One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

The most prominent, respected and influential of the black intellectuals who comment primarily on racial issues are situated ideologically on the left end of the American political spectrum. This cadre includes Patricia Williams, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr., William Julius Wilson, Lani Guinier, June Jordan, Manning Marable, Orlando Patterson, Derrick Bell and Michael Eric Dyson. Although they sharply differ among themselves, they believe that the government must act in order to elevate the portion of the black population that languishes in isolated ghettos ravaged by poverty, disease, crime and wasted human potential. These writers are not unwilling to criticize self-destructive behaviors engaged in by African Americans, but they stress either the ongoing destructiveness of white racism or the white majority’s current indifference to the ongoing harms created by past racial oppression.

Racial conservatives contend, by contrast, that the civil rights revolution and the affirmative action programs that followed have removed unfair impediments to African Americans and that preferential treatment for blacks now is not only unfair to whites but harmful to its intended beneficiaries. Black intellectuals are rare among the ranks of the racial conservatives.

“Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America” is John H. McWhorter’s bid to join Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele and Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom as an influential intellectual among racial conservatives. A linguistics professor at UC Berkeley, McWhorter argues that African American culture is infected with a variety of ideological ailments that are much more responsible than white racism for retarding black progress toward full and equal participation in American life. In his view, victimology, separatism and anti-intellectualism are particularly destructive.

Victimology for African Americans is the tendency to exaggerate anti-black racial discrimination, to minimize black advances and to transform disadvantage “from a problem to be solved into an identity in itself.” Those infected, according to McWhorter, perversely celebrate their status as victims even as they curse their perceived oppression. The principal symptom of victimology is its insistence upon a set of propositions that McWhorter views as demonstrably wrong. These include the belief that most black people are poor, that black people are typically paid less than whites for performing the same job, that the federal government funnels crack to black communities and that the disproportionately large number of blacks in prison is the result of racist law enforcement. McWhorter indicts a number of people whom he sees as purveyors of victimology. He scoffs, for instance, at the “rantings” of Bell and lampoons Jordan’s “festivals of hyperbole.”

The second of the ideological viruses that McWhorter isolates is separatism, a malady which causes sufferers to believe that “because black people endure . . . victimhood at every turn, they cannot be held responsible for immoral or destructive actions, these being ‘understandable’ responses to frustration and pain.” According to McWhorter, blacks’ unwillingness to condemn Tawana Brawley (who falsely claimed that she was raped by white men) or Damian Williams (who brutally maimed a white man during the Los Angeles riots) is indicative of the sickness. “[E]xempting all blacks from general standards of evaluation,” he writes, “is a principal aspect of black identity.” Black academics as well, McWhorter asserts, tend to make dubious claims and then feel entitled by their racial status to be exempt from any sort of criticism. Others, he alleges, indulge in a racial filiopietism that disables them from telling the truth about the Afro-American past and present.

Third, attacking anti-intellectualism, McWhorter asserts that “African American students on the average are the weakest in the United States, at all ages, in all subjects, and regardless of [socioeconomic] class level.” He posits that anti-intellectualism is “a defining feature of cultural blackness.” Blacks, he charges, “do so poorly in school decade after decade not because of racism, funding, class, parental education, etc., but because of a virus of Anti-intellectualism that infects the black community. This Anti-intellectual strain is inherited from whites having denied education to blacks for centuries, and has been concentrated by the Separatist trend, which in rejecting the ‘white’ cannot help but cast school and books as suspicious and alien, not to be embraced by the authentically ‘black’ person.”

Written by a black intellectual who fiercely criticizes heroes of the African American academic left and its totemic public policy, affirmative action, “Losing the Race” will undoubtedly garner attention. The trouble is that much of McWhorter’s book is analytically weak. I feel a twinge of regret in saying this; after all, McWhorter praises me among the few blacks he names as people who have somehow escaped the viruses he describes. He is correct, moreover, in the harsh criticisms that he levels at certain activists and intellectuals. And he is right to eschew the communal censorship that often inhibits robust debate within black communities.

Unfortunately, the vices of “Losing the Race” overshadow its virtues. First, on occasion, McWhorter is irresponsible in his handling of evidence. He writes, for example, that Marable, the director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, has “explicitly urged black scholars to restrict their research to black issues, thereby explicitly deeming intellectual curiosity for its own sake to be inappropriate to black American people.” McWhorter neglects to quote any statement by Marable that substantiates his characterization. And the one article by Marable that McWhorter cites in his notes (“A Plea that Scholars Act Upon, Not Just Interpret Events,” New York Times, April 4, 1998) cannot fairly be read to support his damning indictment. For McWhorter to level such a reputation-damaging allegation without a better predicate is a terrible breach of intellectual protocol.

