LOSING THE BATTLE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 20, 2020
REFERENCE: Eric Hoffer writes of a
“Negro Revolution that never was,” while two scholars born during segregation, Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steel, and one after, John McWhorter, all African Americans in similar yet different ways are critical of the impact on Americans of color after segregation was declared unconstitutional by the
United States Supreme Court (1954), followed by the
Civil Rights Movement that included John F. Kennedy’s
“The New Frontier” with the Affirmative Action Plan (1961) against employment discrimination, promotions and access to higher education. JFD was assassinated (1963) but
1964 Civil Rights Act followed, then shortly after Dr. Martin Luther Kind, Jr. was assassinated, there followed the
1968 Civil Rights Act as part of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s
“Great Society,” the boldest, most sweeping and comprehensive guarantees for African Americans and other people of color ever before acted into American law.
Despite these legislative benchmarks to ensure due process and civil rights for African Americans, we have had the emotional combustibles reported here in 2020 during the pandemic.
Hoffer insists that one of the basic problems is that African Americans see themselves first as African Americans then as Americans, yet no citizen of the United States is in fact more American than African Americans as they have been here for over 300 years. In fact, Crispus Attucks, an American stevedore of African and Native American descent, is widely regarded as the first person killed in the Boston Massacre and thus the first American killed in the
American Revolutionary War. Liberal academics and students at the
University of California at Berkeley and
Stanford University often took Hoffer to task for insisting blacks did not do enough to remedy their situation. Hoffer, a white man, took it all in good cheer. The three scholars cited here are all black, and are even more insistent than Hoffer ever was that to change the dynamic is up to blacks and that all these attempts by well-meaning social engineers and politicians have failed, and will continue to fail. No surprise, the liberal community finds these African American schools “racial traitors.”
HOFFER & NEGROES
He lived with Negroes, as he was fond to report in his biographical writing, in a tenement house in San Francisco with a whore house below and noisy Negro families above.
He attended union meetings with Negroes as a member of the Longshoreman Union and worked on the docks with 2,000 longshoreman half of whom were black with many of his stories about work and life coming from this protean source of research.
Yet as perspicaciously sound as Hoffer’s research, and consistently reliable as his social psychological insights and observations, you would be hard pressed to find academics quoting his works on mass movements or life in early 20th century America as they do Alexis de Tocqueville’s of American life more than one hundred years earlier in early 19th century America.
It is obvious Hoffer is writing from a personal “hands on” perspective projecting his findings in wider conceptual terms. His writing on the American Negro, for example, has the ring of “having been there” with the critical poignancy and credulity of knowing Negroes as persons with a reliability as true today of African Americans in terms of
A Sense of Self, A Sense of Place & Space, and
A Sense of Self-Worth. When inequality is experienced, and yes, it is a contemporary fact of life with discrimination a terrible reality, few African Americans become rioters destroying and looting alongside equally deranged white sympathizers. These hoodlums however fail to move the scales one degree in the cause of social justice.
Hoffer writes:
Who would have dreamt that an unprecedented improvement in the lot of the Negro would result in burning and looting in cities; that the unprecedented affluence of the young would bring into being adolescent skid rows with adolescent whores, pimps, dope pushers, moochers and derelicts; that unprecedented opportunities for education would bring anarchy to places of learning? Whereas medical doctors when they prescribe a new drug warn the patient against dangerous side effects, our quacks of the body politic assume their prescribed reforms can never go wrong. We know now that in human affairs there is no certainty that good follows from good and evil from evil. As we enter the last third of the century it ought to be self-evident that when a society sets out to purge itself of iniquities and shortcomings it should expect the worst and grid itself for a crisis that will test its stability and stamina. A just society must strive with all its might to right wrongs even if righting wrongs is a highly perilous undertaking. But if it is to survive, a just society must be strong and resolute enough to deal swiftly and relentlessly with those who would mistake its good will for weakness.
