A Review of John McWhorter's Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, The Free Press (New York, 2000).

This is a great moment for black America. In ways that would have been unthinkable just 30 years ago, black Americans today enjoy a place at the table of public life. Institutional barriers to black advancement are long departed. Jim Crow is dead. More black students graduate high school and university than ever before, swelling the ranks of the robust and growing black middle class. And white racism, once a virtual given in any encounter between the races, is today a marginal phenomenon, the preserve of a tiny band of closely monitored and universally reviled yahoos. On almost every indicator, black America seems close to attaining the mountaintop famously evoked by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Every indicator but one, that is. Despite the apparent strides made in the direction of social equality, black college students continue to post starkly lower test scores and grades than their white and Asian counter-parts. It has long been assumed that academic performance is a function of wealth: that the greater the number of middle class or better families in a given population, the greater the number of academically successful children it will produce. And yet as any number of recent studies have shown, the conventional wisdom fails in the case of African-Americans. Though the children of middle class black families do perform at a higher level than those of their co-ethnics who are impoverished, they still perform significantly worse than the similarly placed children of white and Asian families.

In Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, John McWhorter, a Professor of Linguistics at UC, Berkeley, attempts to unravel and resolve this great irony of contemporary African-American life. According to McWhorter, the persistent under-performance of black students is the result, not of poverty or white racism, but of such culture- internal features of black American life as a sense of separateness and a deep-seated strain of inherited anti- intellectualism. "My aim," McWhorter writes, "is to show that while there is a reason beyond laziness or mental unfitness that the black kids in front of the Lexus are unlikely to be stars in school, that reason is not class ... we have expectations of blacks so different from those we have of other groups for a reason: because of something specific to black culture." It is a bold thesis and one which has earned McWhorter, who is himself black, more than a few enemies in the black intellectual establishment. Yet, so far, the smoke and heat generated by the book's publication has obscured its message. It's time these arguments be given the attention they deserve.

The Black Performance Gap

According to a recent study of the student bodies of 28 selective universities, while almost three-quarters of white students scored over 1200 out of a possible 1600 on their SATs, just over one-quarter of black students surveyed in the same study performed at this level. More specifically, in 1995, only two percent of black test takers scored over 700 on the verbal portion of the SAT and six percent did so on math. In contrast, white test takers scored at this level respectively five and 10 times more often. According to McWhorter, "in 1995, exactly 184 black students in the United States scored over 700 on the verbal portion of the SAT — not even enough to fill a passenger plane." Since SAT performance has been shown to strongly correlate with college GPA, it is no surprise to find that black college students on average perform at a much lower level than their white and Asian classmates, earning lower GPA's and graduating less often.

But the black performance gap is by no means limited to SAT scores and college GPA's. As McWhorter's statistics demonstrate, the performance of black students in both secondary and graduate programs is similarly under par. A much greater proportion of black students drop out of high school than white or Asian. What's more, according to McWhorter, of the 420 black students who entered the top 18 law schools in 1991, only 24 of them would have been admitted in the absence of affirmative action. At UC, Berkeley — the institution McWhorter calls home — the first class to be admitted at the university's Boalt Law School following the passage of Proposition 209 (a 1996 state ballot initiative banning affirmative action and other race-based preferences within California public institutions) didn't include a single black. And the performance gap persists into professional life. In 1992 in New York, 63 percent of black candidates to the bar exam failed while only 18 percent of whites did.

As McWhorter's discussion makes abundantly clear, this is only the tip of the statistical iceberg: in every recent study of the issue, black students with rare exceptions perform at a significantly lower level than their white and Asian counterparts.

Explaining Black Under- Performance

Black intellectuals typically seek to account for these well- known figures in one of two ways. According to the first explanation, black academic under-performance is a function of poverty. Since black students are poor more often than those from almost any other group and since relative wealth seems to have such a strong bearing on one's chances for academic success, it is no surprise, these intellectuals argue, that blacks on average perform well below the standard set by students of other races. The explanation from poverty is often conjoined with the cruder explanation from white racism. According to this second explanation, the chief factor in continued black under-performance is residual white racism. Though less brutally apparent than the racism afflicting the America of our grandfathers, this argument goes, the racism of today — which ranges from the casually discouraging attitude of white teachers to racial bias in standardized testing to a tendency to dismiss specifically "African" ways of knowing and learning — is just as successful in decisively retarding the academic experience of black students.

McWhorter will have none of these arguments.Mmuch of the first half of Losing the Race is devoted to carefully dismantling the conventional wisdom upon which they depend. Against the first argument — that black under- performance results from the disproportionate poverty afflicting African-American communities — McWhorter points out that, contrary to what many believe, most blacks are not poor. "In 1960, 55 percent of the black population lived in poverty — that is, every other black person and then some ... today (2000), under a quarter of black Americans live in poverty — instead of every other black and then some, today fewer than one in four." For McWhorter, the crucial point to these figures is that, relative to similarly placed whites, middle class black students, just as much as their impoverished counter-parts, on average perform markedly below par — indeed, so much so that the children of black parents who earn $50,000 a year on average post lower SAT scores than white students whose parents earn just $10,000. Poverty, then, cannot be the sole explanation of the performance gap. McWhorter similarly dismisses of the explanation from white racism. While allowing that racism has yet to be eradicated in our society, McWhorter maintains that the racism of today is but an echo of that which 30 years ago characterized every level of American life. To argue that the "very occasional inconvenience" which contemporary racism represents for many blacks is enough to deter black students from pursuing their educational goals is, according to McWhorter, to infantalize an entire race.

