John McWhorter's Winning The Race

The following are extracts (for review purposes) from Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis In Black America, John McWhorter, 2005:

"[W]hat turned black Indianapolis down a wayward path was two things....One was the rise of a hostile, anti-establishment ideology as mainstream opinion....The other was the expansion of welfare such that it could provide a passable living indefinitely. The rest was history—ours." – p. 70

"The burden of proof is upon [others] to explain why these two factors—oppositional culture and open-ended welfare—would not have a profound historical impact on poor black communities. That is, they must be prepared to state that they would agree with the following proposition:

When a community experiences a new charismatic oppositional ideology and links it to authentic race membership, and at the same time is encouraged by bureaucrats to sign up for open-ended welfare payments, this will have only marginal effect upon attitudes to employment, self-sufficiency, and adherence to mainstream behavior." – p. 72

"The roots of black America's therapeutic alienation in inner pain ties in [sic] to the teachings of Eric Hoffer in his classic monograph The True Believer. Hoffer wrote in 1951....

"Hoffer was interested in why individuals, originally as self-directed and idiosyncratic as all humans are, so often subsume themselves into ideological movements based on idealized visions of the past and contemptuous caricature of the present, with proposals for the future oddly light on practical programs....[M]uch of his analysis illuminates today's Politically Correct black orthodoxy eerily well.

"'Militant' black ideology, even when diluted into quieter convictions among ordinary people, looks to an idealized African past, insists that the present is still, as Ishmael Reed has it, a matter of endless days 'at the front,' and proposes a 'Black Nationalist' future of hazily described multi-class black 'communities' difficult to imagine in an increasingly miscegenated and multicultural nation....

"Hoffer's thesis is that...individuality is an unnatural condition, lending a sense of existential disconnection, so much so that it is almost intolerably threatening to many people. This makes membership in collective ideological movements spiritually attractive, in absolving them of the discomfiting responsibility of making their way as unbounded independent actors.

"Hence, they embrace movements whose manifestos require elisions of empiricism and logic that appear bizarre to the outside observer, based on visceral sentiment disconnected from concrete reality....We look at [them], not understanding that the root of the allegiance was more a desperate self-erasure than constructive progress.

"Black Power ideology has, obviously, inspired nothing remotely as hideous as Hitler or Mussolini. But the hold that this way of thinking has exerted upon so many is due to the same inner quest for self-abnegation that Hoffer described. Freed from overt segregation and discrimination after the sixties, black Americans were faced for the first time in their history with true choice, with opportunities to succeed—or, crucially, perhaps fail. In other words, the new legislation at last gave blacks their place in civilization, as it were, such that they could play their part on the American stage as individuals. But as Hoffer noted, being an individual can be challenging. The challenge was especially intimidating for a people who had had so little opportunity to prepare themselves for the task.

"Naturally, then, for many the response was a new hypersensitivity to the obstacles, a new fetishization of The Man, not right in front of you but there, all around you, like oxygen or God, holding you back, cutting you down. It's not about me—(that is, I'm not sure how I feel about me)—it's about him. As such, today's black American meme of therapeutic alienation, albeit occupying not the battlefield but the university classroom, the kitchen table, the black call-in radio show, the blogsite, and the hip-hop CD is a product of the same tendencies in mass movements that Hoffer describes in other times and places.

"Hoffer notes that under this kind of movement, 'to rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason,' since the guiding imperative is to march in lockstep to an ideology whose core motivation is opposition to the present at all costs. Thus, a core of black scholars of Black English insisted in 1996 that black students require tutelage in 'Ebonics,' despite reams of studies in contradiction....Those who questioned the orthodoxy were tarred as morally unfit, regardless of the facts they brought to bear on the issue. The key was simply whether you were with us or against us.

