11 quotes
The only possible way of decreasing Negro population is by means of controlling fertility.
An American Dilemma (1944)
The treatment of the Negro is America's greatest and most conspicuous scandal.
An American Dilemma (1944)
The breakdown of discrimination in one part of the labor market facilitates a similar change in all other parts of it. The vicious circle can be reversed.
An American Dilemma (1944)
Education means an assimilation of white American culture. It decreases the dissimilarity of the Negroes from other Americans.
An American Dilemma (1944)
America has had gifted conservative statesmen and national leaders. But with few exceptions, only the liberals have gone down in history as national heroes.
An American Dilemma (1944)
America, compared to every other country in Western Civilization, large or small, has the most explicitly expressed system of general ideals in reference to human interrelations. This body of ideals is more widely understood and appreciated than similar ideals are anywhere else.
An American Dilemma (1944)
The objective of an educational campaign is to minimize prejudice—or, at least, to bring the conflict between prejudice and ideals out into the open and to force the white citizen to take his choice
An American Dilemma (1944)
On the one hand, the negroes’ plane of living is kept down by discrimination from the side of the whites while, on the other hand, the white’s reason for discrimination is partly dependant on the negroes’ plane of living.
An American Dilemma (1944)
White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually ‘cause’ each other.
An American Dilemma (1944)
The study of women's intelligence and personality has had broadly the same history as the one we record for Negroes. As in the case of the Negro, women themselves have often been brought to believe in their inferiority of endowment.
An American Dilemma (1944)
In this sense the Negro problem is not only America's greatest failure but also America's incomparably great opportunity for the future. If America should follow its own deepest convictions, its well-being at home would be increased directly. At the same time America's prestige and power abroad would rise immensely.
An American Dilemma (1944)