It is questionable whether the Negro revolution can do much for the Negro. The Negro’s future in this country will be determined by his ability to compete and excel. If the Negro cannot learn to strive and build on his own he will remain lowest man on the totem pole no matter how explosive his slogans and how extravagant his self-dramatization. Nevertheless, the Negro revolution is a fateful event because of its effect on non-Negro segments of the population. It is an illustration of the fact that the most important revolutions are those other people make for us. The effect of the Negro revolution on the non-Negro young is as unexpected as it is puzzling. Why have the young so whole heartedly adopted the Negro’s way of life? The Negrification of the young will have profound and durable effects on language, sexual mores, work habits and the attitude towards drugs. Even the young white racists are Negrified and do not realize it.
Equally fateful is the effect of the Nero revolution on ethnic groups. Not only have Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and Indians been emboldened to use the Negro’s tactics, but the entrance of the Negro into the mainstream of American life is bringing about a reversion of the process of amalgamation in the melting pot. Everywhere you look you can see some degree of ethnic crystallization. The fact that the WASP upper crust has shown a tendency to conciliate Negro militants at the expense of those in the middle has caused the ethnics to lose faith in the Mayflower boys. A Linsky now running for office would not dream of changing his name to Lindsay.
The Negro is also bringing the policeman onto the political stage. Policemen are being elected mayors of large cities and, should disorder escalate, we may have a policeman running for President.
Finally, the Negro revolution is transplanting the South to the big cities, and there is a chance that the South will break out of its political isolation. A sophisticated Southern politician who has stripped himself of Confederate impedimenta can now run for national office and find a constituency in the hard-pressed brooding white masses in most of the big cities (First Things, Last Things, 1968. pp. 100-103).
There has been a cadre of African American authors who have been apologists for the burning and looting, and indeed for the Negrification of American youth consistent with the liberal tradition. On the other hand, there have been a small contingent of African American authors who, although largely writing after Hoffer’s time, are equally critical of black culture and behavior and perceptively engaged in seeing people of color as first Americans.
That said, both apologists and critics see the change or the unraveling, whatever their perspective, a factor of change since desegregation when
Brown vs. The Board of Education in 1954, declaring segregation illegal. Another data point, both the left and right share, is the recognition that the “terrible ‘60’s” as Hoffer called that decade has become the target of social engineers. The focus of this attention has been equally devastating to professionals as American workers are now known (See
The Postmodern Worker Exposed: Unmasking An Underachieving Workforce, 2019).
LOSING THE RACE
The three writers whom I’m sure Hoffer could relate to are Thomas Sowell (b. 1930), Shelby Steele (b. 1946) and John McWhorter (b. 1965). Sowell and Shelby are
Senior Fellows at The Hoover Institute of Stanford University while McWhorter is an associate professor of Slavic languages at
Columbia University in New York City and has been a member of T
he Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.
Thomas Sewell grew up in Harlem, New York City, and was 24 when the United States Supreme Court ended segregation with
Brown vs. The Board of Education, May 17, 1954. Shelby Steele grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a segregated neighborhood and was 8 years old when segregation ended.
John McWhorter grew up in Philadelphia and never experienced segregation being born 11 years after it ended.
The three African Americans scholars are not doctrinaire conservatives on race, political and cultural relations but are uniformly disparaged by African American liberals out of the 1960s because they fail to support the liberal litany: i.e., that whites pay for their sins of 300 years of slavery; that blacks receive special reparations; that affirmative action be slanted to the benefit of blacks; that black grading and academic requirements compensate for white cultural biases; that this extend to the extensive white cultural biases apparent in IQ, SAT and GRE testing.
Obviously, should any of this be the case, Sowell, Steele and McWhorter managed to soar over this cultural detritus to address the fundamental issues of African American lethargy in the American culture.
Should the reader see Eric Hoffer’s assessment of the Negro’s failure to assert himself too harsh in his writings (1940 – 1965), it might be useful to show how this severity compares to these three prominent African American writers on matters relating to their own race.
THOMAS SOWELL In
“Black Rednecks and White Liberals” (2005), Thomas Sowell alleges the cultural and academic system of the United States is blatantly dysfunctional and is the principal reason for African Americans persistently experiencing economic and social disparities.
He maintains the lack of blacks’ social and economic advancement is a product of their own failure to adopt mainstream middle class Anglo-American values and behaviors.
He asserts that the African American culture is primarily a variation of the
“redneck” and
“cracker culture,” claiming it was introduced into the South from Great Britain during the antebellum period (i.e., 1783 – 1861). This culture, he insists, is deeply entrenched among urban blacks today.
