Pathological Subjectivity
One of the most famous social science sources cited by the Supreme Court in the Brown decision is Gunnar Myrdal's The American Dilemma, published in 1944 in two volumes (1483 pages plus front matter). Myrdal's study resulted from an invitation by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1937, which committed itself to the study of the African American in the 1930s.
Myrdal, a Swedish economist, laid out the initial research plan for the study. He assembled a group of social scientists, including African American scholars, and consulted with a much larger group of scholars and social scientists, including the African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier. The Carnegie Corporation paid for a large staff that included Ralph J. Bunche, and utilized African American scholars for special research tasks, including St. Clair Drake and Frazier. As research materials accumulated, the Carnegie Corporation published four specialized volumes, in addition to Myrdal's work.
In view of the vast collaboration, we may say that The American Dilemma had African American scientific compliance. Myrdal stated his acknowledgments this way:
"The collaboration in the study--which embraced, in friendship and concerted efforts, white and Negro men and women of different specialties, ages, and different accomplishments--gave more than is contained in the 15,000 typewritten pages of manuscript. Even about the specific problems of race relations, which we were studying together, I learned much more from our informal conferences than I can ever duly account for in this book."(P. xiv.)
I have emphasized the contribution of African American scholars and social scientists to the composition of The American Dilemma, because I want to bring forward one theoretical premise of this study that bore directly on the Supreme Court's Brown decision.
One problem Myrdal faced was how African American community, society, and culture, as they were studied in the late 1930s, should be conceived. This problem was a different problem from studying Negro sociological characteristics or accumulating vital statistics or reciting anecdotes from literary sources. How the community was to be interpretively portrayed would be important for the findings and recommendations of the research. Presumably, this interpretation would have the stamp of approval of the African American scholars and social scientists who contributed to the research.
So it is of interest to read that Negro culture, to use the vocabulary of the 1940s, was pathological. Here is appropriate quotation, with the original italicization:
"In practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is not something independent of general American culture. It is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture. The instability of the Negro family, the inadequacy of educational facilities for Negroes, the emotionalism in the Negro church, the insufficiency and unwholesomeness of Negro recreational activity, the plethora of Negro sociable organizations, the narrowness of interests of the average Negro, the provincialism of his political speculation, the high Negro crime rate, the cultivation of the arts to the neglect of other fields, superstition, personality difficulties, and other characteristic traits are mainly forms of social pathology which, for the most part, are created by the caste pressures."(Pp. 928-929.)
Eventually, Black Americans reacted against the attribution of pathology; this was, generally speaking, the genesis of the intellectual component of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and later. Black Power is another story apart from our current subject; here we need to note what this characterization of the African American did for the Brown decision and the reign of subjectivity.
When the Supreme Court justices ruled that segregated education created negative self-evaluation--inferiority and humiliation--in segregated minority children, the justices were drawing upon the Myrdal work, as well as upon child psychology and mental hygienist theory of the Midcentury White House Conference. For Myrdal and coauthors stated that all segregated Black society was pathological. The Court would have had reason to believe it had the authority of African American scholars themselves for their conclusions. To be a Black person in segregated America was to suffer a pathological subjectivity. In education and by implication in American society at large, the main task of the reform of racial relations would be, focusing on each person's subjectivity, to end the pathological deformation of personhood due to the inherent, nearly metaphysical, contradiction between American ideals of universal equality and American practice of segregation. So the Court ruled.
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* Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, with the assistance of Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1944).
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