Frontpage Interview’s guest today is John McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author of the new book Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America. This book is a sequel to his New York Times best-seller, Losing the Race.
FP: John McWhorter, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
McWhorter: Thanks for having me.
FP: What inspired you to write this book?
McWhorter: Since I started commenting on race, I have found that it is considered a mark of enlightenment in thought about race to propose -- or, as I think most such people are doing deep down, pretend -- that black America's problems will sit unsolvable until there is no racism or discrimination at all in American society. For a certain sort -- concentrated more in academia and the journalism world than elsewhere -- no matter how logical your arguments are, they cannot get beyond an almost ritualistic incantation of the fact that "America remains a racist country." For many of these people, the guiding purpose of ALL discussion of race is to reveal, again and again, that "racism is not dead," despite all evidence that it nearly is.
Winning the Race is my attempt to make a considered argument that racism -- be it "societal racism," "institutional racism," "white privilege" or any of the other terms gleefully tossed around by the aforementioned crowd -- does not have to disappear completely before black America can overcome. This requires, for one, undoing the consensus on why the ghettoes went to pieces starting in the seventies. The common wisdom is that shades of "institutional racism" were the culprit -- factories moved to the suburbs, slums were cleared and replaced by ugly housing project towers, highways split neighborhoods, drugs "came in" and so on. My research has shown me that these assumptions are incorrect -- which means that "racism" is not what turned slums into deathscapes. Then I address some other issues, showing that we are dealing less with "racism" than some people's inner need to pretend that "racism" remains the problem it once was.
FP: In Winning the Race, you examine the causes of the serious problems facing African-American communities today.
You contrast black urban neighborhoods before the Great Society with today’s black neighborhoods -- the explosion of the inner-city drug trade to rising rates of incarceration and teen pregnancy.
What went wrong?
McWhorter: Two things happened. First, the mood in black politics shifted from the constructive activism of the Civil Rights Movement to the theatrical antics of the Black Power era. Previously, people who were more interested in drama than uplift had been kept under wraps by Civil Rights groups, but after 1965 they started running the show. This was partly because once segregation and disfranchisement were abolished, the movement lost its moorings, and partly because in the late sixties, the countercultural movement sanctioned theatrical protest and even encouraged it among blacks. Second, amidst this climate, leftists including white ones successfully agitated for the restructuring of welfare from a temporary safety net program for widows to a program that paid young women to have children even if the men who made the kids were accounted for, able-bodied, and not working. This started in 1966, and is a lost chapter in black history. Black men started leaving the workforce regardless of the state of the economy, and out-of-wedlock birthrates soared beyond anything imaginable in even the nastiest black quarters before. Poor black America was done in by people who taught black people that unfocused cynicism and permanent dependence were somehow noble for a people with a tragic history. All it did was lead to decades more tragic history.
FP: In The End of Racism, Dinesh D'Souza referred to a dysfunctional behaviour in the Black underclass: the exhibitionism of non-achievement. I remember this image and phrase struck me with profound meaning. Can you talk about it a bit in the context of your own observations?
McWhorter: What D'Souza refers to was the product of a new ideology that stressed blackness as that which resists whiteness. This is why suddenly the black man who rarely if ever worked passed from being the pitiful "corner man" of the pre-1965 era to a figure considered typical, and even in a quiet way respected as a "survivor," in poor black communities. Ever since the shift to separatist identity, there has been a background assumption among many blacks that failure and lack of effort are, for us, "understandable." This explains black kids teasing scholarly peers as "thinking they're white," or black basketball players feeling "disrespected" when asked not to dress like hoodlums when representing their employers in public.
Importantly, at the end of the day, this identity is a mark of insecurity -- to build your soul upon rebellion for its own sake is to lack anything more substantial to build an identity upon. And the reason for that hole in the black American soul is racism -- but in the past. Since the sixties, the pattern has lived on as something passed from generation to generation, especially since rebellion always holds a certain appeal as cool, self-directed -- with it too easy not to ask "directed to what"? It is this tendency for cultural patterns to pull away from their moorings that even most social scientists do not understand, or, if they do, doggedly insist that when it comes to black Americans, somehow the tendency is suspended. This makes no sense, and is something I try to cut through in Winning the Race.
