John McWhorter is one of the most interesting voices on the economic and social problems of black America. He is an iconoclast with regard to the sacred cows of liberal thinkers and especially of Black political leadership. I listened to an interview with him on NPR a couple days ago. Arch Puddington has a review of McWhorter's new book, Winning the Race, in the Wall Street Journal.
Mr. McWhorter examines why the optimism that defined the years of the civil-rights movement has been replaced by defeatism and alienation in the black community--even as America's racial attitudes and policies have changed so dramatically for the better.
Mr. McWhorter's answers are anything but orthodox, and little wonder: He is routinely classified--and, in certain circles, dismissed--as a "black conservative." But his views are not easily labeled. He advocates some drug decriminalization, for instance, and favors affirmative action for those in economic need (but not for middle-class children or the children of immigrants). He didn't even vote for George W. Bush. Still, he argues compellingly that the widely accepted ideas that try to explain the persistence of racial inequality--leftist views, for the most part--stand in the way of black progress.
Like others, Mr. McWhorter blames open-ended welfare and the fashions of the white counterculture--especially its glorification of drug use--for damaging precisely the generation of blacks that should have reaped the benefits of civil-rights change. But he also blames an academic establishment and intellectual elite that seem unwilling to judge the dynamics of black life by the standards that it applies to other groups.
This is how McWhorter himself puts it in a piece for the Times of London.
An awareness that a tragic disproportion of black Americans are poor has been a hallmark of civic awareness among educated Americans for 40 years now. . . . The civics lesson, we are to think, is that the civil rights revolution left a job undone in an America still hostile to black advancement.
In fact, white America does remain morally culpable — but because white leftists in the late 1960s, in the name of enlightenment and benevolence, encouraged the worst in human nature among blacks and even fostered it in legislation. The hordes of poor blacks stuck in the Superdome last week wound up there not because the White Man barred them from doing better, but because certain tragically influential White Men destroyed the fragile but lasting survival skills poor black communities had maintained since the end of slavery.
Few thinking people regret the flower children’s opposition to the Vietnam war, sexism and racial discrimination. But these advances also spelt the demise of old standards of responsibility. . . . Behaviour that most of a black community would have condemned as counterproductive started to seem normal. Through the late 1960s blacks burnt down their own neighbourhoods as gestures of being “fed up”. But blacks had been “fed up” for centuries: why were these the first riots initiated by blacks rather than white thugs — when the economy was flush and employment opportunities were opening up as never before? Because the culture had changed, in ways that hindered too many blacks from taking advantage of the civil rights revolution.
It is welfare policy reform in the 1960's that must take much of the blame for the social dysfunction that afflicted so many Black Americans in the 60's and 70's.
Meanwhile, the most grievous result of the new consensus was black American history’s most under-reported event, the expansion of welfare. Until now, welfare had been a pittance intended for widows, unavailable as long as the father of one’s children was able-bodied and accounted for, and granted for as little time as possible.
In 1966, however, a group of white academics in New York developed a plan to bring as many people onto the welfare rolls as possible. Across the country, poor blacks especially were taught to apply for living on the dole even when they had been working for a living, and by 1970 there were 169% more people on welfare nationwide than in 1960. This was the first time that whites or blacks had taught black people not to work as a form of civil rights.
I strongly recommend the London Times essay. Critics of conservatives sometimes call us regressives (or ultra-regressives) because they believe that we stand in the way of progress. That's fair enough; otherwise, they would be on our side. But they reflexively assume that because we oppose many of their favorite policies, we consciously prefer regression over progress.
We do not for the most part doubt that their policies are well-intended. But we think that it is precisely those liberal policies have been regressive in fact. We believe this for the simple reason that so many of those policies were implemented, and had the opposite result of what was intended. Both conservatives and liberals want to see all groups of Americans prosper. They differ in which policies would promote that prosperity. McWhorter makes a strong case on this aspect of the question.
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