Paul Trout
English
MSU-Bozeman
Black talk-show host Larry Elder says there are ten things you can't say in America. In Losing the Race, John McWhorter says them all, and then some. It's the most politically incorrect book I've read and should come with a warning label: "Contents are harmful to progressive biases and orthodoxies."
McWhorter (Associate Professor of Linguistic at Berkeley) has written four scholarly books, but this is his first foray into the mine-field of race. He does not step lightly. But he makes it through with admirable courage to deliver a powerful and much needed message to both races--that what's now holding back black Americans is not "white racism" but a stultifying enthrallment to "victimology," "separatism," and "anti-intellectualism."
These "defeatist thought patterns," which now form "the bedrock of black identity" (xiv), may once have been understandable responses to the indignities heaped upon blacks in the past. But now--in a much less racist society--they conspire to make blacks appear "paranoid, parochial, and dumb" (212). To continue to embrace victimism, separatism, and anti-intellectualism even as white society offers blacks more opportunities than ever is to engage in "a continuous, self-sustaining act of self-sabotage" (x).
McWhorter is sick and tired of the hobbling notion that blacks are constantly beset by "racism," as if the whole country were Selma in the '50s. While there are still pockets of bigotry in the country, American society has made enormous strides over the last 50 years in condemning all forms of prejudice and in providing blacks with professional and educational opportunities that most people throughout the world can only dream about and envy.
Data prove this. Today, less than a quarter of black Americans live in poverty. In 1990, one in five blacks was a manager or professional. In 1996, about one in ten of all female managers in America was black, and about one in twelve of all male professionals. Twice as many blacks were doctors in 1990 than in 1960, and three times as many were lawyers. By 1995, there were not fewer than forty-one black people in Congress (some from predominantly white districts), and 15.4 percent of black people had college degrees (only 24 percent of whites did) (6-7).
A few years ago, the median income of black two-parent families was about $41,300, as opposed to about $47,000 for whites. But even this gap "is extremely difficult to pin on racism," since 56 percent of blacks live in the South, where wages are lower. "As often as not today, black two-parent families earn more than whites--they did in about 130 cities and counties in 1994, and in the mid-'90s, their median income was rising faster than whites' was" (10).
Despite huge improvements in their condition within American society, "a great many blacks" (xiii) continue to think of themselves as "victims" of "racism," inhabitants of "a fundamentally hostile, alien nation" (213). They are encouraged to do so by their own leaders and by white liberals trying to prove their racial bona fides. McWhorter calls this mindset "victimology."
Victimology, which "pulses through the very bloodstream of African-American identity" (49), has its payoffs. It "feels good," it provides "an easy road to self-esteem" and "moral absolution" (39, 42), and it allows blacks to humiliate and intimidate whites. But victimology also seriously handicaps continued black progress. It distorts black perception of facts and policies (black church burnings, sentencing decisions, crack cocaine laws, racial profiling, etc.). It encourages blacks to fixate upon and exaggerate remnants of racism and to downplay all positive developments, a habit of mind that fosters resentment and alienates blacks from mainstream society. Victimology also "gives failure and lack of effort a tacit stamp of approval" (28). And by continually whining and complaining about "racism," despite significant gains, blacks make themselves appear to be "the weakest, least resilient human beings in the history of the species" (113).
Even worse, it may even stoke racial hostility and contempt. "How reasonably can we expect young white people not to take offense at being called racist pigs despite their most earnest efforts to transcend their ancestors' mistakes?" (47).
McWhorter urges blacks not to waste time "playing victim and indulging in the half-assed logic that it requires" (261). "To conceive of ourselves today as eternal victims impedes our progress toward equality" because it subverts initiative and pride (219).
McWhorter believes that another pathology has become part of black identity--separatism. A "natural outgrowth of victimism," separatism encourages blacks to see themselves as an "unofficial sovereign entity" within an "eternally hostile" white society (xi, 50). Under the "Cult of Separatism," expressions of mainstream culture are contemptuously rejected as "white." This self-destructive response alienates many blacks from "white" books and education, and from "some of the most well-wrought, emotionally stirring art and ideas that humans have produced." Separatism serves to mire the race "in a parochialism that clips its spiritual wings" (51, 53).
More disastrously, separatism encourages blacks to regard themselves as somehow exempt from "general standards of evaluation" (65). In education, blacks demand lower admission standards and all kinds of "special" exemptions and set-asides as a sort of birth right. But lower standards, McWhorter points out, sabotage black kids by seducing them to lower their own expectations and efforts.
