Keep on 'em, Cos!

From USA Today:

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Bill Cosby, who has ignited controversy in the past with his sometimes scathing rebukes, criticized teachers and parents at a weekend education conference, saying they don't do enough to help kids.

Cosby spoke Saturday at a forum called "Education Is a Civil Right." Hundreds of Los Angeles-area parents, teachers and students attended the event at Maranatha Community Church.

Cosby, 69, was critical of black parents, saying they don't involve themselves enough in their children's education and don't know what their children are doing.

"We've got parents who won't check the bedrooms of their children to see if there's a gun," he said.

He chided teachers for not offering clear explanations to children who ask why courses such as English and algebra are necessary.

"If you teach English and you can't answer this child, then you're in trouble, and we've been in trouble," Cosby said. "We can't answer these children, because nobody's given them any goals."

In the past, Cosby has criticized some black children for not knowing how to read or write, said some had squandered opportunities the civil rights movement gave them and said whites are unfairly blamed for problems in the black community such as teen pregnancy and high dropout rates.

By the way, for those who would like to read Cosby's May 2004 speech - the speech that started it all - in its entirety, click here.

First of all, let me just say that I believe that marital infidelity is wrong, no matter who initiates it. Marriage is a sacred institution that should never be defiled in that way.

Having said that, I just finished reading “Gorgeous Disaster: The Shocking Story of Debra LaFave,” co-authored by ex-husband Owen LaFave and Bill Simon. My heart goes out to Owen and any other husband (or wife) who has had to endure what no spouse should ever have to.

Owen tells the story of his and Debra's upbringing, how they met, their wedding, and the horrible events that ruined their short marriage and thrust the issue of female sex offenders back into the national spotlight.  Owen LaFave loved Debra Jean Beasley. Fully aware of the emotional and psychological problems she had been dealing with since childhood (being raped at 13, having a controlling mother, living through the death of her older sister), he still loved her and wanted to spend his life with her. Furthermore, he did everything a loving, supportive husband should do in encouraging her to get the professional help she needed to ultimately conquer her inner demons.

How does Debra repay him? By not only cheating on him, but also adding insult to injury by having an affair with a 13-year-old boy!  From police reports and eye-witness interviews, As painful as it must have been, Owen recounts how Debra seduced her young victim into an adulterous, sexual relationship.  One can virtually feel the emotional agonizy that Owen must have felt having to retell the sordid details of his wife's extramarital flings with a boy.  Owen also recounts his ex-wife's trial and the national and international media circus surrounding it, as well as the circumstances that led to Debra receiving a plea deal where she would avoid prison altogether.

(Under the terms of her plea deal, Debra LaFave will be under house arrest for the next three years on intensive probation for another seven.  She’s not allowed to leave home except for work and essential errands.  She’s a registered sex offender, who’s not allowed to work with children or live within a thousand feet of a school.  She wears an electronic ankle bracelet—her every movement tracked. She’s now on medication to treat bipolar illness.)  

In addition to her crime, there are other aspects about the Debra LaFave case that I find absolutely repulsive.

1. She escaped jail time. The double standard at work here in obvious. If it were a 23-year-old MALE teacher who had had sex with a 13-year-old FEMALE student, I’m willing to bet the farm that he would be serving 10 – 15 years behind bars as I type this review (with the first five years in solitary confinement). I don’t care if it is a woman who had sex with a boy (at least Mary Kay Letourneau served seven years behind bars). I don’t care how much of a "knockout" Debra LaFave is (according to Matt Lauer). She broke the law, and should have been punished to the fullest extent thereof. The fact that she was not just goes to show that the outcome was indeed, as Owen rightly states, “a travesty of justice.”

2. During her press conference after her plea deal, Debra introduced a pre-Owen ex-boyfriend as her new fiancé, Andrew. As Owen recounts in his book, after their divorce, Debra not so subtly enticed this guy away from a woman to whom he was engaged to be married and with whom he had a daughter. Debra has the dual distinction of not only wrecking her own life and the life of her underaged victim, but she also wrecked the life of another woman by usurping her fiancé and father of her child. (For his part, Andrew ain’t exactly “Man of the Year,” either, leaving a devoted woman who loved him and the child they have together to get back with an adulterous, sex-offending vixen whom he has supposedly "been in love with since high school."  Right.  But I digress.)

3. Debra showed virtually no remorse for what she did. She blamed her “bipolar” condition; she blamed the media. Not once did she take responsibility for the lives she ruined and the devoted and faithful husband whose heart she crushed. Despite her half-hearted apology to her young victim, not once did she apologize to the man who sure as heck deserves it: Owen.

Her emotional and psychological problems are no excuse for what she did. As Owen says in the book, people who are victims of rape or suffer bipolar disorder get the help they need and go on to live normal, productive and law-abiding lives – they don't use their condition as an excuse to cheat on their spouses and/or commit lewd and lascivious conduct with minors!

Debra LaFave is a selfish, immature, home-wrecking little Jezebel. She should hang her head in shame for the rest of her life, as well as any man-hating, radical feminist loser who would dare try to defend her.

Speaking of which, here is what one Amazon.com reviewer had to say about Owen LaFave:

Owen does a remarkable job of making himself look like a complete jerk. He comes off as arrogant, showing little empathy towards Debra's problems earlier on in their marriage ( eating disorder, depression, social anxiety). He writes about very private matters in his book that have nothing to do with the legal trouble Debra was in, but instead are very embarrassing to her. He comes across as a husband with no compassion. It's ironic that he goes on and on about Debra's poor choices in boyfriends over the years, and how they were always so controlling of her....and then he goes on to tell us how mad he was because he was a tidy person and Debra didn't keep the house tidy...and he didn't approve of the way she dressed!! Seems to me that he was no different than the other guys she dated. He repeatedly reminds us of how smart he is, his GPA, jobs, earning potential, etc...but then admits that when they separated, he sticks Debra with the credit card bill that still had a balance from their wedding and honeymoon to pay off! He says it was in her name, so she can have it! Owen shows how little a man he really is in this book. Debra did have horrible things happen to her as a kid, and maybe if she could have married a man with compassion in his heart, she wouldn't have gone down the road she did. I feel very sorry for Debra after reading this book.

