Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America
by John H. McWhorter
Free Press. 285 pp. $24.00

By any measurable standard, the advances of black Americans over the past several generations have been remarkable. Yet, for every statistic indicating that blacks have moved into the mainstream of American life, there is something or other that many blacks take to be evidence of a poisonous and abiding racism, from white America’s refusal to entertain “reasonable doubts” about the case against O.J. Simpson to the killing of Amadou Diallo by white members of the New York police department. If black teenagers tend to perform below their white counterparts on the SAT, or the incarceration rate is far higher for blacks than whites, this, too, is said to be a sign of racial prejudice.

The sad fact is that, for all the progress African-Americans have made since the 1960’s, they have the dubious distinction of having become some of the country’s most avid producers and consumers of what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style in American politics.” Nor, apparently, is this paranoia susceptible of being defused by reasonable argument, which in recent years has been in abundant supply. Authors like Shelby Steele, Stanley Crouch, and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom have attained notoriety in public-policy circles, and earned the execration of the vast majority of black academics and intellectuals, by questioning the reigning orthodoxies of the black community, and by venturing alternative explanations for the social pathologies that, despite the many gains, continue to afflict much of black America.

Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America is the latest, and arguably the most anguished, book in this dissenting school of thought. A black professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, John McWhorter may seem an unlikely candidate to lead the charge against the self-deceptive outlook of many blacks and those who, in his view, “unwittingly encourage” it. Yet his own experience has convinced him that “black America is currently caught in certain ideological holding patterns that are today much, much more serious barriers to black well-being than is white racism.” Acknowledging that such views may brand him as a traitor among his friends and colleagues, McWhorter nonetheless makes clear his determination to alert blacks to the attitudes and beliefs within their own community that “preserve and reinforce their status as ‘other,’ and a pitiable, weak, and unintelligent ‘other’ at that.”

According to McWhorter, the “self-sabotage” of black America primarily manifests itself in three ways. To begin with, there is the “cult of victimology,” which treats “victimhood not as a problem to be solved but as an identity to be nurtured.” From their youngest days, he writes, African-Americans are encouraged “to fixate upon remnants of racism and resolutely downplay all signs of its demise,” an attitude that ends up convincing them that they possess less power and freedom than they actually do.

When victimology is combined with separatism—the second element in McWhorter’s indictment—the results are socially disastrous. As young blacks are taught that their status as sufferers makes them “an unofficial sovereign entity” within American society, many draw the conclusion that they are “morally exempt” from “the rules other Americans are expected to follow.” Indeed, McWhorter is bold enough to suggest that this stubborn rejection of the social norms prevailing in non-black America explains why blacks continue to be hired and promoted in the corporate world at lower rates than whites.

Still more damaging, by McWhorter’s lights, is the final element in the self-sabotage of black America: anti-intellectualism. As he points out (and he is not alone in this), it is common for intelligent black students to face unusually severe peer pressure from other black children who accuse them of “selling out” and “becoming white” if they do well in school. This tendency to treat ignorance as a mark of authenticity, McWhorter contends, is what leads so many middle-class black students to earn “substandard grades even in well-funded suburban school where teachers are making Herculean, culturally sensitive efforts to reach them.”

In a more personal vein, McWhorter also explores at great length the debilitating psychological effects of affirmative action. In secondary school, he writes, he himself “quite deliberately refrained from working to my highest potential because I knew that I would be accepted to even top universities without doing so.” For talented blacks, indeed, such decisions are rational—since “almost every black child knows from an early age that there is something called affirmative action which means that black students are admitted to schools under lower standards than whites.” But the process is also deeply insidious: for all the emphasis placed on “self-esteem” by today’s educators and policy-makers, affirmative action deprives individual blacks of the knowledge that their accomplishments have been justly earned, thus systematically undermining their sense of self-worth.

Nor does McWhorter have any patience for the rather different psychology that prevails among the most vocal white proponents of affirmative action. Indeed, he saves his most trenchant remarks for those academics and intellectuals who, out of guilt for past injustices, help to perpetuate the “liberal consensus” on preferential policies. William Bowen and Derek Bok, the former presidents of Princeton and Harvard, come in for especially harsh words for their much-publicized book defending affirmative action,¹ as does the legal theorist Ronald Dworkin. But the main burden of McWhorter’s ire falls on the sociologist Nathan Glazer, who famously dropped his long-standing opposition to affirmative action in 1998 just as several states were finally beginning to reverse the policy. Glazer may wish “to atone for what was done” by past generations, McWhorter writes, but the effectual truth of his quest for absolution is to turn young blacks into “mythic victims,” as if he “were writing a play rather than grappling with living breathing human beings in the present tense.”

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Though some readers might wish that McWhorter had broadened his critique to include the civil-rights establishment and its minions in the Democratic party, Losing the Race is an extraordinarily courageous book. Today’s elite college campuses are among the last places one is likely to hear a genuinely open debate about race. The officially sanctioned view is that popular initiatives like California’s Proposition 209 (which banned the use of racial preferences by the state or its agencies) are selfevidently evil. McWhorter has dared to break with this consensus.

The result, one fears, will be the academic equivalent of excommunication. As McWhorter himself recognizes, his book is unlikely even to be read by his colleagues, who are more likely to dismiss it out of hand than to take issue with it. His willingness to endure such treatment in the name of defending certain unpalatable truths is something for which his readers—not to mention untold numbers of young blacks still struggling for a “normal” life in America—are deeply in his debt.

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¹ For an extended discussion, see “Racial Preferences: What We Now Know” by Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom in COMMENTARY, February 1999.

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