Stirring Up a Rage in Black America

The hope was that the “rough places will be made plain,” the crooked places straight. That was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, sketched vividly from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 37 summers ago.

After the marches were over and public policy clicked into place, many Americans hoped that equality--racial parity--would not just be a wish but a statistical reality.

But a generation later--from insurance red-lining to the persistence of hate crimes, the gap in academic achievement and loan acceptance rates--somehow that dream is yet to be realized.

Many black professors, journalists and intellectuals have taken these quandaries up for examination: the country’s racial terrain--how it has broadened; how it remains roadblocked. The impediments to black success--from the classroom to the boardroom.

This vast chasm cuts deep--physically and ideologically--not just across race lines, but intraracially as well. But what has become clear above all is that the discussion about the proverbial “playing field” should go far beyond whether or not it is level. Enter John H. McWhorter.

In a hotly debated new book, “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America” (Free Press), the 35-year-old UC Berkeley associate professor of linguistics has stepped into the already crowded fray, deconstructing race relations and dispensing political prescriptions. Seeking the source of the lag, McWhorter identifies what he believes are the key impediments to black America’s success: the “cults of victimology, separatism and anti-intellectualism.” A “flu,” he suggests, has infected the mindset for generations--beyond control because it’s “in the air.”

Those “afflicted”--and McWhorter spares few--include prominent black thinkers such as journalists Ellis Cose and Ralph Wiley, academics Derrick Bell and Manning Marable and poet June Jordan. He also takes to task public figures like Al Sharpton and Rep. Maxine Waters. The roots of this victimology “plague,” suggests McWhorter, a Pennsylvania native and graduate of Rutgers and Stanford, are inherent in the history of the African on this continent.

“Centuries of abasement and marginalization led African Americans to internalize the way they were perceived by the larger society, resulting in a post-colonial inferiority complex,” he writes. “After centuries of degradation, it would have been astounding if African Americans didn’t have one . . .”

But, says McWhorter, it’s time to throw off that thinking, a chain itself. And he has an idea of the best place to start.

His laboratory, and consequently his target, is the college classroom--a place where he sees a dramatic disparity in intellectual engagement between his undergraduate students--black and other. “The sad but simple fact is that while there are some excellent black students,” he writes, “on the average, black students do not try as hard as other students. The reason they do not try as hard is not because they are inherently lazy, nor is it because they are stupid . . . these students belong to a culture infected with an Anti-intellectual strain, which subtly but decisively teaches them from birth not to embrace schoolwork too wholeheartedly.”

Being blunt about such sensitive matters, McWhorter argues, is the only way to “forge effective solutions to the problem of the education of black students.” He believes it will increase opportunities for the next generation of African American adults.

‘Losing the Race’ Draws Mixed Reaction

McWhorter’s bracing-as-ice-water tone is coupled with a penchant to minimize some of the stings and abuses of bigotry and racism that remain a vivid reality for many in this country. Not surprisingly, in its 2 1/2 months on the scene, “Losing the Race” has created a ruckus.

“At best it’s a pedestrian ethnography,” says Manning Marable, professor of history and political science, and director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. “It’s not even that. It’s a kind of individualistic commentary. Not grounded in any kind of systematic research. Not even qualitative research . . . there is no representative sampling here. Just endless anecdotes that are based on whatever his individualized perceptions are of reality.”

Some, like conservative economist Thomas Sowell, laud him for his “candor.” Yet others are less embracing. Jack E. White in Time, found McWhorter’s theories suggesting that African Americans harbor “a pan-racial bias” against brainy-ness “absurdly simplistic.”

McWhorter’s positions are not exactly new, nor restricted to discussion of the black-white race paradigm. The 1990s, in particular, hosted a lively colloquy assessing the contemporary state of race and race politics, including expansive treatises written by those whose lives have bridged both pre- and post-civil rights worlds. A new library of memoirs written by the inheritors is emerging.

Writers like Cose, Bell and Wiley have studied how overt instances of racism and bigotry have transformed into attitudes that are more elusive and, thus, difficult to root out. On the other side of the ideological (and often political) fence, black conservative theorists like Sowell and Shelby Steele interpret the lag far differently: African Americans, they believe, squander too much time blaming the system and the government for their difficulties, and do not take responsibility for their own role in obstructing success.

Though McWhorter attempts to wriggle out of labels such as “conservative” or “Republican” (“I am neither,” he asserts), his book is much more aligned with the “anti-victimology” stance of Steele than with the writings of Bell and Cose, which address the stubborn stain of racism.

Ready to Face His Challengers

From late-night TV talk shows to standing-room-only book signings on both coasts, people have come armed and ready to challenge.

It’s enough high drama that McWhorter, a man who believes we spend too much time racializing things, sits down to a lunch interview, uncorks an afternoon’s conversation with a dry: “Do you hate me?” (He later explains that black women have been the “hardest” on him and the content of the book.) In time, McWhorter unknots, smooths the edges. Six weeks of talk shows, interviews and signings have made him a bit prickly.

To give one a sense of his journey, he reaches back to explain how a black man trained as a linguist and actor, and beneficiary of affirmative action (albeit now uncomfortable about it) came to write a book about this vast and unwieldy subject, racial parity. What made him, not so long ago, start questioning the messages?