Obviously, this woman doesn't have a man in her life, nor does she deserve one if this is how she views Owen after what he's gone through.  Here is my response to this individual:

It's obvious that, like Debra LaFave, you've got some serious "male issues." I just finished reading "Gorgeous Disaster," and I couldn't disagree with you more. If anything, Owen LaFave should have received an award for "Husband of the Year." Knowing she had childhood rape and other issues, Owen still fell in love with Debra Beasley, wanted to have a life with her, and did everything in his power to encourage her to get the continual professional help she needed. And what did she do? She broke his heart (to put it ever-so-mildly).

Not only did she cheat on him, but she did so with a 13-year-old kid. She humiliated her husband, soiled her family name, destroyed her lifelong dream of being a teacher, and pretty much ruined her own life. In addition, after she escaped having to serve time in prison (which, as Owen writes, was a gross miscarriage of justice). During her press conference, did you notice how she barely showed any remorse at all? She blamed her bipolar disorder; she blamed the media. But she never took any responsibility for her horrible actions or their consequences. She never said "What I did was inexcusably wrong, and I'm sorry for all the pain I caused." What's worse, she never apologized to Owen LaFave, her then-husband, the man who pledged to love her "'til death do us part," the man whose heart she utterly crushed.

The fact that you think Owen is the bad guy while saying nothing about what Debra LaFave did just goes to show that YOU might need to take a good look in the mirror. You trash a justifiably angry [ex-] husband, yet make excuses for his adulteress, convicted sex offender ex-wife. Nice.

With all due respect, get a clue.

I was glad to read that Owen LaFave has risen from the ashes of this horrible nightmare like the Phoenix. Remarried, a new father, and a successful entrepreneur, this experience has only made him a stronger and better person.  Good for him! He also collaborated on a documentary dealing with female teachers who have sex with students called After School. 

(I just hope that, unlike the unworthy former Mrs. LaFave, Owen’s new bride realizes what a great guy she has, and will love, respect and cherish him accordingly. Good men like him deserve nothing less.)

For those who would criticize Owen LaFave for “profiting” off of his experience by writing a book, I say the man has every right to tell his side of the story. If he makes a few bucks off of the sale of “Gorgeous Disaster,” more power to him.

This book is a cautionary tale on many levels, and a powerful must-read by a good man.

Several years ago, John McWhorter went from being a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley to one of America’s premier authorities on black American culture and contemporary race relations. His 2000 book Losing the Race, which analyzes how black American progress has been stymied since the Civil Rights Movement by a three-pronged cultural mindset of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism, became a runaway New York Times best-seller. Mr. McWhorter looked at other aspects of modern black American culture and race issues in his 2003 follow-up, Authentically Black. Now, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, he returns with a new book entitled Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America, offering an even deeper examination of the state of African-Americans by examining the root causes of the problems plaguing poor black communities today, including persistent poverty, crime, drug addition, and illegitimacy.

I had the pleasure of interviewing John McWhorter earlier this year about his new book, the lasting impact of Losing the Race, and where he foresees in terms of race relations and black American culture in the future.

Dutch Martin: First of all, John, thanks so much for agreeing to answer a few questions for the Townhall community. Before getting into your new book, Winning the Race, please tell TH readers briefly about your personal and professional background.

John McWhorter: I was born in Philadelphia in 1965 and had what I suppose was a classic post-Civil Rights black middle class existence. I have a BA in French, an MA in American Studies, and got my PhD in linguistics at Stanford in 1993. My first teaching job was at Cornell, and after a year I moved to UC Berkeley. In 2002, I took a year off to be a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York after I had developed a relationship with them over the previous couple of years, and in 2003 I decided to make the move permanent. So currently I am a linguist without dossier (I still do research and writing in linguistics, attend conferences, etc.) and am officially a Manhattan Institute employee.

DM: I’d like to briefly discuss how the success of Losing the Race has changed your life. There is no question that when the book came out in 2000, it all but turned the debate on contemporary race relations on its head. What motivated you to write it?

JMcW: I’m not sure LOSING THE RACE turned the race debate on its head, but I do get the feeling that it has played a small part in making views on race beyond hard leftist ones more acceptable in public discourse. My writing it was based on a series of chance experiences (rather than, as some suppose, me deciding to write a controversial book that would get me hired by a conservative think tank and get me on TV!). I had a hard time seeing the OJ verdict the way most educated blacks around me did, nor did I see the Million Man March as exactly progressive, especially in its exclusion of women. But then during the Ebonics controversy in late 1996, I was called upon for my view -- simply because I was a black linguist at nearby Berkeley (the chance factor). When I told the media that I didn’t think Black English had anything to do with black students’ problems in school, I found much to my surprise that I was the only black linguist taking that view, and suddenly found myself sought after by the national media in a way that I never had before. What really struck me, though, was that many blacks and allied whites came to despise me for not saying that Black English needed to be used in classrooms -- even though many of them a few years later told me that they basically agreed with my views. In other words, these people expected me to distort the truth when the cameras were rolling.

It was at this point that I first ran up against the leftist orthodoxy in academia, which I had never before had much reason to think about. I thought of myself as a good liberal -- it was how I was raised -- but I also have a hard time dealing with things not making basic sense. People were hating on me because I put logic over tribalism. It stuck with me.

