For my post today about John McWhorter’s 2000 book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, I’d like to talk about McWhorter’s discussion of crime. On pages 13-15, McWhorter seeks to refute what he calls “Article of Faith Number Five” in the “cult of victimology.” This article of faith states that “The Number of Black Men in Prison Is Due to a Racist Justice System".
McWhorter does not believe that this is true, for he maintains that
the number of African-American men in prison relates to statistics that
“nationwide blacks commit…42 percent of the violent crimes in the
country”, not a racist justice system. At the same time, McWhorter does
acknowledge that racism may be behind why African-American men commit
crimes. McWhorter states: “The reason they commit more crimes
is surely traceable to racism, which left a disenfranchised people on
the margins of society and most vulnerable to antisocial behavior.”
That raises a question in my mind: to what extent does McWhorter
believe that racism is responsible for the negative condition of poor
African-Americans? McWhorter refers to statistics indicating that most
African-Americans are not poor and do not live in the ghetto. This is
an important argument, yet one cannot ignore that even the statistics
that he cites indicate that 20 per cent of African-Americans live in
ghettos, and about a fourth live in poverty. That is still a sizable
number, even if it is not a majority. Remember that the number of
people who were unemployed during the Great Depression was around 20
percent.
Does McWhorter believe that the condition of poor African-Americans
is due to racism, or to other factors? A white conservative may look at
this information and say, “Well, if most African-Americans are not
poor, that shows it is possible for them to succeed, so those who do not
succeed must be at fault.” Granted, McWhorter does argue that a number
of African-Americans are holding themselves back by their separatism
and their anti-intellectualism. But how easy is it for a poor
African-American to get out of the ghetto? I doubt that McWhorter would
say that everyone in America has the exact same shot at getting ahead.
Some people are born into situations over which they had no control,
and they find themselves unable to get out of them. Would McWhorter
agree that racism is at least one factor that keeps many people in the
ghetto from getting out of their situation?
I’d like to turn my attention now to the issue of disparities in drug
sentencing. Why does crack cocaine get a heavier sentence than powder
cocaine? McWhorter notes that the Congressional Black Caucus actually
supported such laws in the 1980′s because crack was decimating
African-American communities. McWhorter states that “whites were not
part of the murderous culture that was decimating blacks young and old
in the inner cities” (page 14). And McWhorter affirms that such laws
worked, for “Crack no longer terrorizes the inner cities as it once
did.”
McWhorter’s discussion here gives me some things to think about. I
still don’t think that it’s fair for African-Americans to get a harsher
sentence than a white person for using essentially the same drug, albeit
in a different form. I also think that the mass incarceration of
African-American men is a problem—-that it wrecks their future and takes
fathers from the home. I certainly wouldn’t go to the other extreme
and say that there should be no legal penalties. I just wonder if there
is a way to have law and order, and to be humane about it.