{"id":2880,"date":"2010-08-12T18:11:02","date_gmt":"2010-08-12T23:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/?p=2880"},"modified":"2010-08-12T18:11:56","modified_gmt":"2010-08-12T23:11:56","slug":"culture-isnt-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2010\/08\/12\/culture-isnt-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"Culture isn’t Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

I like John McWhorter.\u00a0 Even when I disagree with him (which is often), I at least think he is intellectually honest.\u00a0 So here’s another example of me disagreeing with his honest assessment.\u00a0 In McWhorter’s review<\/a> of Amy Wax’s new book Race, Wrongs and Remedies<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u00a06 percent, as opposed to the overall rate of 24.7 percent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?”\u00a0 As a trained linguist<\/a>, McWhorter\u00a0 seems to put too much stock in language and symbol.\u00a0 he seems to suggest that there is a black cultural hegemony of ill-advised behavior that explains disparities. \u00a0 On this I agree in part.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They may not be the only discourses about African-Americans, but they are still strong frames that hover around policy discourse.\u00a0 Being confronted with these stereotypes directly, even once, has damaging consequences.\u00a0 Here are the implications of a new study from the University of Toronto<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Even after a person leaves a situation where they faced negative stereotypes<\/a>, 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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Undoubtedly, if one can persevere past pernicious stereotypes, one can succeed.\u00a0 This no doubt is the message of Bill Cosby’s now famous “pound cake<\/a>” speech.\u00a0 However, “culture”, which I take McWhorter to mean a tendency towards out-of-wedlock birth and criminality, is just one response to racial bias.\u00a0 African-Americans also have the highest levels of religiosity<\/a> of any group in the US, which I presume he’d think was a good thing.\u00a0 A recent pew survey found that 79% of African-Americans surveyed viewed religion as central in their lives.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Let’s not pretend that culture happens in a vacuum.\u00a0 Structure informs culture.\u00a0 The fact that there are 10 times as many African-American males in prison<\/a> as White males is not simply reducible to culture and\u00a0 discourse.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It’s not the whole explanation, but it’s not inconsequential either.<\/p>\n

via Andrew Sullivan<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I like John McWhorter.\u00a0 Even when I disagree with him (which is often), I at least think he is intellectually honest.\u00a0 So here’s another example of me disagreeing with his honest assessment.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[467,1080,8963,119,14],"class_list":["post-2880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-african-americans","tag-blacks","tag-mcwhorter","tag-poverty","tag-race"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2880"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2882,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2880\/revisions\/2882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}