Myrdal’s landmark study enshrined cultural assimilation as a racist solution despite his antiracist intent

Evidence

And yet one of Myrdal’s solutions to White racism was still Black assimilation. “In practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is … a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture,” Myrdal surmised. “It is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into American culture.” An American Dilemma did for cultural assimilationists what Darwin’s Origin of Species had done for Social Darwinists, what Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for abolitionists, what Samuel Morton’s Crania Americana had done for polygenesists, and what Robert Finley’s Thoughts on Colonization had done for colonizationists. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 903

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the assimilationist position within Kendi’s three-way scheme: Myrdal opposed segregationism yet still held Black culture itself to be pathological, which is the assimilationist core.
• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s stated discomfort thesis: assimilationism—where most well-meaning people live—is itself a racist position. Also useful for testing the ignorance-hate-discrimination reversal, since Myrdal’s racism survived his antiracist intentions.