Beneath this imposing facade of scholarly expertise, Myrdal advanced a simple thesis: race was a moral issue, inherent in the contradiction between the "American creed" of equal opportunity and the reality of racial discrimination. It was this line of argument, which implied the possibility of an appeal to the uneasy conscience of Americans, that made the book a central document in the history of the civil rights movement. Leaders of the movement could cite Myrdal in support of their belief that American society was not irredeemably racist, that a deep though subterranean reservoir of good will remained, and that the movement should seek to evoke whites' better nature by bringing the conflict between their principles and their practice into the open. Not that Myrdal foresaw or advocated any such strategy. He counted on the courts, an enlightened federal bureaucracy, and the general process of economic and cultural development to resolve the "American dilemma." It never occurred to him that black people might take the leading role in their own liberation. The race problem could be solved only by whites. But his emphasis on its moral dimension at least kept open the possibility of a strategy that appealed to the public conscience; and it is saddening to discover, therefore, that it was precisely this moral emphasis that Myrdal's critics on the left singled out as the most objectionable feature of his book. Americans did not really believe in equal opportunity at all, according to these critics. Their commitment to equality was "primarily verbal," as Kenneth Clark put it in a 1964 symposium commemorating the publication of Myrdal's book on its twentieth anniversay. American society was "essentially not ethical," James Baldwin argued on the same occasion. Even liberals had never managed to "divest themselves of the whole concept of white supremacy." Their refusal to acknowledge their own racism prevented them from seeing that black people would never win a place in American society, as Myrdal allegedly imagined, by appealing to the moral sympathies of their oppressors.

In fact, however, Myrdal devoted more of his attention to social pathology than to moral appeals. Unlike Martin Luther King, he did not ask Americans to repent; he asked them simply to grow up. When he said that race was "primarily a moral issue," he meant that a "lag of public morals" had perpetuated the "anachronism" of racial discrimination. He was a social scientist, not a moralist, much less a "prophet," as one of his detractors inappropriately referred to him. He saw the race problem as a function of Southern backwardness, one that could be overcome through

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