Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America

John H. McWhorter

So, I didn't wind up throwing this book against the wall after all. But, I did wind up skimming through much of John H. McWhorter's arguments, because I've heard and read them before from other "conservative, Black social critics/scholars."

The thrust of McWhorter's book, _Losing the Race; self-sabotage in Black America_ is that African Americans have become in most cases, their own enemy. He writes that we are infected with three cultural phenomena that prevent us from fully achieving the "dream" Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of in his famous speech: the cult of Victimology, the cult of Separatism, the cult of Anti-intellectualism.

The cult of Victimology basically means that Black Americans continue to believe that we are victims of the same extreme prejudice we experienced before the Civil Rights Movement, 40 years ago. McWhorter does not deny that racism still exists, but he says that Black Americans are not systematically being disenfranchised and oppressed. He offers examples of the exploding Black Middle Class, the fact that inter-racial marriages are commonplace, and says that the reason so many Blacks are in prison, on death row, and stopped by police is because Blacks commit a disproportionate amount of the crimes in this country, as a result of the various problems in our urban centers, and most of these are crimes committed agains other Blacks.

The cult of Separatism describes the sense that Blacks are still considered, "Other" in this country. For the same reasons, he challenges this belief. The cult of Anti-intellectualism describes how there is a sense in the current Black Culture that education is not important. He cites SAT scores showing that wealthy Black kids do just a poorly as poor Blacks and he challenges the notion of cultural bias in these tests, saying that wealthy Blacks are culturally similar, or at least aware of the "mainstream/white" culture, and in fact everyone is (he also challenges the notion of the mainstream American culture as being the "white" culture, noting that it fits more closely to the African American and "minority" experience overall.

McWhorter writes, "Black America is currently mired in a detour, inteded by neither blacks nor whites, from the path to the mountaintop that Martin Luther King envisioned." He continues, "it is Victimology, Separatism, and Anti-intellectualism that make it a stretch for whites to think of that suburban black corporate manager as a representative "American" even three decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1964." This is so in spite of the fact that most Blacks are not poor, most Blacks are not in prison, and most Blacks share similar social perspectives with their neighbors. "Paranoid, parochial, and dumb: This is how much of white America perceives us on some level. It is not our fault, and it is absolutely unacceptable," he writes.

The solution he offers is that we all need to combat the "chic-ness" of thinking of ourselves as victims. He says that we need to stop thinking of our successes as no longer being "anecdotes," or "tokens," but as the norm, that being successful and Black is not unusual. Occasional "inconveniences" such as being followed in a department store, or stopped in a high crime area, should not be thought of as oppression. These are unfortunate results of other problems, not prejudice, he writes. We should take the next step beyond Affirmative Action: once the playing field is leveled (which he believes it almost is), we should move on to "achieving the result affirmative action was intended to bring about, to abandon the policy -- before full parity in performance has been achieved." This will prevent the sense of having an "easy ride" in achievement. In the end, McWhorter calls for "those black Americans out there who are tired of being told that to be black one must be a provincial, anti-intellectual underdog," to join in what he calls the reviving struggle to getting back to "making our way up the last few steps to the mountaintop."

Personally, I agreed with most of what he had to say, as I do with many of the "Black Conservatives," though their message more often than not is validated by whites than blacks, which is a big problem, I think. What underlies their social criticism is that somewhere along the way, we all got lost. We all forgot the sense of working hard to reach goals, being educated should not be taken for granted, yes life is hard, but we can handle it and that's why we are all here, because our ancestors survived, from the Middle Passage to the struggles of our recent past. In spite of many of the recent events with our election (blacks having their votes thrown out more often than other groups) this should still be what keeps us going. Our passage has been paid for. Nothing should hold us back, especially ourselves.