False.Start

...BY ERIC J. SUNDQUIST In his iconoclastic Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (2000), the black linguist and social critic John McWhorter identified a trio of pathological behav-iors—the Cult of Victimology, Separatism, and Anti-intellectualism— that have kept African Americans "mired in a detour" on the road to equality...

...So intimate is the entanglement of white and black culture, especially in music and vernacular language, that America itself has long been significantly "black," a point made many years ago by James Weldon Johnson and Ralph Ellison, among others...

...Whether in the arts, athletics, or fashion, what is the image of the black "thug," as mesmerizing as he is menacing, but a strange hybrid of American socialism co-opted by American capitalism...

...This paradox is reflected in others...

...Equality of opportunity, which requires risk, permits failure and is virtually impossible to quantify...

...Partly as a result of McWhorter's influence, black criticism of such assumptions has become more frequent...

...In this respect and others, black marginality and protest inspired the white counterculture, not the other way around...

...The historical explanation is that these habits are the inheritance of black America's encounter with the New Left in the 1960s, which transmuted white activism into institutionalized guilt and instilled in blacks reliance on economic assistance, preferential treatment, and bromides of self-esteem...

...It is no longer discrimination that stands in the way of black success, he argued, but an ethos typified by welfare and affirmative action that has encouraged blacks to see themselves as perpetual victims and to participate in their own ruin...

...It is likely that he would have supported compensatory measures that were temporary, not permanent...

...Even though many blacks reflexive-ly condemn such images, notes McWhorter, the culture that produced them has flourished in tandem with unprecedented black economic and professional success, a fact personified in the figure of the gangbanger turned music mogul...

...No nation can afford to subject groups of individuals to the psychological crippling and distortion which are the consequences of chronic racism," wrote Clark, and those consequences will be felt not only by the victims but also by the "dominant or privileged groups...

...And still another aims to discredit the remnants of affirmative action, most evident nowadays in the seemingly apple-pie notion of "diversity," which substitutes differences in ethno-racial group membership for differences in experience and belief...

...McWhorter's case for "winning the race" would have been stronger had he taken greater account of such questions and grappled more strenuously with both the sources of today's crisis and its sustaining paradoxes...

...As in his earlier books, McWhorter documents the detrimental assumptions he finds governing too much of African American life: "Real" black identity derives from the ghetto...

...The essence of the damage doctrine was stated in 1954 by the black sociologist Kenneth Clark, whose views were instrumental in Brown v. Board of Education that same year...

...Indeed, McWhorter himself has written brilliantly of these issues in his previous books The Word on the Street and Doing Our Own Thing...

...In view of its celebration of violence and the pornographic degradation of women, McWhorter rightly wonders how hip-hop music, pardoned by its defenders as "progressive" and "coun-terhegemonic," can be a force for freedom rather than despair...

...multigenerational single motherhood is a matter of lifestyle, not shame...

...Here, too, a more nuanced historical argument is in order...

...Whereas racism diminished dramatically over the last decades of the 20th century, the cultivation of black insularity—it's a "black thang," you wouldn't understand—seemed to increase inversely...

...Because the end of outright injustice shifted attention to the subtler effects of "structural" or "subliminal" racism, jurisprudence and public policy, from Brown to Bakke and beyond, were strongly compelled to keep steering from equality of opportunity toward equality of outcome...

...But like the notion of damage and debt on which it is based, the quest for equal outcome, because it is utopian, has no limit...

...A repetitious mix of punditry and scholarship, his book covers a lot of ground but seldom goes deeply into any one topic...

...McWhorter's account is not wrong but partial, and he is thus left with an incomplete diagnosis of post-civil rights trends...

...Another strand attacks the glamorization of gang life, incarnate in the brutality and misogyny of hiphop music, while at the same time contending that hypersensitivity to lingering racism leads middle-class blacks to adopt postures of "rage" that mimic those of the underclass...

...If so, the most insidious result of the 1960s symbiosis was to embed the perception of black deviance more securely at both the bottom and the top of the American economy...

...equality of outcome eliminates risk and seems eminently quantifiable...

...Each devolved into excess—Black Power radicalism in one case, ingrained antagonism toward The System in the other—and that devolution certainly helped breed the "bone-deep animus" against bourgeois values he detects in youth and academic culture alike...

...McWhorter moves deftly among these arguments, but he has a hard time tying them together...

...But the ardent case he does make, as classically liberal as it is conservative, is nonetheless challenging and bold...

...Readers acquainted with Losing the Race or the essays collected in McWhorter's Authentically Black will find a good deal that is familiar in this new book, Winning the Race, which once again seeks to replace the alibi of "racism forever" with renewed commitment to equal opportunity and individual responsibility...

...In other words, both blacks and whites, as groups rather than simply as individuals, were damaged by racism, and therefore compensation and debt, like suffering and guilt, were destined to go hand in hand for decades to come...

