused on
Jim Crow laws and segregation, and did encounter the stories of lynching (as
with the unfinished film “American Lynching” of Gode Davis). But he found that individual Americans, both black
and white,
personalized anti-black prejudice long after they renounced discrimination
intellectually. Well into the 60s,
Blacks traveling in the South could not find black hotels and had to stay with
other families.
One of the tools to measure inherent prejudice was the
Implicit Association Test, where people were asked to correlate works with
positive connotations with blacks and found it hard to do so. Blacks would underperform on academic tests
where they were told that the tests “count”.
Myrdal’s book would be cited in the Supreme Court’s “Brown
v. Board of Education” decision in 1954.
Myrdal would live until 1987, 33 years to the date of the decision.
Myrdal’s wife was also accomplished, as they worked
together. But Myrdal was capable of male
chauvinism, and his wife Alva complained that he hindered her own career. Again, people could profess one thing publicly
and behave differently privately. We
call that hypocrisy. Myrtdal became troubled about the crisis that this work produced within his own personality.
Myrdal also drew parallels between racism in the US and the
anti-Semitism that had exploded in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
The official site link is here.
The film was presented as part of Black History Month.
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