In any case, still, no one would have ever heard of me again if there had not been, a year later, at Berkeley a massive outcry over the discontinuation of racial preferences. All over campus people were saying that preferences had been bringing students to campus whose low grades and test scores were the result of blue-collar incomes and underfunded schools. But it just happened that I was joint-appointed between Linguistics and Afro-American Studies, and thus had more exposure to black students in large numbers than I would have otherwise. (Again, so much was about chance -- if I hadn’t had that double appointment then I wouldn’t have had such a perspective, would never have said anything, and would still be a happy linguist in California.) But from what I experienced every day, I could see that what made the black students -- mostly middle-class -- underperform was attitude, and that we were dealing with a cultural legacy of segregation, not just economics alone.

The empirical gulf between what I saw as the truth and what was being indignantly preached around me day after day really tore me up. It was the day that a black student said in my office that, as I recount in LOSING, black students performing at the high level that mainstream admissions standards required would probably not be interested in the black community at Berkeley that I was moved to bang out an essay on my thoughts.

Then, again just by chance, my agent -- who I had worked with when I wrote a book on the Ebonics controversy, WORD ON THE STREET that has probably sold a couple thousand copies in eight years -- had a web page devoted to, usually, essays by the scientists who are the bulk of their stable. Once I wrote my essay, I pitched it to them just so that it would appear somewhere, as back then there was no way any newspaper or magazine would care about what I had to say. So they put it up, and even though this was before the internet was as entrenched as it is now, it elicited a certain response from the other scientists, and -- I think this was the sequence -- the New York Times then asked me for an op-ed based on it, rejected it as too right-wing, but were kind enough to pass me on to someone at the Wall Street Journal, who published the op-ed to, again, a certain response but that’s it. The hot issue at the time was the Lewinsky scandal, not race issues.

But on the basis of that, my agent asked me if I wanted to do a book-length manuscript on the subject. At first I said no -- who would care what some linguist had to say about race? But I kept thinking about it and the agent kept pushing, and then there was something else fortuitous, which is that word processing makes writing physically and even mentally easier than it would have been twenty years before. And I write pretty fast. So I thought, why not? I thought it was time someone wrote about things like this who was “young” but not a kid, i.e. in their early thirties, and I thought some of the observations I had might be at least worth reading.

I also liked the idea of there being a book out there that let people know where I stood on such things, since it got a little wearying over the years that so many people of all colors had my politics written out for me just because of the color of my skin -- which is no knock on them because at that time, “conservative” black perspectives were so marginal in the public conversation. There had been Shelby Steele’s magnificent book -- but he was thought of as a kind of lonely “controversial” figure. Tom Sowell likes to keep things academic, and Glenn Loury’s views had already moved away from his older ones. Ward Connerly was thought of as just the devil incarnate, and in his call to get beyond race entirely, was unlikely to be embraced by people who didn’t agree with the usual leftist orthodoxy but weren’t ready to call themselves “just people” instead of black.

And in general, what I wanted to do was to address closely the convictions of that black leftist orthodoxy and show that there were other ways of looking at such things, rather than couching my views as if a right-leaning perspective were self-evident. I am still committed to suasion over proclamation, which is why one thing I regret but could not avoid about WINNING THE RACE is that it is longer than my preferred 280-or-so pages. There is so much argumentation that requires, I think, careful counter-argumentation, and that requires facts, points, and more facts.

DM: Reading Losing the Race opened my eyes to ways that many blacks think that I had never been fully privy to. It definitely gave me a better understanding as to why black students, as a whole and regardless of class, academically underperform compared to students from other ethnic and cultural backgrounds. In particular, reading the section on anti-intellectualism brought back some vivid and painful memories for me personally of being ridiculed and ostracized for “acting white,” because I spoke correct English and took my education seriously. What have been some of your own experiences dealing this anti-intellectual attitude from blacks?

JMcW: Well, I describe a lot of them in LOSING THE RACE. Basically, there is a certain sense that for black people, mental firepower is to be aimed at black issues, and that beyond that, close engagement with the scholarly is at best odd and at worst disloyal. For example, I recall an interview with a Latino Berkeley professor who was indignant that whites tended to assume that he was in the Latin-American Studies department. Well, in my experience, black people stereotype me in exactly the same way, including ones before I had any public presence and ones who today don’t know of my work. Now, it’s not as if this is universal -- there are pockets in black culture where the nerd can be comfortable. But still, things like that comment about high-performing black students at Berkeley are indicative -- imagine a Chinese-American student saying that, for example. It’s inconceivable.

The reasons black people often think that way are understandable -- it’s a rejection of Establishment mores that took root especially in the late 1960s amidst the new oppositional “Black Power” ideology, which as I describe in WINNING THE RACE had an influence far deeper than on hairstyles, movie plots and the new influence of artists like Amiri Baraka. And that oppositional ideology, as I have tried to stress in work after LOSING THE RACE, took such hold not because black people are “crazy,” but because black people hurt inside after centuries of oppression. Alienation can provide a substitute identity -- it can be, oddly enough, a comfort zone. But while it soothes the psychology, it hinders the sociology, so to speak. It helps hold us back.

DM: How did people (blacks, whites, students, other academics) generally respond after Losing the Race was published, and how has your life changed over the last several years?

JMcW: Predictably, the reviews from academics and top journalists were almost all scathing. But it quickly became clear that these people were just a sliver of the black population. I immediately started getting an avalanche of mail from black people all over the country who loved the book, while the hate mails were just a trickle (and, for some reason, became even less than that after about a year and a half). It’s often thought that LOSING THE RACE was simply condemned by “black people” and left me a “controversial” fellow all alone. But actually, the book was embraced by black people of all walks (I still get occasional letters from black men in prison who like it and have lost count of how many copies of it I have sent to prisons). Much to my surprise, it is now regularly assigned in classrooms, such that I can expect every November and April to get a bump of mails from high school and undergraduate students asking questions about it in preparation for final papers. I once got an odd message from someone at HarperCollins (who publishes the paperback version) marveling that LOSING THE RACE somehow just “sells itself” year after year without them having to do much to publicize it. There is nothing stranger to me than when I give a talk at a university and a bunch of students come up afterwards with copies of that book -- well-thumbed! -- asking for me to sign it. I never expected anything like it, especially five years later.