...McWhorter may be right that a mindset of enervating dependence (inspired by government fiat) and self-righteous resistance (inspired by coun-tercultural rebellion) were more to blame, but only those who already believe him are likely to be persuaded by his rather selective use of evidence...

...And in the polyglot of everyday American English, no strain is more influential than black slang...

...One strand of argument rebuts conventional wisdom about the causes of black poverty—or, rather, the "culture of poverty," since the myth exceeds the reality—and maintains that the precipitous expansion of Aid to Families with Dependent Children played a more instrumental role in modern black life "than Afros, Nixon's Southern Strategy, or [Martin Luther] King's death...

...Whereas diversity sidestepped the stigma of quotas, it begat new kinds of tokenism and new kinds of structural and subliminal racism...

...Both, moreover, were expressions of American-style Marxism, dormant since the 1930s but reborn in the New Left's devotion to anticolonialism both abroad and at home...

...it is certain that he would have continued to reject the culture of black alienation...

...From ragtime to rap, white musicians, patrons, and entrepreneurs have fed on black culture, adopting the voices of the dispossessed as their own...

...Could it be that the nation craves outlaws as much as it craves law and order...

...What McWhorter adds to his own condemnation in Winning the Race is a beguiling thesis and a historical explanation...

...But we, the white and black niggers, will fire the last...

...studying hard is "acting white...

...In answer to those who contend that the loss of factory jobs, middle-class flight, or decaying housing projects are to blame for an entrenched "subculture of depravity," for instance, it is not sufficient to offer the single counterexample of Indianapolis, where such factors were far less evident but a comparable post-1960s escalation in crime, unemployment, and single-parent families occurred...

...King's passion for communal justice was immense, but so was his passion for personal initiative...

...In explaining the beginnings of therapeutic alienation, McWhorter takes note of the perennial popularity of Black Rage, a 1970 trendsetter that dwelled on the psychological "damage" done to blacks by racism...

...But Black Rage cannot be traced to Woodstock or the Weathermen...

...The exact cost of removing blacks from dependence on others, says the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, remains to be determined: "Once we know how much damage has been done to us, and what is required to repair the damage, we will know how much is owed...

...Taking Norman Mailer's notorious Beat-era paean to the "white Negro" in a more anarchic direction, to give just one example, Jerry Rubin extolled a revolutionary alliance between the Black Panthers and the Yippies: "The pigs fired the first shot...

...The thesis is that idealistic oppositional stances born of civil rights militancy degenerated over time into self-replicating habits of "therapeutic alienation," mindlessly reinforced by academics, journalists, and popular culture...

...liberation lies in giving The Man the finger...

...More to the point of his thesis about alienation, however, the white counterculture's renegade dissent from propriety was significantly responsive to black culture...

...In the past year, for example, Bill Cosby has been both lionized and demonized Eric J. Sundquist, UCLA Foundation professor of literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author, most recently, of Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, PostHolocaust America...

...No one knows (though everyone thinks he knows) what King, had he lived, would have thought about affirmative action, reparations, school vouchers, and other hot-button issues...

...However, even if such animus was a byproduct of the white left's supposition that blacks were not yet "whole people," it is simplistic to contend that the "hippie ethos" crossed the color line to "turn black America upside down...

...for publicly condemning various nihilistic features of inner-city black culture...

...All the same, glorification of the black "gangsta" could not survive absent a massive mainstream audience...

...The post-World War II consensus that racist attitudes, not racial traits, create inequality, coupled with the innovation that African-Americans were victims of a generations-long "genocide," soon established the further consensus that blacks were a traumatized people...

...Alongside the stereotype of blacks as damaged, McWhorter identifies an equally disturbing stereotype purveyed in the marketing of ghetto youth culture as the essence of black identity...

...If black pride, and even Black Power, were legitimate reactions to decades of abuse, as he admits, how did militancy become a permanent identity and—be it Malcolm X or Tupac Shakur—a commodity sold worldwide as the epitome of American culture...

...Martin Luther King once lamented Black Power's debilitating belief in the "infinitude of the ghetto"—the belief that there can be no end to the inequities caused by racism and therefore no end to the need for government intervention, if not insurrection...

...Winning the Race is effectively, though not always to its benefit, several books in one...

...Theories of racial damage may have become normative during the 1960s—Lyndon Johnson's 1965 address at Howard University, in which he spoke repeatedly of blacks as "crippled" by racism, became a touchstone for proponents of affirmative action—but they originated at least two decades earlier...

...Although McWhorter addresses the contemporary reparations movement only in passing, it provides a good illustration...

...Insofar as he believes that the 1960s created a better America for many, including the black middle class, McWhorter does not make adequately clear how intertwined the civil rights revolution was with the countercultural revolution...

...A greater problem arises from the fact that, although he complains that blacks have lost track of the events and decisions that produced today's dilemma, McWhorter's own historical explanation is, in key respects, not historical enough...