The dysfunctional values of this “redneck culture” is an aversion to work, proneness to violence, and neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, gravitating to a reckless search for excitement in music, dance and crime.
Sowell believes the social engineering of the 1960s unwittingly provided the ubiquitous catalyst and excuse for black youth to be a drag on American society and on their own possibilities.
In
“The Vision of the Anointed” (1995), Sowell attempts to explain why and how people see society, markets and the role of government in different and often radical ways. He contrasts the constrained and unconstrained view of man, and calls this “the tragic vision of the anointed.”
By that he means, the “anointed” feel so strongly about their vision that they are willing to do everything to shield themselves from any information that might contradict their utopian fantasies. Sowell shows in a devastating manner how they distort statistical data to support their preconceived ideas.
For evidence, he focuses on social engineers and their ameliorating programs meant to deal with problems of race, poverty and crime which include such programs as “Affirmative Action,” food stamps and “The Welfare System,” along with paranoia driven racial profiling and pervasive surveillance to deal with crime.
Complicating this even further the relationship between the policed, that is the community, and the police, those sworn to serve, protect and enforce the law often receive ambivalent orders. Los Angeles Master Sergeant turned novelist, Joseph Wambaugh insists,
“A community gets the kind of law enforcement it deserves,” which is often heavily biased.
Sowell argues that social engineers create the illusion of various social crises and economic problems that interventions are meant to resolve but invariably prove iatrogenic. Why? Either the crises never existed or no longer does.
Political lobbyists for social engineers have been successful involving the
US Supreme Court in societal problems that only free market proponents are capable of correcting, thus making the situations invariably worse. When these social interventions prove to be failures, as free-market advocates warned, social engineers cover their tracks by insisting the interventions weren’t soon or extensive enough to be corrective.
Sowell shows how the manipulating of words and ideas creates a false reality. “Some of the powerful techniques in paternalistic government is to use words that have been anointed”:
·
“Public service” means the government preempts the wishes of the people for goods and services with publicly controlled consumerism.
·
“Geed” is associated with people who attempt to improve their circumstances but no amount of taxation is considered greed.
·
“Responsibility” doesn’t mean individual accountability but the collective guilt of society for poverty, crime, and racial biases.
·
“Rights” don’t mean inalienable rights of all the individual, but to the redistribution of entitlements. And finally,
·
“The “anointed” believe the unhappiness they observe and unfairness they encounter are manifestations of the public being less wise and virtuous than they are, and therefore in need of their being taken care of by the “anointed.”
These and similar themes are expanded in
“Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogma” (1993). Thomas Sowell argues that the educational establishment of the United States - a vast tax-supported empire existing quasi-independently within American society - is morally and intellectually bankrupt.
He suggests in a top-to-bottom review of these mismanaged institutions, including a study of their cynical leadership and tendentious programs, exposing their deceptions and dogmas that have concealed or sought to justify the steep and dangerous decline in educational standards and practices across the board.
Stated more bluntly, Sowell sees American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, substituting ideological indoctrination for education. He cites "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") as diverting time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity.
On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs. Sowell's general indictment is that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is."
This is a theme that Shelby Steele explores but differently claiming everything fell apart when segregation ended. Stated another way, once life became a legislative agenda, African Americans no longer felt the need “to be in charge.”
SHELBY STEELE PBS’s
“Frontline’s Seven Days in Bensonhurst” (May 15, 1990) took an uncommonly sophisticated look at how racial animosities, political calculations and the press and television worked on one another in the weeks following the killing of 16-year-old Yusuf K. Hawkins who was brutally murdered by a racially motivated group of white attackers in 1989. Shelby Steele commented bravely in this film:
I have long believed that race is a mask through which other human needs manifest themselves. I think we often make race an issue to avoid knowing other things about ourselves. Steele is experiencing a revival after 30 years as his greatest strength appears to be a knack for anticipating societal upheavals of “racial reckoning and rage.” Consequently, his works look not only bold but prescient as he identifies the underlying forces shaping the current black-white hysterical cultural chaos. In doing so, he displays the courage to offer his honest but unpopular assessment of the past and the present.
