ACROSS ~BOARD Interview

John McWhorter is not a predictable black intellectual, and his views have upset many in both the black

and white communities,

Dissenting Voice I

n introducing his new book, Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America (Gotham), John McWhorter ticks off names and titles of such prominent blacks as Colin

Powell, Condaleezza Rice, tile CEO ofTi.me Warner, tile editor-in­chief of Newsweek, and tlle president of Brown University. MallY in tlle black intellectual establislunent, he argues, see these peo­ple as outstanding-but very much tlle exception, because tileir presence disguises ilie fissures of a society tllat remains funda­mentally racist and lU1equai.

They are wrong, says McWhorter: "There is so much good news in black America today tllat if we could transport a black American into our era from even as recently as the 1960s, he would wonder whetller some trick had been played."

He would also dispute being labeled, as he is by liberals and academics, a conservative. McWhorter describes himself as a centrist but concedes that the conservative label has stuck, due in part to his affiliation with the right-wing M~Ulhattllil

Institute. Trained as a linguist, McWhorter, 40, is the author of ten

books and a frequent media conunentator on race, lllilguage, llild culture. Winning the Race is a historical analysis tllat asks how African-Americans got to where they are today and why, despite advances especially since the civil-rights movement, the problems of the inner city resist solution.

Ac1'OSS the Board editor A.J. Vogl interviewed McWhorter at tlle Manhattrul Institute in New York City.

let me put some numbers to you from the National Urban league: The overall socioeco­nomic status of African-Americans is 73 per­cent of their white counterparts, 57 percent in terms of economic status, and black un­employment is more than double that of

whites. Your critics would say that you blame blacks themselves for this state of affairs.

to be complete parity at this point? We might expect to be near parity, and that's exactly where we are, but we might also realize that after just four decades tl1ings are not go­ing to be perfect.

First, we're talldng about a time when we're only about four decades past legalized segregation, so the question is: Would we expect there

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Second, we are trained to think that whenever there is a disparity of that kind, then it must be because of racism in some form, that there's some sort of injustice being perpe­trated. That's based on the idea that unequal outcomes are necessarily based on unequal opportunities. But of course, we all know- no mat­ter what our politics, no matter our color- that that's not true. There are other factors, and we're often taught to not think of those parts as significant. But they are, and one of them is cultural patterns that can persist regardless of external con­ditions.

When it comes in particular to the state of black Americans in the United States in the late twentieth century and onward, we've been taught since the '60s that to think about culture is somehow racist. But black people, like all people, have culture, and there are both positive and negative aspects to that culture. If there were no negative aspects, they wouldn't be human beings. It's not the case that because there is

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racism in the world, everything in black culture is positive. It's as sim­ple as that.

A lot of the problems we see in the black community are based on cultural patterns that persist rather than opportunity being denied. It's not that there are no problems of opportunity, but that does not nec­essarily mean that opportunity is the main issue in our time.

Is there still inequality in the system? I wouldn't dispute that inequality

is built into the system, but I would dispute that that is what has created the nature of today's inner cities. When you see two teenagers in a disadvantaged black neighborhood who are shooting each other in the face over an iFod, that is not because the playing field is not level. The playing field has never been level in America. Frankly, I think it never will be.

For everybody or just African-Americans? For people in general. Our ideal

is to get to the point where the play-

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ing field is not more level for any particular group. If you grow up in a nasty, all-brown neighborhood in Brooklyn, the chances of getting into Princeton are small , yes , but the conditions in that neighborhood do not make it inevitable that peo­ple start shooting each other in the face. The conditions in those neigh­borhoods do not make it inevitable that almost nobody knows their father. The conditions in those neigh­borhoods do not predict that there are people who can grow up never having attended a wedding. Unfair conditions existed before the 1960s for most black people in America, and early black slums were not paradise, but they were nothing like the New Jad: City that we 're familiar with now. Which means we have to look for something else besides injustice to explain what's going on.