But there it is. And I guess it has “changed my life.” Based on it, I started being asked to write for magazines and newspapers regularly, and on the basis of that I have come to be seen as a commentator on race in general rather than just black students in school. Also, the media -- as well as a lot of people out there who follow race issues -- seem to have also realized that I am not, for whatever it’s worth, a right-wing ideologue but just someone who tries to make some kind of sense of things and lets the chips fall where they may. As such, venues like National Public Radio seem to allow me a place at the table, which I like, since I grew up listening to NPR and still am a huge fan.

Gradually it got to the point that I had, basically, two careers, and I find that I like it. One problem with academic work -- in linguistics, for example -- is that you cannot expect that any more than a hundred or so people will ever actually read anything you write in most cases, and I was always nagged a little as to how significant what I was doing was in anything but an abstract, noble sense of building on the stock of human knowledge. I have tried to get past that in linguistics by writing accessible books like THE POWER OF BABEL, but even there, only so many people will ever be interested in your little subject no matter how you couch it. But with my race work, I get to engage in commentary on real-life, urgent events.

But -- for me, that alone also feels unfulfilling: there is nothing more inert than an editorial from four years (or even four months) ago, and LOSING THE RACE is already becoming a period piece and will be only dimly comprehensible to young black people in about fifteen years. Plus, communicating in the media rarely allows you to get into detail or really represent all of the contours of an issue the way academic work does.

Moreover, my race work is always “controversial,” open to many interpretations and stirring people in their guts. That’s stimulating but exhausting. In academia, it’s about the facts, the argument, period, and even though I am “controversial” there too (my work on creoles has made me Public Enemy Number One among a certain cohort in academic linguistics, but that’s another story and about as uninteresting as my commentator one), the emotions cannot run as high, and the issues are more concrete.

So -- one day not too long ago, for example, I did one of the morning tapings of News and Notes with Ed Gordon on NPR, hopped on a subway uptown and spent a few hours researching the influence of Cornish on English in the Middle Ages at Columbia University, came home and did a radio interview on whatever the race issue of the week happened to be, worked on a handout for one of the linguistics conferences I was about to attend, finished Cornel West’s DEMOCRACY MATTERS and outlined the review I was assigned to write for it for the New York Sun, and then later that night stayed up till three AM banging out part of a chapter of the first draft of WINNING THE RACE. Gradually I have realized that this is, basically, “me.”

DM: In Authentically Black, your main point is that publicly cloaking black America in a mantle of perennial “victimhood” against an “ever-present” white racism (while privately stressing initiative and education) is for many blacks a cultural “badge of honor” as well as a balm to assuage personal/cultural insecurity. How did you come to this conclusion?

JMcW: You could say that I came to that conclusion from endless conversations with black people who readily say things I would agree with (or Bill Cosby) but bristle when such things are said in clear language when whites can hear them. In my conversations with so many people, what I hear is a deep discomfort not with what I am saying, but in how what I am saying may be misinterpreted by people “out there.” But we have to wonder just what, in the concrete sense, we are worried about. When we see that universities’ commitment to racial preferences is now so culturally embedded, for example, that even George Bush cannot come out and criticize them when the Supreme Court is about to render a decision on the issue, or that the University of California schools, after racial preferences are barred in that state, dutifully crafts a “disadvantage” metric in their admissions policy in order to address societal inequity by other means, then it is hard to perceive an ever-threatening “backlash” against blacks in that realm. Similarly, no one could get elected today proposing (Lord forbid) to abolish welfare programs entirely.

I think few people could truly identify evidence that anything Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Armstrong Williams, myself, or anyone else has said or written has led to any “backtracking” of this kind. Rather, what disturbs people is the sheer airing of any message beyond one depicting us as eternally “owed” and powerless. To them, this is just not the proper “tone” to be struck. This strikes me as evidence that we are to stress our own strength in private, but that we cannot trust the mainstream public to understand that our doing this will not mean that we need no help from the powers that be. They think that the public thinks of it as either-or: that either we are dependents or we pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, and that given a choice between the two, the bootstraps would be better. I suppose I am “controversial” in insisting that this underestimates what the public believes -- or at least the part of the public that has any influence on legislation.

DM: On a slightly different subject, I’d like to take you back to May 17, 2004 – the 50^th Anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision. As keynote speaker at a black-tie commemorative gala in Washington, DC, actor/comic/philanthropist Bill Cosby waylaid the audience and left members of the modern-day civil rights establishment in attendance reportedly “stone-faced.” In short, Dr. Cosby excoriated poor blacks for not taking advantage of the opportunities that Brown v. Board and the legal victories of the Civil Rights Movement made possible, chastised the poor command of the English language that many ghetto youth exhibit, mocked the romanticized view that many blacks have of Africa, and took low-income blacks to task for not being irresponsible parents – and he sugar-coated nary a word. (Since then, Dr. Cosby has taken his tough-love message of personal responsibility on the road to low-income communities across the country.) How did you react when upon hearing about Cosby’s speech?

JMcW: I imagined that the usual suspects of the black punditocracy would assail Cosby as ignorant but that Cosby’s cuddly persona, iconic status, and unquestioned bona fides as a Real Black Man would make it hard to entirely dismiss him. I guess that came true. Cosby’s not a professional scholar, and so naturally some of what he said does not stack up to scientific evidence. And I suppose he puts across the message in grumpy fashion -- but then, how effective is it when one more person says the same things with a smile, as countless people do in churches and at assorted public assemblies roughly once a day somewhere in America? To the extent that Cosby is stressing that the patient has to play a key part in learning to walk again even if the oppressor broke his legs, he is, quite simply, correct -- and because of his place in the culture, is uniquely situated to get that message across.

DM: Now on to your new book, Winning the Race. What was the impetus in writing it?

