I finished John McWhorter’s Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America,
but I will most likely still be referring to it as I blog about other
books for Black History Month. In this post, I will highlight something
that McWhorter says on page 217:
“The truth is that today, all of our anecdotes are valid and
representative of the lives of million of black Americans. I am not
‘lucky’ or ‘odd’ or ‘different’ to have never been barred from a store
as a black man in the year 2000—-I am ordinary! What all of the
anecdotes good and bad spell is the reality—-racism is not dead (Nathan
McCall, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Patricia Williams), but the situation is
strikingly better than it was a few decades ago and is getting better
all the time (Orlando Patterson, Glenn Loury, Randall Kennedy).”
Reality, in my opinion, is not always easy to emplot. That’s why
questions were swimming around in my mind as I was reading McWhorter’s
book. For example, McWhorter talks about a trend of
anti-intellectualism that he has observed within the African-American
community, and he argues that this is what explains lower
African-American SAT scores and academic achievement. Yet, in arguing
against affirmative action for higher education, he seems to believe
that many African-American students are advancing on their own merits,
without the help of affirmative action. After a proposition in
California banned affirmative action for public universities, McWhorter
notes, African-American enrollment declined at Berkeley, but it
increased for solid second-tier universities. So which is it? Are
African-American students holding themselves back through
anti-intellectualism, or are they earning decent enough grades and SAT
scores to get into second-tier universities without affirmative action
lowering the bar for them? Perhaps both are true, depending on where
one chooses to look. And perhaps, notwithstanding McWhorter’s arguments
against the idea that the poor quality of inner-city schools is a
significant factor holding African-American students back, there is
actually something to the narrative that McWhorter is challenging.
Jonathan Kozol is not getting his narratives from nowhere!
People have their own stories and experiences. An African-American
once told me about how white people who were less qualified than he was
were being promoted over him, and he also mentioned his attempt to get
an apartment, and the landlord didn’t want to rent it to him because he
was black. A black man from Barbados said to me that he tried to get a
job at a fast food restaurant, and the manager told him that he didn’t
hire blacks. Try telling them that racism is no longer a problem!
Granted, there may be laws against this kind of discrimination (though I
am not knowledgeable about what exactly they say), but how many people
have the time and the resources to spend in court challenging
discrimination?
Then there was something that a white man once told me. He wondered
why African-American students who went to high school with him got
advantages due to affirmative action. I couldn’t tell him about the
plight of African-Americans in inner-city schools because the students
he was talking about went to the exact same school that he did. That
told me that, while the conservative view that racism was dead was
flawed, so were some of the liberal narratives that I was hearing. Or
maybe there is something to different narratives that are out there,
since people have different experiences.