Like Thomas Sowell, Steele is disparaged by African American liberals seeing him as a race traitor and contrarian black man who makes a living assuaging the guilty consciences of whites at the expense of his own people.
His first book,
The Content of Our Character (1990) sparked outrage over its indictment of liberal American policies and attitudes towards race. He wasn’t through.
In
A Dreamed Deferred (1998), he compared government interventions such as
Affirmative Action to the most damaging practices of slavery, segregation, Soviet Communism and German Nazism. While acknowledging that the
Civil Rights Movement is the greatest nonviolent revolution in American history if not in human history, but at the apparent expense of stigmatizing the whites. This miscalculation he feels has led to all the subsequent disasters.
In
A Dream Deferred, Shelby Steele argues that a second betrayal of black freedom in the United States—the first one being segregation—emerged from the civil rights era when the country was overtaken by a powerful impulse to redeem itself from racial shame by targeting white guilt. According to Steele, 1960s liberalism had as its first and all-consuming goal the expiation of African American shame by exploiting white American guilt rather than the careful development of true equality between the races.
Steele takes on the familiar questions of affirmative action, multiculturalism, diversity, Afro-centrism, group preferences, victimization—and what he deems to be the atavistic powers of race, ethnicity, and gender, the original causes of oppression.
A Dream Deferred: The Second Black Betrayal (1998) is a courageous look at the perplexing dilemma of race and democracy in the United States—and what we might do to resolve it. This book gets inside the untold story behind the polarized politics in America today.
In
“White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era” (2006), he attempts to show how
“shamed whites” try to prove their innocence through redemptive acts.
“This moral self-preoccupation,” Steele insists post 1960’s white liberal interventions, has
“made them dangerous to blacks – ready to give them (i.e., blacks) over to an ‘otherness’ in which nothing is expected of them.” On Fox News
“Life, Liberty & Levin” (September 2, 2018) Shelby Steele had this exchange with Mark Levin:
Levin:
“Do you think part of the problem is the daily recitation of group think, group rights? You get it a lot in our universities and colleges, you see it on television a lot. Politicians Balkanizing the nation in order to empower themselves and their party.” Steele:
“What I think you are pointing to is definitely the overriding problem, which is, and we don’t talk about it very much, is white guilt. And that keeps feeding whatever blacks are doing is not helping them, thinking of themselves as nothing more than members of a group, of protesting and so forth. It’s white guilt that keeps feeding that. What is white guilt? We always – we think – will I wake up in the morning and feel guilty about black Americans? No. White guilt doesn’t have anything to do with actual feelings of guilt. “White guilt is the terror of being seen as a racist, as a bigot that now pervades American life. All of our social policies, our culture, everything is touched by this anxiety in most of white America. Understandably, given American history, they have this vulnerability to being disarmed of moral authority.
“By being called a racist, I can use it as a weapon. I can say, ‘You know what? I went on the Levin Show, let me tell you how I was treated.’ And big – it explodes. So, it constitutes black power, white guilt is black power. They are virtually one and the same and one of the big problems we have is that we talk about universities and political correctness and so forth. These are all ways in which white Americans say, I’m innocent, I don’t feel this way. I am not a bigot. I am not a racist. I am innocent.
“And while guilt causes this drive to prove and establish innocence, and so then we have a whole generation of black leaders who do one thing, and one thing only, milk white guilt. And we’re at a moment, I thought this protest was telling in that regard, kind of pointed in which culture maybe turning because it was a fruitless protest. It achieved absolutely nothing.”
Levin:
“Could the culture be turning? But the elites digging in?” Steele:
“That is well said.” As Hoffer and Fisher continue to illustrate in this surreal attempt to bring two minds in sync in
“The Mirror the Psyche,” it comes back to the old saw that when you leave the driving to someone else, where you end up is bound to be a disappointment.
Steele writes:
The greatest ingenuity of interventions like affirmative action has not been that they give Americans a way to identify with the struggle of blacks, but that they give them a way of identify with racial virtuousness quite apart from blacks. Stated another way, victimization is the greatest hindrance for black Americans. White liberals see blacks as victims to assuage the guilty consciences of whites with blacks parlaying their status as victims into a currency that has no long-term buying power.