JMcW: WINNING THE RACE is a response to something else that I think distorts how we are taught to see black issues. Since LOSING THE RACE, I have realized that many thoroughly smart people think that it is “simplistic” to suppose that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Great Society legislation were enough to allow us to succeed. There is a certain take on black history since then that is thought to mean that what we need is a Second Civil Rights Revolution to fix new problems that hit blacks starting in the 1950s.

The idea is that there was a cocktail of factors that laid the ghettoes low even if legalized discrimination was abolished. Factory jobs moved to the suburbs and left uneducated blacks with nowhere to work. The black middle class moved out of the slums, and left poor blacks with no “role models.” Housing project buildings encouraged crime because they didn’t face the street and had long, dark stairwells where criminals could hide out. Highway construction dissipated blacks’ sense of “community.” Drugs “came in” and, well, what else could you expect?

If this historical analysis were correct, then indeed, black America is still owed a “debt” and will stand still until that debt is paid. But I don’t think this historical saga is correct. In Indianapolis, factory jobs stayed where they were, and the ghettoes still turned upside down. On the “exodus of the black middle class,” I am unaware of a single other group in human history where we are told that when all of them are poor, they end up shooting each other in the faces because there are no doctors and lawyers around. The housing projects were struggling but stable places until welfare laws were changed in the late sixties and created multigenerational families of people who barely knew work or fatherhood -- a largely untold chapter in black history that I devote a chapter to in WINNING THE RACE. As to drugs, heroin was a scourge in black neighborhoods long before crack -- but never destroyed the fabric of the community in such a way. The difference was in a breakdown of community norms. This was partly because of that hideous new welfare legislation that transformed AFDC from a safety net (good) to a lifestyle (awful). It was also because by this time, the new mood in the sixties elevated oppositionalism over coping. The two are not the same thing.

So, WINNING THE RACE is my attempt to get down to cases about such things. There are people, and a lot of them, who think that anything a black “conservative” says is deep-sixed by this historical analysis. I think they’re wrong -- there are other facts that this “good-thinking” perspective neglects. My hope -- and we’ll see if it is realized -- is that we can get past the idea that disagreeing with thinkers like Michael Eric Dyson is simply a sign of ignorance or a lack of compassion.

DM: You make a very strong case as to how the adoption of a counter-cultural, oppositional identity (cloaked in what you call “therapeutic alienation”), and the expansion of welfare precipitated the cultural downward spiral of poor blacks from the late-1960s onward. As one who grew up welfare-dependent family, this subject really hits home with me. Looking back on what welfare dependency has done to poor blacks over the years, how do you think the original supporters of open-ended welfare such as Columbia University social work professors Frances Cox Piven and Richard Cloward feel about it now?

JMcW: I am quite aware that they are unrepentant. They are committed leftists, and as far as they are concerned, the fact that the people they brought onto the welfare rolls were no longer spending their lives working as maids is a plus, even if the movement’s goal of forcing a guaranteed income never bore fruit.

I, for one, cannot look at pre-1966 America, where indeed the typical black woman labored in drudgery till the end of her life, as a good thing. Nor, however, can I see post-1966 America, where that woman’s daughters so very often never worked steadily at all and passed that lifestyle on to their own daughters, as any better. Given widening opportunities in the 1960s, things could have been better than the way it used to be, and certainly better than the way it was after 1966.

DM: In the final chapter of Winning the Race, you make the case for a New Black Leadership as well as a new way of thinking for black Americans. How do you think the Jesse Jacksons, Julian Bonds and Al Sharptons of the world, as well as “icons” of radical black academia such as Eric Michael Dyson and Cornell West will receive your book (that is, if they even bother to read it)?

JMcW: Well, you have it right there. How many people, in general, read long nonfiction books? We’re all so busy. Especially if the book is written by someone they classify as evil? And then, when it comes to high-flying superstars, they don’t need to engage people like me nattering away at the margins of their lives; they’re famous, adored, and busy. So -- I once did a radio debate with Jesse Jackson and got the impression that he was only dimly familiar with my work if at all (and perhaps as such there was no friction) so no, he will not read my new book. Julian Bond once very smoothly but decisively refused to acknowledge my presence when we were on a talk show together with some other people except for when the camera was rolling -- he was probably slipped something I wrote against the modern NAACP in 2001and thinks of me as slime, so no, he will not read my book. I find it unlikely that Reverend Sharpton has much of a relationship with the printed page, and so he will not read WINNING THE RACE and may never have heard of me. Dyson is harder to say: we met once and all was fine despite how differently we think. Maybe someone will ask him to review it. West, from what I see, is not given to engaging detractors on race issues: he is a very busy man, and is more “prophet,” as he puts it, than interested in historical analysis and the problem-solving mindset. He and I are in different businesses and so I doubt he would curl up with my book.

I am more interested in reaching people beyond that elite.

DM: Thanks again, John, for your time, and all the best with the new book.

The year is 2006, over 40 years into the post-Civil Rights era. In many areas of life, black Americans are much better off today than in the first half of the 20^th century. Yet even before the Civil Rights movement, poor and working-class black communities were relatively stable and progressive, in which families taught their children to embrace hard work, education and personal responsibility in the face of systemic racism. Such communities are a far cry from the poverty, welfare dependency, crime, drugs and fatherlessness that plague black ghettos today. What caused urban black America to descend into such a decadent state of social pathology from the late-1906s onward?

John McWhorter tackles this very important question in his new book, Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America. A prominent voice in the national race relations debate since his 2000 best-seller Losing the Race and critically-acclaimed follow-up Authentically Black, McWhorter returns with a brutally honest examination of the real reasons why inner-city black communities have taken a turn for worst since the second half of the 20^th century.