“As late as 1990, I was very happy about black America. I was happy to be part of what I thought was the status quo. That we were a race getting beyond oppression and moving ahead with what we had,” he recalls, his voice as crisp and richly textured as his freshly pressed black jacket and trousers. “Then things started going wrong.”

Around that time, McWhorter, discovered Steele’s first book and found it not only resonant but life-changing. “To me, that was really like most people [felt] reading Malcolm X’s autobiography. It focused a lot of things that were rumbling inside. Little things that I’ve learned you weren’t supposed to say.”

McWhorter particularly found Steele’s take on victimhood freeing: “I had never been comfortable with the victim thing. I mean I knew things were there. I had my little victimologist stage. I was taught by my parents to be on the hunt for racism, to sniff it out. But I always knew it wasn’t as bad as people say.”

“My mother, who was the primary parent, didn’t like white people very much. Mom was a victimologist,” McWhorter recalls. “But then again, she had grown up in the deep, segregated south. Somehow, even though my mother could make racism out of anything, we could never use racism as any excuse.”

For McWhorter, much of the current race discourse has felt timeworn and dated, not at all reflective of the world he lives in. “A lot of these people were talking like it is 1960, and all this time had gone by.”

McWhorter’s epiphany corresponded with a series of front-page, racially charged events that he calls a “1-2-3-4-punch.” The O.J. Simpson trials, the Million Man March, the Ebonics debate, and the passage of Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action initiative. The pressure for all blacks to form a consensus on these complex issues troubled him and propelled him to begin writing “Losing the Race.”

McWhorter began to pay attention to the language used to discuss race, the nature of the indignities people suggested they suffered, the disparity in the day-to-day lives of whites and blacks. He saw a connection to what he was seeing in his classroom.

“In real life,” says McWhorter, “in our culture we [black people] are saddled with a wariness.” A wariness, he suggests, whose roots are sunk deep in slavery and segregation. “Affirmative action doesn’t address that problem.”

McWhorter suggests that the emphasis has long been misplaced. That too much energy is focused on an outside force--white racism. A more constructive approach would be to focus on what has been accomplished and less on what has yet to happen.

“How do you strike a balance?” he asks. “You have to know what’s out there. On the other hand, most black college students know too much about ‘what’s out there’--in terms of racism. Or better, they’ve been taught to exaggerate what’s there.”

While McWhorter doesn’t say that racism no longer exists, he does make plain that he believes it is largely “on the wane.” His take on hate crimes and hate groups? “Mere whispers.” The brutal Texas dragging death of James Byrd Jr. Admittedly horrific, “remnants.”

Not surprisingly, such attitudes rankle. “That’s like saying ‘Shazaam,’ it’s over,” says author Wiley, whom McWhorter has characterized as a victimologist. Currently at work on a book about the children of Martin Luther King Jr., Wiley says, “You can choose your atrocities and spin it the way you want, but the spate of these books mirrors the turn of the last century.

“It’s sort of a rollback. The war of the ‘60s, civil rights movement. The ‘70s was an attempt to create this [integrated] world. The ‘80s was the realization that no, it’s not going to happen. The ‘90s we asked ourselves what happened? As far as I’m concerned, the horse is already out of the barn, the statistics are there, I’m trying not to turn a blind eye.”

To be sure, there is a strong and growing literature confronting the problems of young black men, says Marable.

“There is a certain kind of peer pressure within groups not performing well academically. That’s a problem that serious scholars are taking up. You [have to] approach them within the framework of understanding the people and their culture. To me, it’s not even a political/ideological thing, this is really deeply morally offensive. It’s what Jean Paul Sartre and the existentialists referred to as mauvaise foi--bad faith--it’s deeply dishonest. To give him the benefit of the doubt he may not even realize it.”

Marable criticizes McWhorter’s treatise for ignoring historical context, while Ellis Cose calls it un-constructive: “The core of his argument--we, being black Americans, do do a lot of things to hurt ourselves--I think is true. But he takes the argument way too far. There are a lot of self-destructive things that black people do that we need to take an honest and serious look at. I don’t have a problem with criticizing black folk, I do it myself,” says Cose. “But he’s punitive. He puts people in an ideological box.”

Marable suggests that the ones who might suffer most from McWhorter’s often bald observations are the students--the very group that McWhorter hopes to help by “breaking silence” on these matters. For whatever it stirs up, McWhorter sees this as a greater good. Particularly in this election year, when public education shares center stage. “For me, [education] is as important an issue as a woman’s right to choose,” says McWhorter.

“I think that vouchers are absolutely necessary, they are important to the quality of education for people who can’t afford to go to private school. We have a problem with those ossified school boards. . . . I can’t cast my vote for someone who won’t face that down.”

He hasn’t been surprised by the fallout he’s experienced over the last few weeks: the sharpness of the words, the depth of the anger. The subjects he tackles are all sacred ground. McWhorter says he’s prepared. He bought a new big-screen TV, a stack of CDs, plants and wooden dinosaur skeletons to decorate his Oakland apartment.

“I thought, I’m really going to have to hunker down for this fall. I’m going to have to stay home and watch a lot of movies, because I’m not going to be able to walk around my campus.” (In fact, McWhorter is on sabbatical this semester.) “But to tell you the truth,” he says reflectively, “people are yelling and screaming, but this book has kinda focused it for me. I frankly think it is like religion. If someone believes in God, you don’t try to talk them out of believing in God. They’ve been trained to look at the world like that. And some proper-talking, snooty college professor is not going to fix it.”