Researching race relations: Myrdal's American Dilemma from a methodological perspective

Abstract

This paper explores the research methodology of Gunnar Myrdal's study of race relations in the United States, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). It gives an overview of the methodological framework it presents for the study of racism and its consequences. The interpretative paradigm that underpinned this forcefully anti-racist synthesis of a large amount of empirical evidence is discussed, and three core elements of the normative theoretical framework are highlighted: the role of human rights values in theory and practice, the concept of 'social environmentalism' and the principle of 'cumulative causation'. Examples are then given of quantitative and qualitative evidence in support of the overall arguments about racism and its consequences. The paper concludes by noting that Myrdal's explicit value perspective, coupled with detailed empirical attention to the causal institutional effects of racism as a belief system, is a research tradition worthy of continued attention.