Self Sabotage
Losing The Race
Self-Sabotage in Black America.
By John H.
McWhorter.
285 pp. New York: The Free Press. $24.
McWhorter, who now teaches linguistics at the University of California,
Berkeley, says this incident did not occur in one of those low-income
neighborhoods often perceived to be the factory producing black youngsters
wanting to be so unwhite that they reject and scorn the kind of intelligence
that makes for good spelling. McWhorter says he was smacked for being smart
in the comfortable black middle-class haven of Mount Airy, a Philadelphia
suburb.
That it happened there forms the base of McWhorter's argument that the
black middle and upper middle classes are destroying the possibilities and
dreams of the civil rights movement. He says a deep anti-intellectual
current -- often considered characteristic of the underclass -- has swept
into the culture of black privilege and is complemented by an identity
clouded in separatism and victimization. In McWhorter's view, this sense of
victimization produces a misguided moralism that makes anything black, like
O. J. Simpson, always right. He argues that this anti-intellectual strain is
largely responsible for the test-score gap between black and white
middle-class children. He says this destructive force in black life must
end, along with any reliance on affirmative action, before blacks reach true
equality.
McWhorter relates several encounters with irresponsible black
middle-class students at Berkeley; these, along with other personal
experiences like the Mount Airy episode, form the core of the limited
original evidence he offers to support his contentions. He often leaps to
broad generalizations from personal experiences and observations that are,
most often, inadequately explored. For example, he mentions seeing a
television program, featuring the actress Nell Carter, in which her
character expresses an intense interest in Russian history: ''It struck me
as a false moment, and I wondered whether the script had originally been
written with a white actress in mind. I couldn't help thinking of how very
few black people I have ever met who were so passionately interested in a
subject that had nothing to do with being black.'' McWhorter breezes by
without considering whether his response reflects his own limited exposure
to African-American culture and his inability to see black life in America
without polemical lenses.
Too often McWhorter does what many blacks accuse whites of doing -- he
draws a conclusion from any negative encounter he has experienced with
another black person and assumes it is the norm; whatever violates it is the
exception. ''I once met an aspiring black linguist who had spent two years
in China without learning Chinese beyond what he needed to buy food at the
market,'' he writes. ''Most people who spend two years in a foreign country
come back speaking the language. . . . This was the only linguist I have
ever met who spent two years abroad without becoming bilingual, and it is
not likely to be accidental that he was black. Separatism has a way of
discouraging black Americans from learning foreign languages other than
French and Spanish . . . and Swahili.'' He produces nothing empirical to
support this.
He rightly defines the black majority as middle class, but never imagines
that population beyond the confines of the argument against affirmative
action. It sometimes seems as if that horrifying day in Mount Airy eternally
looms over his view of black Americans. He too often appears simplistically
to divide the race into two camps -- those under spells of victimology and
separatism and those like himself. ''I am not alone,'' he writes. ''An
increasing number of black people are questioning the cognitive dissonance
between the vast potential of their lives . . . and the insistence of so
many blacks around them that America remains a racist purgatory.''
His argument remains captive in a closet of his own experiences, with
scant assessments of academic studies, and data on the test-score gap that
are never explored with the rigor they deserve. Yet the book's shining
moments are tied to that shortcoming. McWhorter's accounts of personal
encounters are riveting even when they do not fully carry his arguments. For
example, he shares some details of his successful climb to tenure that, in
his view, did not escape the suspicion of affirmative action. He firmly
believes his colleagues, despite his stellar record of publication, can
never get beyond a reductive thought: ''It was perfectly obvious that in the
back of most minds was 'Of course he got tenure -- they wouldn't dare deny
tenure to a black person unless he was hopeless.' ''(He does not offer any
data to show that black professors have an easier route to tenure than
others and barely addresses the many stories that suggest otherwise.) In
McWhorter's view, all the blame goes to affirmative action -- none to the
troubling visions of colleagues who cannot see his success without thinking
''affirmative action.'' And should affirmative action be abolished to
appease the limitations of those professors?
McWhorter often celebrates the economic advancement of blacks as evidence
that racism in the United States is not as severe as many claim. One is left
wondering why he or anyone should celebrate the rise of the black middle
class if the majority of those well-off blacks are locked in the cults of
victimology and separatism -- and choked by anti-intellectualism -- as he
contends. That thought underscores the great frustration in reading ''Losing
the Race.'' Even when I find myself disagreeing with McWhorter, I could not
help thinking of more solid, substantial and constructive ways to state his
argument.
There is documentation that finds some blacks rejecting academic success
for fear of being called white and in order to be ''cool.'' One might argue
this is complemented by the American disdain of the nerd that looms far
beyond black culture and did not begin there. Yet the test-score gap, though
not sufficiently explored in ''Losing the Race,'' is real. McWhorter at
least brings attention to its possible connection to the anti-intellectual
strain that he confronted in Mount Airy and that he says he finds in his
black students. This issue is not served when many blacks avoid it.
McWhorter stirs the waters. Unfortunately, he does not clarify much in the
process.
John H. McWhorter shares what he calls ''the very first memory of my
life'' in his book ''Losing the Race.'' It happened in that turbulent year,
1968: ''A group of black kids, none older than 8, asked me how to spell
'concrete.' I spelled it, only to have the 8-year-old bring his little
sister to me and have her smack me repeatedly as the rest of the kids
laughed and egged her on. From then on, I was often teased in the
neighborhood for being 'smart.' ''
A review on Nov. 26 about ''Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black
America,'' by John H. McWhorter, referred incorrectly to the author's
childhood neighborhood, Mount Airy. It is part of Philadelphia, not a
suburb.
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