Steele concludes, the only way for blacks to stop buying into this zero-sum game is to adopt a culture of excellence and achievement untrammeled by set-aside entitlements.
JOHN MCWHORTER Linguist scholar John McWhorter debuted on the American racial stage some twenty years ago when a fracas erupted over a proposal to use
“Black English” (then called “Ebonics”) as opposed to
“White English” as a teaching tool in public schools in Oakland, California. The idea was roundly criticized. Ebonics, critics said, was simply a collection of
“slang and bad grammar” and simply not enough to make a language. McWhorter defended advocates of this alternative.
He recalls how baffled linguists were to this reaction as they had come to acknowledge informal speech variants as consistent with notable cultural change with Jamaican Patois, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole. McWhorter, who is black, was then teaching at the
University of California, Berkeley and had an interest in black speech. By dint of his race and inclination, he became the quintessential authority on Black English. This found his interests naturally extending beyond language to the plight of his race.
If you have seen him interviewed on television, you would have observed his youthful nonchalance and grace, although now 55, a scholar who doesn’t look like a scholar. Perhaps this is because he has built a career outside academia with his quirky populism sometimes accepting gigs to play the piano in nightclubs, which critics call his
“slackening standards.” McWhorter’s ecumenical approach to scholarship and black American life, however, falls in stride with Sowell and Steele, but with his own scathing critical voice in such bestselling treatises as
“Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America” (2000) and
“Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority” (2004).
While he argues the same litany of black American troubles as these other conservative African American scholars – low academic achievement, poor work ethic, absence of upward mobility, and low self-esteem – there is a “bite of now” to his words.
In these two books, he insists racism, even systemic racism, is not the greatest problem facing black people. It is what he calls black “double consciousness”: i.e., the “authentic black person” displays personal initiatives and strengths in private, but dutifully takes on the mantle of victimhood as a public face.
He writes in “Authentically Black”:
African Americans must give up the ‘seductive drug’ of holding whites accountable for every perceived problem in the community; avoid welfare and demand opportunities for self-realization, not charity and handouts; fight their unacknowledged ‘sense that at the end of the day, black people are inferior to whites . . . an internalization of the contempt that the dominant class once held for us.’ Whereas Sowell and Steele are more doctrinaire conservatives on racial matters, McWhorter progressed to this status as a liberal Democrats entranced with the ideas of former Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927 - 2003) who was against the death penalty, massive incarceration, and the drug war.
McWhorter attempts to answer these questions:
· Is school a “white thing,” and if not, why do African American students from comfortable middle class homes perform so badly in the classroom?
· What prevents black college students in the humanities and social sciences from studying anything other than black subjects?
· Why do young black people born decades after the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement see victimhood as the defining element of their existence?
In
“Losing the Race,” McWhorter reports from within the trenches of today’s classroom, where he is a professor, to offer a daring assessment of what is plaguing these young black students. Paradoxically, he claims, students now free of yesterday’s centuries of disenfranchisement, they prefer the mantle of victim than that of victor as they and their leaders are trapped in self-destructive ideologies enshrined to “what was” not “what is,” now!
McWhorter claims young black people are shepherded into a separatist conception of “blackness” largely defined as that which is not “white.” This in turn conditions the young black psyche into seeing academic achievement as a
“white thing” apart from what it means to be “authentically black”; and that financial gain is what everything is about, not about pursuing one’s own self-interests, whatever they might be. This mindset chronicles blacks victimhood which unfortunately too often results in them becoming bottom feeders, when academic achievement and pursuing what they love is within reach.
This scholar addresses these problems drawing on his own empirical experience, black history over the centuries in America, and related statistics. He shows that Affirmative Action, indispensable in college admissions thirty years ago, is obsolete, a counterproductive policy and reinforces the idea of separatism, anti-intellectualism and victimhood if unwittingly so.
What McWhorter finds most pernicious, however, is that wallowing in victimhood prevents the brave work of Civil Rights Leaders a half century ago to reach fruition: i.e., the nurturing of African Americans to be and become all that they could become.
Racism is not dead, but McWhorter argues in these two books, it is not what it once was, and although it is unlikely to ever be erased, if young black Americans invest in themselves academically, they will triumph and not only survive but no longer be losing the race.