Ironically, in this lapse and others, McWhorter’s own writings mimic some of the bad tendencies found in work he rightly condemns. In the same pages in which he criticizes Bell for exaggerating anti-black racism, McWhorter minimizes the extent to which racial discrimination continues to impede black Americans, viewing it as an occasional encumbrance, a mere nuisance. McWhorter could have performed a useful service by telling readers what is known about the extent of racial discrimination in American life. For instance, he could have cited the work of Ian Ayres of the Yale Law School; Ayres has conducted several careful studies that show that blacks typically receive far worse deals in their negotiations for automobiles than do white consumers, a finding that should not be surprising and that contains troubling implications for other areas of negotiation. The Urban Institute has performed a series of studies uncovering substantial amounts of racial discrimination in employment and real estate markets, and over the last few years, the New England Journal of Medicine and other reputable forums of medical knowledge have published a variety of articles that point to racial discrimination as the most likely explanation for differences in medical care, be it the prescription of pain medications or decisions regarding surgery.

It is true, as McWhorter argues, that sometimes racial discrimination is animated by considerations other than racism, that racism of the old malevolent variety is fortunately receding and that the realities of race discrimination are distorted by people who exaggerate its scope and mis-portray its motivations. But real racial discrimination--and the burdensome uncertainties, suspicions and imaginings that it generates--continues to hamper blacks significantly in virtually every aspect of their interaction with whites. This multidimensional problem is surely one to which blacks and whites must attend.

Like those he criticizes, McWhorter is an anecdotalist who neglects to determine whether a particular incident is representative or idiosyncratic. Consider the torture of Abner Louima and the death of Amadou Diallo. McWhorter properly notes that some commentators seized upon these events as if they were characteristic of a social order in which blacks are pervasively and routinely subjected to open and malicious racism (overlooking the prosecution of the policemen involved). Yet McWhorter is similarly reductive. Arguing that foreign-born and native-born blacks encounter white racism on the same terms, he asserts that “anyone who wants to claim that Caribbeans . . . and Africans are not subject to the degree of racism that American blacks are ought to consult Abner Louima (Haitian) or the parents of Amadou Diallo (Guinean).” Contrary to what McWhorter suggests, however, merely consulting two horrible cases cannot tell us whether, in schools and elsewhere, African Americans generally receive a different and perhaps more debilitating response than foreign-born blacks. More assessment than that is required before one is able to posit sensible conclusions. (See, for example, Mary C. Waters’ excellent new book “Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities.”)

There is yet another way in which “Losing the Race” replicates writings that McWhorter denounces. Like some of his antagonists, McWhorter has an unrealistic view of the African American condition. He portrays black America as pitiable and forlorn. McWhorter and his antagonists simply ascribe the cause of failure to different agents of doom. For Bell, the agents of doom are white racists. For McWhorter, they are blacks infected by victimology, separatism and anti-intellectualism.

McWhorter and his antagonists are both wrong. Both need to revisit with a proper understanding John Hope Franklin’s book “From Slavery to Freedom” or James Weldon Johnson’s great patriotic song, the Negro national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” At the outset of the 21st century, American blacks are only three to four lifetimes removed from chattel slavery. The wonder is not that blacks lag behind whites in education and other indicia of social well-being but that blacks have managed to come so far so fast in so many fields of endeavor. This is a tribute not only to American democracy, which, for all its many grievous faults, has facilitated the incorporation of this once-despised minority. It is a tribute as well to African Americans and their culture--a fascinating, resilient and resourceful culture that has contributed a great deal to making the United States the most powerful nation in the world.

African American advancement would have been impossible without the sustaining influence of the African American culture that McWhorter maligns. Victimology, separatism and anti-intellectualism are important and regrettable aspects of black American (as well as white American) culture. But neither singly nor together are they the “defining” attributes of Black America. Much more active, influential and numerous than McWhorter credits are African Americans like himself--hard-working, ambitious, intelligent, independent, competitive, folk who are forging impressive careers for themselves.

At the end of “Losing the Race,” McWhorter attempts to preempt criticism. “I am quite aware,” he writes, “that the response many black people will have to this book is that I am taking the line of the ‘other side,’ joining the whites who are ‘against us.’ ” My complaint is not that McWhorter has joined the “other side” or aired dirty laundry that white folks can see. My complaint is that he failed to write a book that satisfies the standards by which he appropriately measures others, a high standard that should be applied to all intellectuals regardless of race.