The Linguist's Fighting Words
By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 3, 2001; Page C01
NEW YORK — Students waiting in the lounge at Audrey Cohen College
cluster in small groups, murmuring and shaking their heads as they read
the flier summarizing the eye-popping views of the evening's guest
speaker. He's the one who writes that African Americans undermine their own
progress by subscribing to "a cult of victimology" that leads them to loaf
through school, mistake minor inconveniences for crippling racism and
embrace an anti-intellectual culture that frowns on serious
scholarship. The students can hardly wait to get a load of whoever wrote this stuff.
"Who is this guy?" asks Raemona Winningham, 34, a social worker and mother
of six pursuing her bachelor's degree at this small college in lower
Manhattan. "I'm reading this and not liking what I'm seeing. This is just
a little too much." John H. McWhorter has been here before. In the months since
publishinghis controversial new book, "Losing the Race:
Self-Sabotage in Black America," the black 34-year-old University of
California-Berkeley linguistics professor has been in hot demand -- by
both supporters and critics alike. In recent months he has made dozens of speeches, often before people
who were insulted by what he has to say and quick to let him know it. Some
have called him a sellout, a self-hater and an Uncle Tom. So he has learned to be particularly wary of audiences like this one,
mostly black and relatively young, as he has found them to be the most
likely not only to disagree with his views, but also to accuse him of
betraying his race by even expressing them. Sure enough, the rancor flows almost immediately. Mitchell Duneier, a
sociologist who makes it clear that he holds a higher opinion of
contemporary black culture than McWhorter, introduces the author by noting
not just his thesis, or his four previous books (about linguistics), but
also the fact that he speaks Spanish, French and German and has a decent
working knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Swedish and
Hebrew. "He's uncool," Duneier concludes. The remark is a playful jab at
McWhorter's contention that academic achievement is frowned upon among
African Americans, a sanction he has clearly ignored. But for a moment, it
comes across as a personal critique. This appears to startle McWhorter,
who seems a bit miffed as he takes the podium. Still, he sticks to his script, which starts with a painful but
indisputable fact: As a group, African American students are the worst
performing in the nation. They earn the lowest grades and test scores at
every level from elementary school through law school. This pattern is not
merely confined to those isolated in rural areas or poor inner-city
communities. Even in prosperous suburbs such as Fairfax County, Va.,
Evanston, Ill., and Shaker Heights, Ohio, educators are struggling against
a tide of underachievement among black students. "You see it again, again and again," McWhorter says. "It is not a
fluke." The stubborn achievement gap separating black and white students is a
problem that has baffled educators for years. From the beginning, African
American preschoolers score much lower than whites in vocabulary tests,
setting a pattern that is evident through graduate and professional
school. But while educators are well aware of the problem, there is no
agreement on either its cause or its solution. Researchers have found that
even though blacks complete less homework than whites, they spend as much
time doing it. Also, blacks tend to spend much more time watching
television than whites, but researchers have found no link between
television watching and school achievement. And while much is made of
black kids who ostracize high achievers, researchers have found blacks no
more likely than whites to lose social status among their peers because
they do well in school. "The more we look at the data, the more we move away from a simple
cultural explanation," says Ronald F. Ferguson, a Harvard University
researcher. "There are behavioral differences that you can observe between
racial groups, but they tend not to be behaviors that help you predict
achievement." Still, McWhorter is convinced he has put his finger on the problem.
Leave it to others to blame poorlytrained teachers, crumbling
schools, Eurocentric curricula, the vicissitudes of class or old-fashioned
racism. He says the main problem African Americans face in school and elsewhere
is the set of values they choose to embrace as authentic. Too many blacks
dismiss school achievement as a "white thing," he says, establishing a
predictable pattern they follow later in life by accepting distorted
notions of "cultural blackness" that cast racism as an immutable fact and
romanticize ghetto life. Much of this, he says, is neatly capsulized in the lyrics of Lichelle
Laws, a modestly successful rap performer raised in middle-class comfort,
who sings: "Trying to get to Watts, but I'm stuck in [well-heeled] Baldwin
Hills." "There was no such thing as a Jewish man or woman standing on stage and
singing seriously of how he was 'trying to get down to Delancey and Essex
[formerly the heart of Manhattan's Jewish ghetto] but I'm stuck in
[wealthy] Murray Hill,' " McWhorter writes. "If one tried, he would have
been booed and no record company would have offered him a contract." With this attitude, McWhorter says, there is little mystery why many
African Americans are lagging in school and, ultimately, in many other
walks of life. If the problem isn't attitude, he says, why else would many new
immigrants do well in the very same inner-city schools, staffed with the
very same teachers that serve so many black students? And if the nation's
school curricula are grounded in a culture irrelevant to blacks, he says,
that culture is downright foreign to Indian, Korean or Chinese students
who, by and large, do well in school. Also, he argues, the problem must not be poverty since only 25 percent
of black families are poor and as many as half can be considered
middle-class. On the SAT, for example, the children of black parents who
earn more than $50,000 a year score lower than whites whose parents earn
$10,000. None of this will change, he says, until African Americans regain the
seriousness of purpose and moral authority that helped lift them from
slavery and segregation. Also, he contends, affirmative action has to go,
as he believes it sows self-doubt among blacks and animosity among
whites. Needless to say, this line of thinking is stirring some angry reaction.