Separatism also encourages many blacks to feel somehow exempt from mainstream norms of behavior. Racism, thuggishness and violence are often excused within the black community as "pardonable" expressions of "authentic" black identity (a view seconded by the Klan: 43, 45, 81).
Black journalist Carl Rowan wrote of Marion Barry, "The mayor may be a cocaine junkie, a crack addict, and a sexual scoundrel, but he is our junkie, our addict, our scoundrel" (207-08). Although Damon Williams publicly committed a despicable hate crime against Reginald Denny, "Williams and his 'crew,'" McWhorter points out, "were considered nothing less than heroes in the Los Angeles black community and beyond, under the idea that their actions were justifiable rebellion against racism" (69).
Again and again, widely accepted standards of logic, evidence and moral behavior are virtually jettisoned in the name of racial self-esteem. Many whites, desperate to establish their non-racist bona fides, gleefully help with the junking. But by pardoning and even glorifying immoral and criminal behavior, McWhorter argues, blacks sacrifice their dignity and equality on the altar of tribal identity.
The third pathology that has become "a defining feature of cultural blackness today" is anti-intellectualism. Found at "all levels of the black community" (xii), this "virus" is a remnant of the past, when blacks were barred by whites from all forms of education. But it has been made virulent by separatism, which, in rejecting "white" culture, cannot help but cast schooling and books as "suspicious and alien, not to be embraced by the authentically 'black' person" (83).
Anti-intellectualism is today "a self-sustaining" and self-sabotaging cultural trait of the black community (150), impoverishing them intellectually and spiritually, and preventing them from forging for themselves "the best techniques for working toward a better future" (xv;160).
It is black anti-intellectualism--not school underfunding, bigoted teachers, tracking, "black intelligence," stereotype threat, or biased exams (politically correct explanations which McWhorter deconstructs)--that best explains why blacks underperform Asians and whites, on average, in all subjects, at all educational levels, at all income levels and by all measures (test scores, grades, class ranking) (82-89). Blacks are not barred from academic achievement; they are "leery of it" (162).
How else can one explain the academic success of Haitian immigrants in crumbling urban schools, on one hand, and the "rampant black American failure in places like Shaker Heights on the other?" (135; 123). How else can one explain why low-income Asians regularly out-perform middle-class blacks by a wide margin (89)? How else can one explain why even children of black doctors and lawyers make the lowest average grades and test scores in the United States (118)? Simply put, many black students--taught since birth "not to embrace schoolwork too wholeheartedly"--"do not try as hard as other students regardless of life history or present conditions" (100; 95,130).
McWhorter urges both blacks and whites to confront the problem of anti-intellectualism in the black community "honestly, directly, and relentlessly." To believe that black students cannot be expected to learn as much and as well and as quickly as others--including other minorities--until society is "perfect" is to imply that black Americans are the "most dimwitted and constitutionally impotent ethnic group on the planet" (162).
Losing the Race is written to blacks, but some of what McWhorter says seems intended to liberate liberal whites from their misguided complicity in black self-sabotage. "Victimology," "separatism," and "anti-intellectualism" got an initial boost from the "white counterculture's indictment of middle-class American mores" (69), but now these pathologies are being reinforced and "condoned" by mainstream and academic whites seeking to free themselves of inherited racial guilt and to avoid any taint of "racism" (xiii, 41, 252).
McWhorter is especially critical of white defenders of affirmative action (Glazer, Bok, etc.). "It's easy to talk about permanent set-asides for people who are not your own. Only a sense that they are not 'your own' could keep people from processing the blot, the stain that a policy like affirmative action is when restricted to a particular race, especially one too damaged by a sense of spiritual distance from learning for learning sake to see the harm of it themselves" (239). Racial preferences and quotas, McWhorter argues, do not help "poor" black students (of whom there are few), stigmatize all black students on selective campuses, and seduce black high-school students into not working as hard as they should.
By promulgating special exemptions for blacks, whites rob blacks of "knowing the concrete and unalloyed sense of accomplishment that comes from winning as a result of one's best personal efforts" (252), and discourage blacks from even making the effort. McWhorter exposes, as Jim Sleeper has done, the "liberal racism" that lurks behind such policies and exemptions." A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect" (239).
