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Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. At more than 1,500 pages in length, Gunnar Myrdal's "An American Dilemma" remains a foundational text on issues of race, politics, and power in the US. Published in 1944 by a Swedish economist, the study was commissioned and supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York who believed that the European outsider could produce a more "unbiased" analysis.

This choice by Carnegie philanthropists has shaped the study of race in America for more than seven decades. A new book by Maribel Morey, "White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation's An American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order", examines this influential text and the powerful monied interests behind it. Morey is founding executive director of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences. In full disclosure, she was once my student. We started by discussing An American Dilemma.

Maribel Morey: It was published in 1944. The main author is Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish economist, who was commissioned by Carnegie Corporation of New York to travel to the United States and study Black Americans. He produces his final manuscript in two volume where he lists all the forms of anti-Black discrimination that he sees in the US from public policies to personal behavior.

He explains to his-- what he perceives to be his main audience, white Americans, that these forms of discrimination go against democratic ideals, and that this is very much the dilemma in white American psyches, their distinction between their discriminatory actions and behaviors and policies and their democratic ideals. He tells them that he has a solution to the dilemma. He says, "You can just bring this, your behavior, in line with your ideals. By the way, you can use the federal government, which right now during the new deal is becoming much more powerful to expedite this process."

The book is famously associated with the US Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and to this day, it's very much a central study in the social sciences and cherished by many Americans.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Why did this guy want to write a 15,000-word study of this? Where was he getting the cash to do this?

Maribel Morey: He was getting the cash from Carnegie Corporation of New York, and much like today, many philanthropies might seem to be just benevolent, not really problematic. They're just funding social scientific research scholars, how bad could it be? If you read it at one level, it's about racial equality and it has its history associated with Brown, but it had deeper intentions. That's what we can see if we study Carnegie Corporation's intentions behind the book, and also how Myrdal dialogued with those intentions.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Say more about that because, again, even the way you've described it here, that the solution is we've got this American creed of individualism, of civil liberties, of equality, of opportunity, they're even enshrined in our founding documents. This notion of self-governance and the experiment in democratic reliance on the rights of individuals and that if simply the nation came into line with those ideals, that we would see a different, far more equitable society. It feels to me like, yes, let's have a parade for An American Dilemma, for Myrdal, and for the Carnegie Corporation for funding it. Why is there a problem here?

Maribel Morey: Because we already know from the very start, the signs are already in the text. That's the one layer. We can just stay at the layer of equality, racial equality, but you sense it, a lot of a sense of problem with the project and he didn't hide it too much. If you read the text itself, for example, he writes, "Americans also recognize that America has to take world leadership. The coming difficult decades will be America's turn in the endless sequence of main actors on the world stage." He says, "For perhaps several decades, the whites will still hold the lead and America will be the most powerful white nation."

His policy prescription in the book is supposed to help the US maintain and even become a stronger presence on the world stage as a white nation. We see it, too, that his urgency in the book cannot be disentangled from the fact that he wrote it during World War II, and he wanted to promote a positive image of white Americans on the global stage. He's talking about a dilemma that is moral. He's trying to suggest that white Americans are moralistic by contrast to Germans in their treatment of Jews versus white Americans in their treatment of Black Americans.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Is this just a matter of the time in which it was written?

Maribel Morey: Well, we're still living in those times. I see it when I research Carnegie Corporation's intentions for the project, the roots of it, the organization's own roots for the project has to be understood by how Andrew Carnegie envisioned international peace and international order and how that frames the funding practices at the organization and how Gunnar Myrdal complimented those intentions. He was very much in dialogue with the organization and we still see it today in how funders discuss even their priorities in democracy, equality, in Black and brown education, organizations, and international peace.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Say a little bit more about that. What kinds of funding priorities do you see as replicating some of these same kinds of concerns?

Maribel Morey: We see that the principle allegiances are racialized, privileging the interests of white people. For example, in a domestic US context, we see that the interest and the institutions of white Americans are most funded. We see it in how universities are funded. There's some effort to do a course correction right now, but for the most part, elite white institutions have received the most funding from these foundations.