Critics call McWhorter's thesis superficial, opportunistic and reminiscent
of black cultural critics who make a quick name for themselves -- not to
mention hefty speaking fees -- at the expense of African Americans. "You remind me very much of [William B.] Shockley, who waded into a
field for which he wasn't prepared," Rae Alexander-Minter, an Audrey Cohen
vice president, tells McWhorter after his speech at the college. Shockley
won the Nobel Prize in physics, but is infamous for promoting incendiary
views of genetic differences between the races. Later, Alexander-Minter explains, "The issues McWhorter raises are
important. But his argument is flawed. Let's just say, to blanket a race
or group of people the way he does is ill-advised." Ishmael Reed, a writer who teaches at Berkeley, is even less kind. He
calls McWhorter a "hustler" who offers a line that will get him noticed
but ignores realities such as the exploding market for black books, or the
string of public opinion surveys that find significant percentages of
whites still cling to patently racist views such as believing blacks are
inherently less intelligent than whites. "You have these academics who are removed from the African American
community who use anecdotes and gross generalizations to make a career for
themselves," Reed says. "He is sort of like a rent-a-black-person." This kind of criticism leaves McWhorter shaking his head, but no less
convinced that he is telling the truth. "I wrote this because all through
the 1990s when a so-called black issue came up I didn't feel the same way
most black people seemed to. I kept saying, where is all of this racism
that I do not feel?" he says. "I certainly didn't write this book to
become the 'new' black conservative." But yet this is where he finds himself. Since McWhorter's book hit
store shelves the conservative establishment has welcomed him as one of
its own. (The book, however, hasn't made it to the major bestseller
lists.) Ward Connerly, the leader of a national anti-affirmative action
movement, has called to chat him up. The Manhattan Institute, a
conservative think tank, has named him a contributing editor to its
journal. Others have come across with ballet and opera tickets. And
McWhorter credits Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, the conservative
activists who wrote "America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible,"
a book that argues against affirmative action and brims with racial
statistics, for providing much of the raw data underlying his
conclusions. The Thernstroms, in turn, credit McWhorter for having the courage to
tell it like it is. "I wouldn't have the credibility to say what he
writes," says Abigail Thernstrom, who is white. "There would be this cloud
of suspicion. This is a book written by somebody who feels an enormous
amount of pain from what he is looking at." McWhorter seems almost embarrassed by the name he is making for
himself. He is also amused by the assumptions that people now make about
him as a result of his book. Old friends who know him to have a healthy
ego are shocked to hear him described as some kind of self-hater. And his
newfound friends are surprised when they hear that Adam Clayton Powell,
the late, legendary Harlem congressman whose type of activism was anathema
to many conservatives, is one of McWhorter's heroes. "Don't associate me with Clarence Thomas or any of those other people,"
he says. "I didn't write this for those reasons." Instead, he describes
the book as one based on his experience. "Everything in my book squares
with what I've seen all my life." McWhorter says his "very first" childhood memory is of being surrounded
by a group of black neighbors, none older than 8, who demanded that he
spell the word "concrete." Although he was only 3 or 4 at the time, he
spelled it correctly, only to be rewarded by being smacked upside his head
by a little girl while the others laughed and egged her on. As McWhorter sees it, in one way or another this happens to many black
students. Worse, this did not take place in some poverty-stricken
inner-city community, but in leafy Mount Airy, Pa., a middle-class
Philadelphia community renowned as one of the first purposely integrated
neighborhoods in the country. McWhorter lived in Mount Airy for the better part of his childhood,
before moving to Lawnside, N.J., a predominantly black town outside of
Philadelphia. He and his younger sister attended private schools and his
parents both worked at Temple University, his mother as a social work
instructor and his father overseeing student activities. Unlike many of his peers, McWhorter had no interest in sports as a
child, preferring to stay in the house reading, playing the piano or
listening to his Spanish language records. His tendency to be a loner is
the thing that he believes allowed him to avoid the cultural abyss that he
argues consumes so many black students. "My parents were rather socially insular people who conveyed, without
ever being explicit about it, that 'we' were not like 'them,' " McWhorter
says. "It wasn't that I didn't spend time with other black kids. But I was
inculcated subtly with a sense that 'You do not do what they do.' " Not only that, he was also a bit of a nerd. He still cringes as he
recounts the time his mother virtually pushed him into a neighborhood
football game, where he quickly became a source of ridicule when he did
not know which way to run with the ball. He also remembers hiding his