Using Indianapolis, Indiana as a case study, the author recounts many widely-held theories as to why black ghettos spiraled downward post-1960s, primary among them being that factories left the inner cities for the suburbs, thus leaving poor urban blacks without jobs. As widely held as this “factory-flight hypothesis” is in academia, a little-reported fact of 20^th century black history – the First and Second Great Migrations – blows it out of the water. As the author puts it, “When work disappears, people move,” and that’s exactly what happened in the immediate years following WW’s I & II: poor blacks left the Jim Crow South in massive numbers and migrated to northern cities and found jobs and an overall better way of life, in an era when racism, by no means non-existent in the North, was less institutionalized than south of the Mason-Dixon. (The Second Great Migration of the late-1940s, in fact, sowed the seeds for what would become the modern-day black middle-class.)

This begs the question: If blacks of an earlier era were able to successfully travel from one region of the United States to another to find work, then what prevented their urban-dwelling progeny from moving (or, at the very least, commuting by bus or carpool) just a few miles from the city center to the suburbs, where many (though by no means all) factory jobs relocated?

McWhorter further dispels the factory-flight belief by pointing out that, though many businesses did leave Indianapolis-proper, many more remained, and that city officials and local businesses went out of their way over the years to recruit, hire and train low-income, low-skilled blacks. However, as the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. What caused inner-city blacks post-1960s to lose their thirst for work? (Hint: It wasn’t racism.)

Two things caused the downward spiral of poor blacks in Indianapolis and nationwide to the modern-day black underclass with which we are so familiar today:

• Adoption of a defiant anti-Establishment mentality as part of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, cloaked in what McWhorter calls “therapeutic alienation,” in which righteous indignation against “the Man” for its own sake became praised by blacks and liberal whites alike as a badge of black authenticity; and
• The expansion of welfare from a temporary assistance program for widows with children to a federal bureaucracy that basically subsidized out-of-wedlock childbearing, personal irresponsibility and an aversion to work.

McWhorter devotes an entire chapter to the history of welfare and how, through an incremental relaxation of restrictions and a heavy recruitment of poor blacks who could have worked instead, it evolved into an open-ended public assistance by 1967.

These incremental changes… created “welfare as we knew it,” [where] a young woman who got pregnant in her teens had available to her a lifelong check from the government, regardless of whether the father[s] of her children worked for a living, and could keep picking up that check wherever and whenever she moved within the United States. No one black or white in the thirties, forties or fifties had known welfare of this kind…. This new version of welfare quickly took over poor black communities and became one of their defining traits. The nation’s welfare rolls increased by 107 percent from 1960 to 1970 – in contrast to only 17 percent from 1950 to 1960.

This “welfare culture” soon had such a stranglehold on poor blacks that the author quotes a welfare mother admonishing New York City mayor John Lindsey, “I’ve got six kids and each one of them has a different daddy. It’s my job to have kids, and your job, Mr. Mayor, to take care of them.” That such an attitude would have been unfathomable among poor blacks pre-1960s only drives home the point that times had surely changed.

McWhorter plunges into the roots of therapeutic alienation and its psychologically “analgesic” (to borrow Bill Cosby’s phrase) effects on blacks over the past 40 years. (In my interview with him accompanying this review, McWhorter put it this way: “Alienation can provide a substitute identity -- it can be, oddly enough, a comfort zone. But while it soothes the psychology, it hinders the sociology, so to speak. It helps hold us back.”) He devotes the last third of the book to explaining how the liberal academics and popular cultural elites have bought into it, and what needs to be done to finally get over it.

John Hamilton McWhorter, V, is a scholar whose research and insight into black American culture make his contribution to today’s race relations debate crucial for three reasons. First, he takes readers on a journey back in time to black life in America before the 1960s. In doing so, he shows that, despite living under brutal and systemic racial oppression, crushing poverty, and not far removed from slavery, hard-scrabble black folks carved out a sustainable existence for themselves by living by a cultural credo where you basically played the hand you were dealt in life as best you could.

Secondly, juxtaposing this earlier slice of black life next to the 1960s – where racism was on the down-slope and the overall economic situation for black Americans was improving – McWhorter demonstrates how embracing the Anti-Establishment Zeitgeist of the sixties all but nullified the cultural credo of that earlier era, thereby rendering blacks – especially the black poor – culturally worse off than previously. Lastly, in Winning the Race as well as in his two previous books, McWhorter offers a ray of hope on what can and should be done to make things better.

Winning the Race represents John McWhorter’s third installment on race and culture in America that will cause readers to look at these crucial issues in fresh new ways.

Black leaders in America have an unflinching allegiance to the political left and are part-and-parcel to the Democratic Party. They see no reason to change or reform existing race-based affirmative action programs. They are also out of step with the times.

This is the premise of John McWhorter in a collection of essays called Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority. Picking up where his bestseller Losing the Race left off, the author argues (rightly) that the civil rights era is over, and that the new battleground against racism requires individual initiative as opposed to collective action.

McWhorter critically dissects the icons and issues of black leadership from Randall Robinson's reparations book Randall Robinson's The Debt to Jesse Jackson's lucrative shakedown deals for himself and his wealthy black friends, not to mention Al Sharpton for perpetuating notions of victimhood and provoking racial tensions to suit his own selfish ends.

According to McWhorter, African-Americans in this country still remain "a race apart" nearly 40 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. He believes that modern blacks internalize a tacit message: "Authentically black" people stress initiative in private, but publicly cloak our race in victimhood to protect black people from an ever-looming white backlash. This done, he says, so as to not let white America "off the hook."

This thesis is the focus of McWhorter's opening essay, in which he identifies this "New Double Consciousness" in homage to W.E.B. DuBois' description of a different kind of double consciousness in blacks a century ago.

In one of the most important themes of Authentically Black, McWhorter asks us to stop emphasizing and exaggerating our plight and misery while treating our successes as anecdotal "exceptions" (a constant theme in more liberal black American discourse). In other words, let's focus more on the ubiquitously palpable examples of black American achievement, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice being two notable examples.

Another McWhorter target is oxymoronic ways of thinking that are central to the political left and modern black "leadership." He reiterates a point he made in Losing the Race - that black American success stories nowadays are not longer "exceptions." Black success is now the norm.