Internationally, we see right now in the US response to the Ukraine versus other refugee crises. We know that behind these platitudes, we know instinctually and my book underscores, there is an effort to solidify a white Anglo-American world order. It's a project that many people have invested their time and their funds over a century to solidify.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What's the alternative? This is Andrew Carnegie's money, or this is Ford Foundation's money, or this is whomever, right? It's their money. Shouldn't they be able to spend it in a way that ultimately meets their priorities?

Maribel Morey: Well, one, is it their money? One is questioning the labor practices and how they achieve that wealth accumulation. For Andrew Carnegie himself, he had very abusive labor practices that led to his profit maximization. Two, even if you put that aside, they have created non-profit organizations, whether they are foundations or whether it's the academy that are, by definition and their corporate structure, supposed to be serving the public. It's not just their money, it's the public's money and there should be accountability.

Three, I think there's a value in just being honest about what the intentions are, because that just gives everyone just much more clarity and will feel more empowered. I can't do very much that a dominant definition of equality in the US, as I explained in the book, from Myrdal's book, suggests that I, as a Cuban American, as a Latina, should be okay in devaluing my own identity, my own language in order to assimilate into white American Anglo-Americanness.

I can't do very much about that per se, but what I can do is know that that's not the only definition of equality, that it's been established by certain people with certain interests, and that there are many other critics who saw very different definitions that are much more empowering from Oliver C Cox to Ralph Ellison, to many others. What we can do is break down the veil and see truth.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Give me an example of an alternate definition of what the American dilemma is.

Maribel Morey: I think the American dilemma is, are we really advocates and champions of equality, of democracy, and international peace as we say we are, or are we simply at the end of the day as a country interested in solidifying our predecessors' project of a white Anglo-American world order, both domestically and internationally by using these platitudes?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Just because I know it will likely come up and I think it's worth making sure we have it as a response. In your acknowledgments, you do thank the Carnegie Corporation. Tell me about how the Carnegie Corporation supported you in this project.

Maribel Morey: I was a Carnegie Corporation grantee as part of the Andrew Carnegie scholars' program or fellows. They supported me for two years. I received $200,000 over the span of two years, which allowed me to have a two-year sabbatical from my teaching obligations. I look forward to having more engagement with Carnegie Corporation on the book. I think there's a tension many times in wanting to serve the public as these organizations say, but then trying to internalize and be in dialogue about our own histories, our own complicity in these very tense and troubled roots of which we're still a part.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm going to ask one more on this because I do think sometimes I know I have engaged on my own campus with those who decide that some money is dirty money and that it must be shunned and removed from campus because resources from that source are simply unacceptable in the space of higher-end. Clearly, your text is bringing an important critique, as you said, an analysis letting us understand the complexity, but I'm wondering where you stand on this question of, are there resources that we simply should not accept?

Maribel Morey: When we established the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, we started out exclusively with a mutual aid model. Very much trying to start from scratch, saying, "Okay, we know that foundation money can be tricky. How can we do this as mutual aid?" We're increasingly doing a mixed funding model, but very much in mind that foundation funding can really shape the projects we do because instead of being accountable to each other and to the global majority, that makes us accountable to program officers in the global north who are not always sympathetic to projects that are for and among and by global majority scholars. An audience and executors who are very much decentering white Anglo-Americans.

Now, as far as dirty money, I have a broader definition of dirty money. I'm sometimes perplexed where people draw the line in defining good money versus dirty money because, in many ways, many labor practices, to me, seem very much inhumane. They seem to be condoned generally by the US public and the global community. I think what we should be doing in these conversations on dirty money is questioning which labor practices, which forms of wealth accumulation do we find to be moral or immoral, and start there. I think there's so much more money to question than the very narrow definition that's used when they pinpoint, for example, the Sackler family.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Maribel Morey is author of White Philanthropy. Thank you so much for joining us.

Maribel Morey: Thank you so very much, Melissa.

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