strong interest in school from his neighborhood peers for fear that it
would only prompt further derision. "We wanted to excel, to make something out of ourselves," says Bernard
Tucker, a longtime friend wholived two blocks from McWhorter in
Lawnside, and now lives in California where he is a service consultant for
Office Depot. "In our neighborhood, the typical thing was to go to school,
make mediocre grades, have kids, work in the general vicinity and not move
out of the area. John and I were among the few who wanted something
different." McWhorter says it was a relief when at 15 he was accepted to Simon's
Rock College, which is designed for high school students who want to begin
college early. Not only did it free him from the neighborhood strictures,
but it also allowed him, he says, to escape a household where his parents
did not always get along. After earning an associate's degree at Simon's Rock, he went to Rutgers
University, where he earned a bachelor's. He went on to New York
University for a master's, then to Stanford University, where he earned a
doctorate in linguistics. He did postgraduate work at the University of
California-Berkeley before he began teaching at the school. But even in the cloistered world of academia, McWhorter says he could
not escape the troubling attitudes that he says are prevalent among both
black students and some of his black colleagues. Not only did he find
black students not working hard, but he believes they tended to overstate
the presence of racism to confound whites and fit in with one another. He recalls a black student at Stanford who complained about being told
by a white professor to drop calculus because, in the professor's words,
"black people are not good at math." McWhorter says he does not believe a
white professor would say such a thing at Stanford. At Berkeley, a black woman he knows complained that she was tired of
having to wear a "happy" face on campus to avoid being treated like a
"criminal" by whites. While this anecdote got a rise out of many black
students on campus, McWhorter dismisses it as utter nonsense. More alarming than that, he says, is the nonchalant attitude too many
African American students take toward their work at Berkeley, one of the
jewels of California's public university system. He had one black student who responded to an essay question with two
"literally incomprehensible" sentences handed in with a "jolly, salutary
smile." Another never came to class, even on days he was spotted
socializing on campus. Others made only feeble efforts to do senior thesis
work. He says these are hardly isolated incidents. Students of all races have
their share of academic problems, he contends, but not nearly as
frequently as black students. "I have found it impossible to avoid nothing less than fearing that a
black student in my class is likely to be a problem case," he says in his
book. "We are trained to say at this point that I am stereotyping, but I
have come to expect this for the simple reason that it has been true,
class after class, year after year." McWhorter's strong views leave even academic experts who study racial
achievement differences puzzled. Some call his opinions overly sweeping,
given that most of his book was drawn from others' research and selected
incidents from his own life. "Given what he has observed, he can't factor out the extent to which he
is the one producing these effects that he sees," says Ferguson, the
Harvard researcher who has written extensively about black school
performance and has taught at four top-flight universities. "McWhorter's stuff seems to be extreme," Ferguson continues. "In my
teaching career, I have had black students who will come out at the top of
the class, the middle, the bottom . . . there is not a narrow
stereotype." McWhorter acknowledges that he is probably the "wrong person" to be
making his arguments as he is neither a social scientist, an
anthropologist or a trained education researcher. Moreover, he sees himself as someone most African Americans do not
recognize as a "real brother" -- something that he worries undercuts his
authority. His appearance is unmistakably black, but "the tone of my voice
is inherently rather condescending," he says. "I have very little black
inflection. I sound white over the phone. I have a snotty voice." Still, he does not regret a single word of his book. He is proud of the
scores of letters and complimentary e-mails he has received, many from
teachers, who say his arguments ring true to them. "Most black people who
contact me agree with me," he says. "Most of us know this. We talk about
it among ourselves." That much seems to be true as he wraps up his talk at Audrey Cohen
College. The audience that at first seemed eager to confront him now seems
to be with McWhorter. Some raise their hands to share their own struggles
with black people who seem to resent academic success. "When I was in school, I was constantly teased for doing well," student
Monge Codio, 27, says after McWhorter's talk. "It got to the point that I
eased up on my school work in high school. Now, I'm playing catch-up." Onetia Murray nods in a agreement. "You know, I don't agree with
everything he says, but a lot of what this guy says is on the money," says
Murray, whose 6-foot-4-inch son is always teased because he is something
of a bookworm. "We have a large bookcase in our place and I heard one of
his buddies saying that we're trying to be white. Tell me, what is that
about?"
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