McWhorter observes that we cannot continue to stress how strong we are while still going to pieces in public displays of emotional histrionics - as some blacks are apt to do - upon hearing the dreaded n-word uttered by a white person (no matter the context).

John McWhorter proves he is not afraid to turn the microscope on black America, forcing us to take a hard look at how current radical groupthink hinders us from being the absolute best that we can be. Asian, Jewish, African and Caribbean immigrants serve as his examples of what a strong work ethic and love for education, inseading the constant whining, griping and victimologist moaning you hear from many native-born blacks, can accomplish. (But don't bring this up to a native-born black person; you might get slapped.) For this reason, however, black "flaming leftist" critics like Ishmael Reed resort to such childish tactics as labeling him "a rent-a-black who only writes and says what conservative whites want to hear" instead of trying to offer thoughtful rebuttals to his arguments.

Critics can't refute him, quite frankly, because they know deep down that McWhorter is telling the truth. Period.

John McWhorter presents the most refreshing and eye-opening contribution to the dialogue on American race relations since Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele gained prominence. Learned men like these, who dare challenge "sacred cows" of political and social thought in our community, are not sellouts. They are heroes. Ours is a better, more enlightened society because of their scholarly work.

Over the next several weeks, I will run reviews of books that I have written over the years.  These books have had an indelible impact on me ever since I embraced a conservative philosophy.  I hope that you will enjoy reading these reviews - and ultimately read the books themselves - as much I enjoyed writing them.

I'll start with the book that basically made me a conservative.  When it first ran three years ago as a Project 21 New Visions Commentary, I received a ton of positive e-mails from readers.  I was told that it was the biggest response to a New Visions piece Project 21 had ever seen.

Losing the Race, by John McWhorter

As the youngest of six children, the greatest gift I received from my dear, now-departed mother was an appreciation of the value of an education. This appreciation helped me rise from our poor surroundings in inner city Cleveland to become the successful black professional that I am today.

Heeding this lesson, however, was also the genesis of years of verbal abuse, ostracism and criticism I was forced to endure from other black people - from elementary school through graduate school. During these years, I was accused by my black brethren of "acting white" for using correct English, for making good grades and for having a sincere love of learning for learning's sake.

I could not understand why this happened until I read John McWhorter's 2000 book Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. As the Bible tells us in John 9:25, "Where once I was blind, now I see."

In Losing the Race, Dr. McWhorter, formerly a linguistics professor at U-C Berkeley, now a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, outlines in surgical detail three aspects of modern day black American cultural mentality, or "cults," that hold us back as a people. First is the Cult of Victimology, where victimhood is not seen as a problem to be overcome but an identity to be nurtured.  This way of thinking serves as a soothing agent for the racial insecurity that bedevils so many blacks, especially given our unique history in America.  It also enables many a black criminal, thug, and lowlife scumbag to absolve themselves from taking responsibility for their actions.

In the Cult of Separatism, the uniqueness of our history is used as a justification to exempt us from the rules that govern the rest of American society.  Using the black criminal as an example, this cult says that because (usually) is the product of a poor, fatherless home, the black thug should not be held to the same standard of accountability for breaking the law as, say, a white criminal (no matter his socio-economic background).  "Racial justice" dictates that the Damian Williams and Willie Hortons of the world be held to a "separate" (read: lower) standard of public decency, no matter how heinous their crimes.  (Think of the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial, and you'll see exactly what the author is talking about.)

Lastly, in the Cult of Anti-Intellectualism, an affinity toward education is seen as running counter to an "authentic" black identity.  This cult really hit home with me, and McWhorter's book let me know that I was not the problem.

An experience from graduate school, I hope, will better explain this cult at work. While enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University, I always actively and enthusiastically engaged in my own learning process: asking questions and engaging professors and other students on various topics. One of my fellow graduate students, a black woman from New York City, felt it necessary to talk to me about my behavior.

I expressed to me her concern that white students in our program who hadn't grown up around blacks (How she even knew this is beyond me) and who, therefore, were not used to being around "intelligent, articulate black men" like me would be "intimidated." She felt they might "try to use that against me in the future." In other words, white students might discriminate against me because of my love of scholarship! Thus, she advised, I should basically tone down my intellectual zeal.

I never forgot that conversation. After reading Losing the Race two years later, I realized that this woman's "concern" for my well-being was merely her own anti-intellectual attitude toward me - cloaked à la "whitey." In other words, this culturally - and thus, authentically - "down" sister from Brooklyn was dumping her own academic insecurity on me through the specter of supposedly socially ignorant white students who would supposedly retaliate against me for supposedly making them feel mentally inadequate. How lame is that!

McWhorter's book opened my eyes to the three self-defeating aspects of black American culture, over 40 years removed from the civil rights movement. It also re-ignited the love of learning that my mother instilled in me as a child. That love, as well as a faith in God, enabled this poor boy from Cleveland to become his high school valedictorian, become his family's first college graduate, earn a master's degree, and ultimately become a proud conservative.

My life has taught me, and Losing the Race reaffirmed, that education is the key to a beter life. There is no way I would sacrifice that just to gain the myopically fleeting acceptance of my "peers."  I no longer have the desire to fit in with the "in crowd" or be "down with my homeys."  I do not need anyone's "Ghetto Stamp of Approval."

This is a race that I plan to win.

Senior NPR correspondent and Fox News political analyst Juan Williams continues to catch major flack from the black left for "airing black dirty laundry" in his new must-read book, "Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America - and What We Can Do About It." 

As he writes in an October 12 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, instead of facing head-on the problems plaguing the black under-class (e.g. the 70% illegitimacy rate, 50% high school dropout rate, the 44% black prison population rate among other ills), as well as calling on the carpet the modern-day civil rights establishment for doing nadda, Williams writes that his critics are much more comfortable with calling him an "Uncle Tom," "sellout," a "black Ann Coulter," and accusing him of "demeaning black people."