Let's move from inner-city youth to the middle class. In your book, you dismiss the whole idea of so-called black middle-class rage, partly because you've never really

been exposed to discrimination personally. Is it valid to project your own experience to the universe of an entire class?

Well, it's not that I've never expe­rienced discrimination-

But you say it's never been a big deal in your life .

It's been so rare and so feather­light. What it comes down basically is this: There is a thesis that being middle-class and black is a matter of dealing, week in and week out, with little racist slights. Nothing so dramatic as crosses being burned on lawns or being unable to get a job, but little slights, like doors being slammed, clerks cutting up credit cards in front of you, and not being able to get the apartment that you want-or, if you 're a middle-class bJack man, constantly being stopped by tile police, no matter how you're dressed or the car you're driving, on the presumption that you're car­rying drugs.

What I'm saying in ~Vinning the Race is something very simple: None of that stuff happens to me. And I'm not lying. It's not that it's hap­pened and I let it roll off of me; it's not that I didn't realize that the police were stopping me on a reg­ular basis-I would notice that, as I would notice if they were cutting up my credit card or asking me for two where the last person was asked for just one.

I recently turned 40. I've lived in many cities, I know milieus of various social levels, and I can hon­estly say that as a bJack man- and I don't look anything but black­those things don't happen to me. What tllat means is that there's some­thing wrong with the idea that to be black and middle-class is to un­dergo SUcll slights on a regular basis. We can't say that the other people are lying, but I'm not either.

But if you're not and they're not-the two views seem to conflict.

The way I reconcile those views is this: Other people must undergo exactly as much of that sort of thing

as I do- the rather ambiguous slight that occurs on a very occasional basis. For tllem, however, it becomes part of their entire identity, because many black people have a need to fashion themselves as victims of racism that stems from a kind of lingering insecurity that is due to the history of American racism. So they're not lying-but, then, neither am I. For them, when one day a year they get a funny feeling from some clerk, that sits as one of their life­time's signature events, while I just

of acting, it's quite possible that the sewer worker'S kids will see the doctor's kids as not knowing that they're black.

I grew up in a neighborhood that had a diversity of black classes, and I don't think that my starchy ways had any effect on the roughly one in two boys in that neighborhood who were black and ended up go­ing wrong. They saw me as kind of a pansy, and I saw them as kind of proto-thugs. That's the way it was, and that's kind of the way it is. The

As a black man-and I don't look anything but black-those things don't happen to me. think that of that clerk as inferior, and that my business with this one anonymous individual is much more important to me than how he feels. So it's a matter of how you process those things.

I know a great many middle-class black Americans who consider such incidents funny or barely worth tallting about. Life is so much larger than the person who didn't wait on you fast enough maybe because you 're black.

Now, you argue that middle-class African­Americans shouldn't be criticized for depart­ing the inner city as soon as they're financially able to. But don't those people serve as role models for their poorer neighbors?

A nice idea, but it 's never been proven that a doctor living next door to a sewer worker is somehow go­ing to affect the sewer worker or a bus driver. In fact, there's aca­demic literature that suggests that it doesn't.

But how about the effect of the doctor's sons and daughters on the sewer worker's sons and daughters?

That's been said, I realize, but I see no evidence of it whatsoever. Frankly, these days, to the extent that authentic blackness is associ­ated with being a rebel and a certain way of talking and a certain way

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middle-class ltids in Mount Airy in Philadelphia did not show the way to the rougher black kids in Phila­delphia. We went our separate ways.

There are obvious difference between mid­dle-class blacks and young African-Amer­icans hanging out on a street corner, but are they related in terms of what you call therapeutic alienation-being defined by victimhood and by defiance of the white establishment?

Yeah, they are. Therapeutic alien­ation is a crutch for a person to lean on. For some people it stands as an excuse-that's the problem with it. If you're not doing too well, one way to deal with it is to think that tlle white man doesn't want me to get a job or get promoted. You might not have concrete experience or evidence, but you 'd be supported in that belief by the discourse , by the conversation in the air, by rap music.

