White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation's <i>An American Dilemma</i> and the Making of a White World Order
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this in-depth history of the genesis of the Carnegie Corporation's magisterial An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), Maribel Morey uncovers the white supremacist underpinnings of the foundational text of mid-twentieth-century racial liberalism and of the American philanthropy that sponsored it. As it turns out, this ideology was hiding in plain sight in the title itself. From its Gilded Age beginnings, modern American philanthropy was fixated on the so-called Negro problem, or how, in the post-emancipation period, the white elite could peacefully maintain the racial domination on which the national economy depended and the society was built. The Carnegie Corporation's innovation was to turn away in the 1930s from the failed philanthropic strategy of funding Black vocational education to keep African Americans as quiescent sharecroppers in the South, and toward interdisciplinary social-scientific and policy-oriented research to address Black urbanization as the putative cause of racial conflict and social pathologies in American life. What remained unchanged for philanthropists was a fundamental disregard for African Americans and their freedom struggles as anything but a threat to the nation. It is no coincidence that Francis Keppel, the Carnegie Corporation's longtime president and key figure in Morey's book, began his decades-long interest in this “problem” while monitoring “Negro subversion” for the War Department during World War I (p. 134).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.037 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".