Given the need of the black left to foster black victimhood and white guilt in order to stay in the game, their vilification of Williams is not surprising.  As conservative blogger La Shawn Barber puts it:

"Quoting the 70 percent illegitimacy rate statistic, drop-out rate, poverty rate, prison rate, criminal culture, etc., doesn’t play too well with leftist blacks because of the “dirty laundry” stigma. There’s no stigma against getting knocked up or having served time in prison, but if you talk about how much of it goes on in the black community in front of white people, ostracism and insults, baby.

I’ve learned in my four years of blogging and writing that to name a thing is worse than being the thing. Haven’t figured out how that works yet…

I applaud Juan Williams and encourage him, Bill Cosby (by whom Williams was inspired to write the book), and other like-minded blacks to keep speaking out.  Let the critics "hate on" you all they want.  In doing so, they're just reserving their place in the dust bin of irrelevance.

In July 2003, the United States Supreme Court ruled on two cases regarding the University of Michigan's use of affirmative action in undergraduate and law school admissions.  In the undergraduate case (Gratz v. Bollinger), the High Court ruled that the school's undergraduate admissions policy, which gave extra points for race and ethnicity, was unconstitutional, yet upheld the law school's use of race in admissions determinations (Grutter v. Bollinger).

Three new studies released this week by the Center for Equal Opportunity show that U-M's use of racial preferences in admissions has only intensified in subsequent years, particularly in undergrad, law and medical school admissions.

CEO Chairwoman Linda Chavez discusses the findings (which are available on the CEO website) in her new article.

"CEO looked at undergraduate, law school and medical school admissions at UM for 1999, 2003, 2004 and 2005, with information provided by the university under a freedom of information request. In all years and at all levels, the University of Michigan routinely admitted blacks and Hispanics with lower test scores and grades than whites or Asians -- and the differences were large.

In 2005, for example, the combined median SAT scores for blacks were 190 points lower (on a scale of 1600) than whites and 240 points lower than Asians. Similarly, blacks trailed whites in high school grade point averages by .5 and Asians by .4 (out of a potential 4.0). Over all the years analyzed, 8,000 whites, Asians and Hispanics were rejected who had higher grades and test scores than the median black admittee, including nearly 2,700 such students in 2005 alone.

The odds favoring black undergraduate admittees over whites with the same SAT scores in 2005 were 70 to 1, and 46 to 1 for Hispanics. And such preferences are not limited to undergraduate admissions, which arguably reflect greater disparities in opportunities among racial and ethnic minorities who may have attended poorer performing public schools. Blacks and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics also enjoy preferences in law and medical school admissions.

For example, odds ratios favoring black law school applicants over whites with the same test scores, grades, sex, Michigan residency and alumni connections were 36 to 1 in 1999, though they dropped to a still high 18 to 1 in 2005. For Hispanics, the odds ratios were 4 to 1 in 1999, 2 to 1 in 2003, and more than 3 to 1 in 2004 and 2005.

Perhaps the most disheartening evidence in the CEO studies, however, was that racial preferences don't even help the intended beneficiaries succeed in college. Based on college GPAs, Hispanics generally did less well than whites or Asians, though the best performing Hispanics (those whose grades put them at the 75th percentile) did about as well as their white and Asian counterparts in one year, 1999.

But blacks, who were awarded the greatest degree of preference in admission, performed more poorly than other groups across the board, with those blacks whose grades put them at the 75th percentile for their racial group performing below the 25th percentile for whites. And both blacks and Hispanics were far more likely to be put on academic probation during their undergraduate career.

Despite tons of empirical evidence proving that academically under-prepared minority students who are preferentially admitted - or to put it another way, "pervasively mismatched" - into competitive colleges and universities like the University of Michigan run a greater risk of dropping out than graduating within five years, U-M still refuses to revise its admissions policies accordingly.  In fact, according to a recent CEO press release, the school has actually accused CEO of releasing the results of the studies for political purposes.

"U-M spokeswoman Julie Peterson said in a statement: 'It is no coincidence that CEO has released this report in the weeks leading up to a ballot proposal [the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, similar to California's Prop 209] that would outlaw public affirmative in the state of Michigan."

To which Ms. Chavez responded:

“If the University of Michigan is unhappy with the timing of these studies, it has only itself to blame for taking eight months to supply us with the data. We would have liked to have released these studies much earlier. Unfortunately, the University of Michigan did not respond to our Freedom-of-Information request—which we filed in late 2005—until late this summer. We received no undergraduate data until this August. After we finally received the data, we prepared the studies as fast as we could, and they have been released in plenty of time for U-M to respond.”

If U-M really cares about educating disadvantaged minority students, then it needs to look at the results of California's Prop 209.  As Thomas Sowell writes in "Affirmative Action Around the World," Prop 209 resulted in a reshuffling of black and latino college applicants throughout the U-C and Cal State system that benefited them.  Black and latino entering freshmen were admitted to schools for which they were academically better suited.  Minority students who might not have been ready for the academic rigors of a top-tier school like UC Berkeley, were instead admitted to second- or third-tier (though no less respectable) schools like UC Davis or Cal State Northridge - schools from which they had a much better chance of graduating.

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times:  Black students, regardless of class, don't do as well in school as white and Asian students because of the anti-intellectual attitude that equates hitting the books with "acting white."  The sooner black parents take the lead in culturally deprograming their kids to stop thinking this way and start embracing education from the very beginning, the sooner we can begin to close this abyssmal academic achievement gap. 

Furthermore, it's high time we stop letting black youth pay the price for liberal do-gooder policies like racial preferences, which, instead of stressing hard work, initiative and learning, simply fan the flames of black victimhood and white guilt.  Just as California voters did in 1996, I hope that Michigan voters will do the right thing and vote for the MCRI, to ensure that black and latino students will be confident that they will be admitted to college based on merit, and not on the color of their skin.

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