Many academics will praise that man for having a wider awareness of the operations of institutional racism. That's unfortunate because ideally one would hope that a person dealt a bad hand would feel, "I have to try harder, and I'm going to succeed." Fifty years ago, it was easier-and may well have been true- to think, "I'm not going to try because the white man won't let me compete." In

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ACROSS gBOARD Int e r view

the north, until the late 1960s, black people couldn't join most unions.

In Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun, for instance, the protagonist, \'V'alter Younger, is hav­ing a hard time malting his way in the world- all he does is drive a cab. That's real. But opportunities are wider now. You don't have to go to Princeton to get a college degree. The minute you say that it's difficult to find work, we have to look at immigrants. They get jobs, they put fOGKI on the table, and franldy driv­ing a cab or running a corner store is not the most ignominious thing in the world.

I'm not exaggerating .when I say that therapeutic alienation, and how vastly it's supported by our common culture, is one of the most perni­cious aspects of late twentieth-cen­tury American sociology-where that way of tlunking has come to hold sway. It's really dangerous be­cause it saps effort.

Speaking of opportunities, your book dis­cusses diversity with respect to affirmative­action programs in colleges . Have you thought about corporate diversity?

Diversity initiatives in corpora­tions can be a good idea if there is a sense that black people are less likely to be hired simply because they're not fam ily. From what I've seen, that is possible in corporate

whether they're good. It's a bad formula . But there is a birds-of-a­feather phenomenon. You're more likely to llire or promote somebody who feels like you. To tlle extent tllat there is a black culture, to the extent that there is something of a color line in the place you're in, tllat could interfere Witll the luring of people of color, and tllere are intelligent ways of addressing that question.

I am quite sure that part of the reason black people often find a sort of glass ceiling in corporations today is not because whites are racists but because, especially after you 've been in a company for a willie, promotions often come down to the birds-of-a-feather phenome­non. In deciding who's going to be partner, if there are three peo­ple who are equally competent and you can only choose one, it's go­ing to be the one you go out and drink with , have a bunch of run­rling jokes with, who dated your sis­ter, etc. , etc.

If you are the kind of black per­son who has been taught tllat white people are to be held at half an arm's length, if you 're a black per­son who feels that white people are subtly racist in ways you can't quite put your finger on, it means you live in a black world, you laugh at black jokes, you don't have any white friends . This doesn't mean

Promotions often come down

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to the birds-of-a-feather phenomenon. lliring, and it could be the occasion for quotas-that are very flexible­to remind people to not only lure people who laugh at the same jokes you do. On the other hand, the min­ute tllat diversity becomes a matter of lowering standards, then I find that as repulsive in the corporate world as I would in the academic world, partly because it helps con­vince wlute people that black peo­ple are not as good, partly because then black persons can never know

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you 're hostile around white peo­ple, but if you 're the kind of black person who tlunks of wlute people as a kind of second language that you have to deal Witll from tune to five, tllen you're probably not going to make partner. That's not fair, be­cause the black person who has developed that kind of orientation didn't do it on purpose, usually. They can't help it that they only really feel comfortable around peo­ple of their own kind. That kind of

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black person is going to be with us for a wlule, and I worry about that black person, because tllat black person often really deserves to be made partner.

It occurs to me that many aspects of the birds-of-a-feather phenomenon could also be applied to women who work in corpora­tions. Some men may have difficulty relating to them, they don't laugh at the same jokes, and soon.

That can definitely happen with women, but my sense is that race is definitely more powerful here than gender- in terms of jokes, for instance. Most jokes can go across tlle gender line more easily tllan the racial line. For example, Seil1/eld was a very, very low-rated show among black people, while it was a huge success among whites. Seil1/eld's particular kind of irony for irony's sake, its heavy self-consciousness­that 's just not part of black folk humor. Black people laugh at dif­ferent things.

