"In 1938, Dr, Frederick Keppel of the Carnegie Corporation asked my father to come to the United States to study 'the American Negro Problem.' Keppel's courage, honesty, warm-heartedness, and imagination impressed my father deeply. Keppel insisted that my father begin his study by traveling through the South rather than settling down to do library research on race issues. My father soon recognized Keppel's wisdom in forcing him to confront the realities of discrimination right away: 'I was shocked and scared to the bones of all the evils I saw, and the serious political implications of the problem which I could not fail to appreciate from the beginning.'
"It was clear from the outset that the problem my father had been asked to study, far from affecting blacks alone or simply dividing blacks and whites, was lodged in the hearts of all Americans: 'It is there that the interracial tension has its focus. It is there that the decisive struggle goes on. This is the essential viewpoint of the treatise.'
"This struggle generates the dilemma in the book's title. How can Americans square lofty ideals--the American Creed--with the base realities of racial discrimination? How can they claim to respect the dignity of all persons, equality, and the inalienable right to freedom, justice, and a fair opportunity, while countenancing pervasive violations of the dignity of blacks and of their rights to that freedom, that justice, and that fair opportunity?
"'The Negro in America has not yet been given the elemental civil and political rights of formal democracy, including a fair opportunity to earn his living, upon which a general accord was already won when the American Creed was first taking form. And this anachronism constitutes the contemporary 'problem' both to Negroes and to whites.'"
Saturday, July 19, 2014
AN AMERICAN DILEMMA ...EXCERPT
"In 1938, Dr, Frederick Keppel of the Carnegie Corporation asked my father to come to the United States to study 'the American Negro Problem.' Keppel's courage, honesty, warm-heartedness, and imagination impressed my father deeply. Keppel insisted that my father begin his study by traveling through the South rather than settling down to do library research on race issues. My father soon recognized Keppel's wisdom in forcing him to confront the realities of discrimination right away: 'I was shocked and scared to the bones of all the evils I saw, and the serious political implications of the problem which I could not fail to appreciate from the beginning.'
"It was clear from the outset that the problem my father had been asked to study, far from affecting blacks alone or simply dividing blacks and whites, was lodged in the hearts of all Americans: 'It is there that the interracial tension has its focus. It is there that the decisive struggle goes on. This is the essential viewpoint of the treatise.'
"This struggle generates the dilemma in the book's title. How can Americans square lofty ideals--the American Creed--with the base realities of racial discrimination? How can they claim to respect the dignity of all persons, equality, and the inalienable right to freedom, justice, and a fair opportunity, while countenancing pervasive violations of the dignity of blacks and of their rights to that freedom, that justice, and that fair opportunity?
"'The Negro in America has not yet been given the elemental civil and political rights of formal democracy, including a fair opportunity to earn his living, upon which a general accord was already won when the American Creed was first taking form. And this anachronism constitutes the contemporary 'problem' both to Negroes and to whites.'"
