I like John McWhorter. Even when I disagree with him (which is often), I at least think he is intellectually honest. So here’s another example of me disagreeing with his honest assessment. In McWhorter’s review of Amy Wax’s new book Race, Wrongs and Remedies
If you finish high school and keep a job without having children before marriage, you will almost certainly not be poor. Period. I have repeatedly felt the air go out of the room upon putting this to black audiences. No one of any political stripe can deny it. It is human truth on view. In 2004, the poverty rate among blacks who followed that formula was less than 6 percent, as opposed to the overall rate of 24.7 percent.
The implication of this is that the door is open for blacks people but, because of “culture,” many of them are simply not walking through it:
Even after hearing the earnest musings about employers who are less interested in people with names like Tomika, no one can gainsay the simple truth of that advice. Crucially, neither bigotry nor even structural racism can explain why an individual does not live up to it.
McWhorter seems to be asking why more black folks aren’t “walking through the open door.” The more important question is “why does the door appears closed to many in the black community?” As a trained linguist, McWhorter seems to put too much stock in language and symbol. he seems to suggest that there is a black cultural hegemony of ill-advised behavior that explains disparities. On this I agree in part. While overt bigotry and structural racism might not be what they were a generation ago, the perception of the black-male as dangerous and the perception of the poor black single-mothers as a “welfare queen” still pervade in American society. They may not be the only discourses about African-Americans, but they are still strong frames that hover around policy discourse. Being confronted with these stereotypes directly, even once, has damaging consequences. Here are the implications of a new study from the University of Toronto:
Even after a person leaves a situation where they faced negative stereotypes, the effects of coping with that situation remain,” Inzlicht said. “People are more likely to be aggressive after they’ve faced prejudice in a given situation. They are more likely to exhibit a lack of self-control. They have trouble making good, rational decisions. And they are more likely to over-indulge on unhealthy foods.”
Undoubtedly, if one can persevere past pernicious stereotypes, one can succeed. This no doubt is the message of Bill Cosby’s now famous “pound cake” speech. However, “culture”, which I take McWhorter to mean a tendency towards out-of-wedlock birth and criminality, is just one response to racial bias. African-Americans also have the highest levels of religiosity of any group in the US, which I presume he’d think was a good thing. A recent pew survey found that 79% of African-Americans surveyed viewed religion as central in their lives.
I think social critics like McWhorter spend a lot of time focusing on mal-adaptations to racial stereotypes rather than emphasizing the overwhelming number of heroic, positive adaptations to a challenging set of social circumstances. Let’s not pretend that culture happens in a vacuum. Structure informs culture. The fact that there are 10 times as many African-American males in prison as White males is not simply reducible to culture and discourse. If you could swap the population of central city Detroit with one of it’s affluent suburbs, I daresay you might see a spike in school dropouts, teen pregnancy and criminality. It’s not the whole explanation, but it’s not inconsequential either.
via Andrew Sullivan.