Instead of condescending to and infantilizing blacks (162), McWhorter urges, the best thing that whites can do is to "allow black people the dignity of true competition" (258)--on the pain of otherwise casting them as "innately weak and unintelligent" (255). "If you really believe black people are 'fellow Americans,'" McWhorter tells whites, "then treat them as such" (241). This will not be easy for many whites to do, it seems to me, since the real issue to them is not the long-term health of the black community but demonstrating--to other whites--their own racial bona fides.
While I think that McWhorter generally got things right, there are aspects of his book that merit critique.
For one thing, McWhorter does not define "racism" and winds up wielding the term with the same mindless abandon as any race baiter, white or black. He calls "white flight" "racism" (12), when it may be triggered by fear of black crime (about which McWhorter is ruthlessly honest), and he finds in the most innocent acts signs of "subconscious racism" (105, 107).
There are times when McWhorter's critical faculties leave him, as when he claims that black immigrants suffer the"same degree of racism" as American blacks. Perhaps they do, but he preposterously tries to "prove" his claim not by interviewing a number of black immigrants or citing survey data, but by pointing to the inflammatory cases of Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo (115). Horrible though they were, two cases cannot validate McWhorter's claim. By the way, when it comes to prejudice faced by black immigrants, a National Public Radio report recently suggested that they encounter more bigotry from their black neighbors than from their white ones.
And it is not clear to me that either case is an example of racism (though certainly the Louima case was one of police brutality). Louima was foully beaten and raped by Justin Volpe, a New York cop. Volpe's attack may have been racially motivated, but Volpe, at the time of the crime, was engaged to marry a black woman, a detail that makes the claim of "racism" greyer than McWhorter implies (24).
And the killing of Diallo, while tragic in every way, struck me, and several hearing boards, as a regrettable instance of police panic provoked by fear. McWhorter, however, interprets these two events as "racist" because to him every case of "police brutality" (also not defined) "is racism" (22). Well, not every case, apparently. McWhorter has nothing to say about the police beating of a black driver in Philadelphia just before the Republican Convention, perhaps because the cops thumping the driver were black too.
Which brings me to a second point about the term "racism." For McWhorter, there seems to be no such thing as "black racism," a term he avoids like the plague. A Black Muslim with a "passionate antipathy toward white people," who calls them "evil incarnate," "genetically recessive," and "pathologically deceitful liars," is not called a "racist" but is described as "stridently black identified" (209). The deplorable assault on Reginald Denny is not described as a racist hate crime. A black teacher who favors her black pupils is not chided for being prejudiced (98).
The upshot is that at times, McWhorter seems unable to free himself from the same pathologies he bravely condemns. Although he despises the sick paternalism and condescension of exempting blacks from moral responsibility, he himself seems to do just that when he refuses to hold blacks partially accountable for these pathologies. "It is not our fault," he insists again and again (212, 150-51), implying that the "white Devil" makes them do it. But if blacks can be exempted, for historical reasons, for what they are doing to themselves now (with white complicity, of course), then why can't whites in the past and now also be exempted? Why can't whites say that historical forces imposed the "cultural disorder" of slavery and racism on them too? Either nobody's at fault (cultural relativism with a twist), or whites victimize weak blacks (back to square one for McWhorter), or blacks by now must share some moral responsibility for perpetuating and indulging these pathologies (as must whites who abet them).
McWhorter is very hard on blacks who distort or ignore evidence just to get the outcome that confirms tribal identity and racial self-esteem. He is especially contemptuous of those who think O. J. Simpson innocent despite so much evidence of his guilt. Such supercilious disregard of logic and science, he says, makes blacks look dimwitted. Yet McWhorter, like many other bleary-eyed academics, claims that Mumia Abu-Jamal never killed police officer Daniel Faulkner (13), despite a mountain of well-shifted evidence that proves he did. But then, McWhorter watched the trial of O.J. on TV, and the Abu-Jamal trial was in 1982.
In sum, McWhorter has written a powerful, courageous book, for which he will be made to pay, I'm sure (his book has not been reviewed by The Nation, The New Republic, and most other "liberal" publications). Will it do any good? Perhaps it may encourage others to speak out on this forbidding issue, and if enough do so, maybe these pathologies (which increasingly afflict white culture too) could finally be discredited.
But I think even McWhorter doubts this will happen. To change the frame of mind he describes so honestly, he ruefully notes, "Would entail a massive sociopsychological dislocation few human beings are capable of or willing to endure" (214). A dislocation even he finds difficult to endure.