So imagine you' re in a corpora­tion and it's the '90s, and every­body's talking about the latest epi­sode of Seinfeld and saying tlungs like, ''Well, not that there's anything wrong with that" or, "He's a close­talker" or referring to the "puffy shirt." Well, that stuff isn't funny to most black-identified people. Peo­ple aren't making those jokes in black barbershops.

So take Seinfeld and multiply it by a hundred, and I think that can really have an effect on promotions. ''You see that Seinfeld last night?" a white person nught casually ask. The black person probably didn't.

And this white person didn't either. I was never a fan.

I was, very much so.

So you have a sense of irony. It's not that black people don 't

have a sense of irony-it's that sense of irony, that particular thing that the Sei1~feld writers were doing. That's not part of most black-identi­fied people's folk humor.

While we're on the subject of pop culture,-I have to bring up hip-hop. You seem to have become its leading critic.

By default.

I'm impressed by the extent to which you know the lyrics. You must have spent a great deal of time listening to the music.

Yeah. When you criticize hip­hop, the first thing that people say is that you don't know the music well enough to speak. If all you've done is hear it as cars go by, or read about it a little bit, and then you crit­icize it~well, you could be charged with missing something. Being ac­cused of not listening to the music is a powerful rhetorical feint: Be­cause hip-hop is so cool, you're really being accused of being kind of a square.

Uncool. Yes, uncool. Socially undesirable.

Before I wrote the chapter on hip­hop, I made sure to listen to several dozen CDs of this stuff, and I con­sulted with people to make sure I was listening to the right rappers, and I listened to them many more times than once. My opinions did not change.

Sonically, I don't find hip-hop unpleasant. Some of those albums are very entertaining, just like a Jesse Jackson speech is entertain­ing, but for me the idea that people my age or even a little older with PhD.s are walking around saying that this music is the new version of the freedom songs that people were singing during the civil-rights movement-it's repulsive. If you actually listen to those CDs, you 'll hear that the lyrics have nothing to do with uplift. All it is somebody sticking their finger in your eye over and over again. Most people can enjoy that on some level, but it is not revolutionary music.

But you like the beat. Sure. Not very long ago, my girl­

friend and I were cooking and we were listening to one of the CDs I mention in the book, Cam'ron's

CD "Come Home With Me." Right in the middle of cooking, we started dancing-the beat is that infec­tious-yet it's the most vicious, mis­ogynous, thuggish piece of crap ever recorded ..

And these hip-hop musicians are role models for the kids on the street corner?

They are, and I'm realizing that more and more. The idea now is not that you grow up to be a bas­ketball player- you grow up to be a rapper.

Which makes me think of something else you talk about in Winning the Race-young African-Americans underachieving in their studies out of fear that they'll be character­ized as "acting white:' Do you see this as di­minishing at all?

I don't have any evidence that it's diminishing, but one imagines

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that it will diminish as the lines be­tween the races get hazier and hazier. I first wrote about that in Losing the Race in 2000. At the time, many people- people who consid­ered themselves smart and enlight­ened- claimed that I was exagger­ating, that the acting-white phe­nomenon was not real. I don't dunk anyone would say that now. Aca­demics have taken a closer look at the problem, and either they've found that it is real, or tlle ones who claim it's not- if you actually read tlleir articles-carefully sidestep the fact that they've found it and don't want to see it.

This acting-white phenomenon is land of an alienation that has lost its moorings. We don't want to do what white people do for no coher­ent reason except for group fellow­ship. Unfortunately, this attitude

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sets in and ends up determining the course of one's life.

You mean that even after you graduate from school, you continue to identify with this attitude?

It's not necessarily that. Rather, if that's the way you start feeling

people to listen up. But predictably, the soul patrol didn't like it.

