Gunnar Myrdal knew that most Americans would never read An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, the 1944 volume in which he gathered, over more than fifteen hundred pages, the latest anthropological and sociological research on the “Negro problem.” The Swedish sociologist left it to novelists to reach the masses. For racial apartheid to end, he believed, white Americans needed to reconcile the “ever-raging conflict” in their hearts. He and his coauthors could reach a few of them, but all needed an education in anti-racism, and for that he looked to literature (xlvii). “The personal relations arising out of Negro activity in science and literature are restricted to a small proportion of the white population, whose prejudice—if not already low—is diminished considerably by such contacts. Indirectly the effect may be greater,” Myrdal wrote, offering a favorite example: “The literary product of a Richard Wright will achieve nation-wide publicity and acclaim and will affect people as far down as the lower middle classes” (656). The arts may remain the domain of black and white elites, but what artists created—stories that dramatized the degradations of anti-black racism, tales that invited fantasies of overcoming—could reach the middle and working classes and convince them to live out the nation’s unrealized ideals, a kind of trickle-down anti-racism.

中文翻译：

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种族小说：教育

Gunnar Myrdal知道大多数美国人永远不会读过《美国困境：黑人问题与现代民主》，1944年，他收集了超过一千五百页的有关“黑人问题”的最新人类学和社会学研究。瑞典社会学家把它留给了小说家去传播。他认为，要结束种族隔离，美国白人需要调和内心的“日趋激烈的冲突”。他和他的合著者可以接触其中的一些人，但所有人都需要接受反种族主义的教育，因此他着眼于文学（xlvii）。“黑人在科学和文学活动中产生的人际关系仅限于一小部分白人，由于这种接触，他们的偏见（即使不是很低）也大大减少了。间接的效果可能会更大，” Myrdal写道，并举了一个最喜欢的例子：“理查德·赖特（Richard Wright）的文学作品将在全国范围内广为宣传并广受赞誉，并将影响到下层中产阶级的人民”（656）。艺术也许仍然是黑人和白人精英的领域，但是艺术家创造的东西（可以使反黑人种族主义的退化戏剧化，故事引起幻想的克服）可以传到中产阶级和工人阶级，并说服他们生活在这个民族的生活中。未实现的理想，一种of脚的反种族主义。