"Because reality is always complex, an ideology so compelling as to seduce an individual into marching in step with thousands of others must be based on ideas that address the gut rather than the brain. But because the real world is complex, these ideas can never withstand careful analysis, such that as Hoffer put it, 'a doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.' Thus, it is pretended that race issues are uniquely 'complex,' their mystical underpinnings proposed as justifying assumptions such as that unequal outcomes always mean unequal opportunity. To get down to cases is to be accused of 'not getting it,' with little attempt at logical elucidation necessary. Predictably, adherents value what Hoffer pegged as 'impassioned double-talk and sonorous refrains' more than 'precise words joined together with faultless logic,' and, hence, black scholars like Cornel West rocking black audiences with Latinate words delivered in the cadences of the church and the street, with the content of what they are saying considered a background concern. I have watched black fans of West start mm-hmming to his cadences and angular gestures even when what he was saying was either too arcane for any but one or two scholars in attendance to know whether it was true or too ordinary to merit such vigorous consent on its face alone. The theatrics alone are the message.

"For those uncomfortable to see this ideology likened to Hitler and Mussolini, we might heed thinkers like Erik Erikson, who wrote that in moments of rapid social change, 'youth feels endangered, individually and collectively, whereupon it becomes ready to support doctrines offering a total immersion in a synthetic identity (extreme nationalism, racism, or class consciousness) and a collective condemnation of a totally stereotyped enemy of the new identity.' It is not hard to see post–Civil Rights black America in that description, and Erikson meant exactly what Hoffer did." – pp. 164–7

"My argumentation so far could possibly be misinterpreted as implying that racism alone was what created therapeutic alienation. However, racism had been a reality forever: It must be understood that this response to racism was in turn enabled by a particularity of the moment: whites' new interest in the black condition amid the commitments of the counterculture. This allowed a new vent for a spiritual insecurity among blacks that had existed for centuries with whites uninterested in paying it attention. After all, there are all kinds of human responses to insecurity, and black Americans had previously manifested many of them.

"Insecurity can make you work harder....Insecurity can make you withdraw into yourself and have as little contact with The Man as possible....Insecurity can make you just give up and while away your days in idle misery....Or—insecurity might make you dutifully protest when a white woman uses the word n[——] in condemning it. But that will only happen with the precondition of an Establishment newly receptive to such a 'message.'

"Only in the late sixties...could William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs's Black Rage become a best seller, introducing the idea that blacks' problem was not only discrimination but also whites' deep-seated psychological feelings of bias against blacks. This helped usher in a keystone of therapeutic alienation, that our interest is in whether all whites esteem us in their heart of hearts.

"That seems so ordinary now but is, in fact, a rather eccentric fetish of ours. Blacks before the late sixties assumed that whites did not like us, and thought that sheer opportunity was what their people needed. But starting in the late sixties, endless investigations and condemnations of whites' psychological biases against blacks took center stage—even though blacks' regularly saying that they thought whites would always be racist meant that the goal was less to fix something than to dwell in it indefinitely. As historian Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn has it,

The desired goal was no longer civic equality and participation, but individual psychic well-being. This psychological state was much more nebulous, open to interpretation, difficult to achieve, and controversial than the universal guarantee of political equality sought by the early civil rights movement....

"Black Rage was being planned and written...basically concurrently with the Civil Rights Act. The new focus on psychological issues emerged, then, just as discrimination was outlawed and white consensus on blacks shifted from dismissal to professional guilt....

"Nevertheless, Cobbs pioneered encounter groups in which blacks dressed down whites for their subliminal racism, a trope familiar to any number of people who have sat through corporate diversity 'seminars' since. This kind of thing has only been possible in an America where two conditions reigned. One was that blacks gained a sense of comfort in assailing whites, with only faintly constructive purpose, as a coping strategy for feelings of insecurity....There was another necessary condition: Whites were newly open to pretending to like being yelled at[,] and that has only been the case since the sixties.

"Therapeutic alienation, then, was spurred not only by 'racism,' but also by a particular congruence of sociopolitical factors at a particular time. If the new ideology of the sixties were a response simply to 'oppression' writ large, or blacks being finally 'fed up,' then we might try some thought experiments[:] 1876...1919...1947...