Who's the soul patrol? Most black academics are part of

the soul patrol; it's almost like being part of the guild. The entire hip-hop industry also has a soul patrol. It's

Bill Cosbr suddenly was not a warrior, so the sou patrol kind of jumped on him.

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around 11 or 12, when your mind is in that very plastic state, there are cer­tain habits of scholarly engagement that you're not going to develop. You may let that go by the time you're in college, but because you've never learned how to embrace school in that special way when you're 13-what we stereo typically associate with Asians and white nerds- you're probably never going to get it. Our brains lose their plasticity as time goes by. To become a real kick-butt student at 20, if you've been surHng until then- well, it happens, but not often. And so I think the "acting white" thing has a way of stopping people before they've begun.

Talking about attitudes toward education brings up Bill Cosby's recent remarks, in which he criticized the personal values and parent­ing skills of poor blacks. Why did that raise such a firestorm of criticism?

Because there 's a schema that we're supposed to internalize: that black problems are due to white per­fidy. He's stepping away from that by saying that black people have a responsibility to help themselves as well. Now, he's not saying it the way a scholar would say it, and he's breaking a rule by saying it, but he's saying it out of a love for his own people. That confuses many people, who believe you only say those sorts of things if you're either white or some starchy black conservative who's sold out, works for a think­tank, and wears a bowtie. But here's an authentically black man, saying these truths. I think he got a lot of

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characterized by a certain complex of traits , all defined by defiance. What you do is based on giving the middle Hnger to the man. The soul patrol likes to make sure that in pub­lic black people are represented that way as much as possible. You must be a warrior. And Bill Cosby sud­denly was not a warrior, so the soul patrol kind of jumped on him.

Obviously, no one person-even Bill Cosby­can represent 40 million people, but what about national black leadership? Who speaks for African-Americans today?

There's no need for a national black leader at this point. Black peo­ple are too diverse, and problems are too complex for there to be one so­lution. AI Sharpton and Jesse Jack­son- theY're stars, quirky celebrity personalities. One would enjoy a sit­com that Jesse Jackson starred in as the father. One would enjoy a variety show hosted by AI Sharpton.

The black Ed Sullivan. That's right. Wouldn't that be fun?

It's wonderful to listen to them speak, but they're not leading anything; they never have.

You said there's no need for a black leader "at this point;' implying that at some future point-

No, that was thirty or forty years ago, when all black people were in the same boat. You couldn't try on shoes at Sears in Philadelphia in 1950. There was segregation, and if you were black, there was only so far that you could go.

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At that time, there was a national issue to be addressed. Nowadays we have to deal with giving people the orientation to take advantage of the opportunities that exist. That doesn't involve a march on Washing­ton- that involves the up-close work of working with people in their own communities. And therefore it's local leaders who matter today.

Some people see that pull-yourself-up orien­tation, in and of itself, as conservative. Does it bother you to be labeled a black conservative?

No. I'm not a black conservative, but there's a foll< terminology, which is that if you're black and you don't approve of racial preferences, you're conservative. The minute I said that, I became a conservative, and no­body cares about who I vote for or anything else. But while I'm not a conservative, I admit that, to the ex­tent that people keep calling me that, it brings me a certain amount of attention, which gets people to read my black centrist views. If some­one picks up Winning the Race and finds that they actually agree with me on about 95 percent of my points, then I've done my job.

But by being affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, which can fairly be described as a conservative think-tank, you're playing out that conservative characterization.

Certainly.

If you were affiliated with Brookings, for instance, your views would have a different effect-no?

Yeah, but chances are that I will only be seen as salonjahig- a Ger­man word meaning suitable for the salon- in a right-wing think tank. So here I an1, but if the Manhattan Insti­t1.1te were really an institute of idiotic right-wing zealots, then I wouldn't be here. What's important is that there is very little that the Manhat­tan Institute supports that I don't agree with. They know tl1at I'm their token liberal anyway. I'm interested in what people think of my ideas. The labels- I can't control that. +