FP: Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Your thoughts?
McWhorter: Well, I don't dwell on them much in the new book. Basically, they are not leaders -- they are personalities. As such, they don't harm anyone -- I am unaware of anyone who takes a cue from Jackson, or inhales their political views from Sharpton. In a history book of 2050, it is hard to imagine just what the entry for Jackson will say he DID for -- or even to -- the black community other than provide the symbolism of "running for President." Sharpton will likely start doing cute movie cameos and eventually rack up a star turn doing a randy old uncle in a black family film. Both men are getting old -- and neither have proteges. No rising black politician could even begin to pull the things these two have and get anywhere today. As such, I think Jackson and Sharpton are old news -- let's look for real leaders and enjoy them as diverting rock stars.
FP: During the Katrina crisis, the media and many black and liberal politicians indulged in divisive and inflammatory rhetoric about Katrina, painting it as some kind of moral lesson about white racism. What is your take on how this went down?
McWhorter: Naturally the sheer pictorial aspect of it all was manna from the heavens for a certain crowd, who think that America remains somehow ignorant of the fact that a disproportionate number of black people are poor. Never mind that the same people regularly decry the stereotype of all black people as poor ... but, well. In any case, what Katrina revealed was the result of a community blindsided by people who taught them that it was constructive to burn down their own communities in black-led riots starting in the 1960s, and people who departed from anything any Civil Rights leaders had ever told black America until 1966, which is that it would be advisable not to work for a living.
If Katrina had hit in 1980, we would have seen not people scraping by in low-level jobs but people most of whom did not work at all. Something that gets lost about Katrina, however -- even though these were often people who had, as often reported, never left New Orleans and did not have cars of their own, the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward were not living the degraded, Jacob-Riis-photo lives that many imply. Note that these people fiercely crave returning to their neighborhood and miss its coherence, its sense of history. The Lower Ninth Ward was not a teeming slum, but a struggling yet stable working class area.
Uneducated working class people often do not travel much, and often take buses instead of owning cars. But the picture many want us to remember -- as if the Katrina evacuees were like dirt-poor villagers in Saigon fleeing bomb raids -- is inaccurate. At the end of the day, I have yet to see a coherent argument that if it had happened to be poor whites who lived in the most vulnerable area, that the results would have been any different. I was heartened, however, by the fact that the predictable racism-forever rhetoric did not have the pride of place that it would have twenty years ago. We are often told that the rise of right-wing outlets like Fox News is a tragedy for public discourse -- here was an example that disproved that, in that people working out their inner demons by finding racism behind every rock and tree cannot dominate the media discussion the way they used to.
FP: Tell us about your new vision of black political and intellectual leadership and how both blacks and whites can improve the future of black America.
McWhorter: It's very important that we divest ourselves of the schematic model of Washington, DC pulling off some grand gesture that will shift the paradigm, or that all of white America will at last get down on its knees and "realize" something. Rather, while it's certainly important that certain things be in place at the federal level as damage control (Head Start, the Earned Income Tax Credit), real change in black communities today comes from the ground up, via organizations that help black people help themselves, up close and personal. I am referring to organizations like the Harlem Children's Zone in New York, the Ten-Point Coalition in Boston, Operation Hope in Los Angeles, and many, many others -- all funded by philanthropies and corporations and making a real difference.
In the meantime, I think that blacks have a responsibility to rethink the idea that alienation for its own sake is somehow important to black authenticity, while whites have a responsibility to avoid condescending to black people with policies like racial preferences and by subscribing to beliefs such as that being dealt a bad hand excuses almost any behavior from someone if they are black (but not if they are, say, white Appalachians). The nonviolence that Dr. King practiced took a largeness of spirit that amazes in legend. Today we need a new largeness of spirit -- whites and blacks must take a deep breath and realize that getting black America over the hump will happen without any "payback" or resolution of white guilt. We must, and we will, make the past the past.
FP: Mr. McWhorter, thank you for joining Frontpage.
McWhorter: Thank you Jamie.
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