"Well, why not? There is not a thing in any of these hypothetical accounts that would seem at all illogical in John Hope Franklin's keystone black history text From Slavery to Freedom—except for the fact that, we immediately think, if blacks had tried such things in those times, whitey would have crushed us like a bug. Which is true. The angry, theatrical separatism now so often treated as genuine and progressive was impossible until whites were poised to give it the floor. And this means one thing: The privileging of alienation over action so familiar to us is not an inevitable response to being given a really bad hand. If it was, it would have ruled black America, really, starting in the early 1600s. It is one of many responses possible. The one we know is only so common because in the sixties it became possible—and only then." – pp. 167–70

"In 2000, the New York Times solicited opinions for one of those Conversations on Race, in which black psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum...intoned...the solution is 'a structured dialogue about race relations.'

"[W]hat, exactly, would the 'structure' be?...The 'structure'...will be imposed upon the whites. That is, the 'structure' will be one in which Tatum gets what she wants: People like her get to decry with no obligation to make sense, while whites have a choice between nodding sympathetically or being tarred as racists. Anything other than this will not satisfy her[.]

"Logic does not allow that Tatum requires this out of a genuine sense that it will achieve anything for black America. After all, people like her have been foisting this kind of 'structured dialogue' upon white America for forty years, and yet remain aggrieved that a debt remains unpaid to black people, that the day has not yet come when whites across our nation get down on their knees and 'understand,' and forthwith somehow render all blacks backyard-barbecuing middle-class Cosby Show homeowners. Tatum has seen no evidence that this kind of 'dialogue' has any concrete effect—but continues to call for it in prominent venues.

"This is because what really drives her is personal. When one feels inferior to whites deep down, one is uncomfortable presenting oneself as a self-directed individual. That individual wouldn't be good enough. So one seeks a tribal identity, hiding oneself within a multitude living for an abstract ideology larger than any one person. That ideology is one lending a substitute identity, one seductively easy to fall into and soothing to the soul for someone whom history divested of anything more connected with reality. That is an identity based on being the noble underdog battling an evil machine—regardless of what is actually happening in the land that one's ancestors turned upside down to make one's life and career possible." – pp. 184–5

"People embrace alienation as a way of hiding from facing the real world as self-realizing individuals....The New York Times portrayed an aspiring young rapper philosophizing about the problematic tendency for hip-hop to celebrate black pathology. He hit it right on the nose: The nasty lyrics are about the fact that 'I'm valid when I'm disrespected.'" – p. 335

"A black film industry executive says the following in 2005:

I don't think much has changed for black films....

"This man, too, is hindered by history from standing on his own two feet. He is willfully ignoring the heartening progress under his very nose because endlessly rehearsing the same old anti-whitey theatrics gives him a sense of comfort. He is part of a herd nurturing a predictable and eternally self-affirming ideology. He affirms himself via the presumed affirmation of that herd, not via affirmation of himself alone. He stays with that herd because he would not quite know how to affirm his sense of self-worth outside of a herd, as just an individual, himself, engaging with the complexities of the world as it actually is. This is not surpising given the history of his people. However, the fact remains that the worldview of people like this—with the injustices of history resoundingly acknowledged, regretted, and even reviled—does not correspond to current reality. I have ventured an argument as to why, and I do not mean it as a dismissive one. But I do believe that a truly progressive orientation toward black America must refrain from treating views like this as valuable counsel.

"The view that what black America needs is for whites from the suburbs to the Capitol to face their inner racism and learn of remnant racial discrepancies is not complex. Nor is it even accurate, as our pre–Civil Rights ancestors knew so well. It is performance, by people who made the best of themselves with neither of those things even in the cards. But other black people need help now. As they sit mired in what American cultural history did to them, basic morality leaves no room for luckier blacks to nurture a self-indulgent tic passing as politics, thought, and compassion.

"Forty years ago this same tic distracted white and black America into turning black communities across the nation into hells on earth. We're still living with the consequences. Under the influence of this tic, instead of overcoming, we condemn ourselves to merely undergoing. We must take a deep breath, rub our eyes, put our shoulders back, and let this tic go—free at last." – pp. 389–91

Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.