For McWhorter, it is the very tendency among African- Americans to see themselves as the victims of a fundamentally hostile white society that is the main culprit in the persistence of black academic under-achievement. Over the years, a tripartite pathology — what McWhorter describes as three "cults" — has grown up around this foundational belief. In the first of these, the "cult of victimology," African-Americans are encouraged to always view themselves as the victims of an oppressive and racist society. "It has become a keystone of cultural blackness to treat victimhood not as a problem to be solved but as an identity to be nurtured. ... black Americans too often teach one another to conceive of racism not as a scourge on the wane but as an eternal pathology changing only in form and visibility, and always on the verge of getting not better but worse."

A natural outgrowth of this tendency to view themselves as social victims is what McWhorter terms the "cult of separatism", or the disposition "to conceive of black people as an unofficial sovereign entity, within which the rules other Americans are expected to follow are suspended out of a belief that our victimhood renders us morally exempt from them." As an example of this, McWhorter cites the response of many blacks to O.J. Simpson's acquittal on murder charges. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence of Simpson's guilt, many blacks regarded Simpson's acquittal as a sort of compensatory victory for black America. Since "suspending moral judgment in the name of racial solidarity is an integral part of being culturally black in America today", the football star's patent guilt was for his supporters less important than that, as an honorary representative of black America, Simpson not be condemned in full view of the white public.

For black students, the result of the twin pathologies of victimology and separatism has been a deeply ingrained "cult of anti-intellectualism" constantly militating against their chances for academic success. One consequence of the widespread belief amongst African-Americans that they are the unaccountable victims of a racist society is a tendency to locate their identity in whatever happens to be "not white". Sadly, this outlook often extends to academic achievement and intellectual distinction more generally, both of which, McWhorter argues, have long been regarded by African-Americans as fundamentally white virtues and, as such, "not cool." Prior to the Civil Rights Movement, such an attitude with regards to the ornaments of formal education was understandable, a defensive rejection by blacks of a criterion of value to which white America had long denied them access. And yet, as McWhorter is at pains to convince his readers, anti-intellectualism, once crucial to the maintenance of black self-esteem, has for several decades functioned as a decisive impediment to black advancement. It is for this reason that black students of whatever social standing continue to perform at a level well beneath that of their white and Asian counter-parts. To the degree that "being black" means not being over-eager in school, most black students regard their academic experience as, at best, a form of necessary drudgery. If McWhorter is right, it should come as no surprise that academic excellence, always within reach, is so rarely sought.

Overcoming the Gap

McWhorter makes a strong and convincing case for his controversial thesis, drawing in equal measure on academic studies and his personal experiences as a teacher and scholar. Along the way, his discussion ranges broadly over the terrain of contemporary African-American culture, covering such topics as the Tawana Brawley fiasco (in which Brawley, a young black woman, was assisted by the Reverend Al Sharpton in fraudulently claiming to have been raped by three off-duty white police officers), the perennial controversy concerning the representation of African-Americans on national television, and the Ebonics debate (into which he was unwittingly drawn once it was discovered by national media outlets that he was the only practicing black linguist to oppose the use of Ebonics in primary school education).

Losing the Race is neither an academic study nor properly speaking, a memoir. Rather, it belongs to the literature of public intellectual engagement and, as such, shares the faults of that genre. In his eagerness to drive home his point, McWhorter's discussion can sometimes become mired in soundbiting recapitulations of previously stated arguments. What's more, the frequency with which certain stylistic tics occur — in McWhorter's anecdotes, for instance, people address themselves to him in a "genial yet pointed" manner with weird regularity — together with a taste for awkward analogies ("yellow passes through green to become blue, but if someone held up a blue-green Crayola crayon and told us ...") sometimes give the impression that the book was rushed to press at the expense of a more thorough proofread. And yet these shortcomings are more than redeemed by McWhorter's iconoclastic wit, which is nowhere displayed to better advantage than his send-ups of the faddish hyperbole characteristic of so much of the recent literature on race in America.

It is for all of these reasons a shame that critics haven't taken the arguments of Losing the Race more seriously. In the reviews published since the book's release in November, McWhorter has regularly been miscast as an embittered and rather quizzical black conservative, with little attention to the book's actual contents. Writing in a Nov. 26 review for the New York Times, for instance, David Dent dismisses McWhorter's book on the grounds that "his argument remains captive in a closet of his own experiences, with scant assessments of academic studies, and data on the test-score gap that are never explored with the rigor they deserve." Not only is it a lame criticism — as even the most primitive college sophomore knows, the "not enough data" argument is a coward's gambit, a way to avoid expressing an opinion on an issue while suggesting that one is in a better position than most to have one — it is also an empty one. As McWhorter was quick to point out in a letter to the editor, "Dent asserts that I found my conclusions almost exclusively upon personal anecdotes, when in fact I refer to no fewer than 96 articles, books and academic studies." Trey Ellis' criticism of McWhorter in a Salon review is similarly obtuse. "So if we're no longer poor," Ellis demands, "then what 'race' are we 'losing'?" Clearly, Ellis' brush with the ideals of liberal education was not a happy one. For as McWhorter is at pains to remind his readers, the aim of the Civil Rights Movement was not merely to achieve social parity between blacks and whites. Amongst other things, it aimed to do so in order to ensure that African-Americans might have the opportunity to lead lives as full as those of anyone else — and such a life is impossible without education.

But the real problem with these critics is that, in a way entirely consistent with the victimologist stance identified by McWhorter, they tend to put their ideological commitments before the welfare of the community for which they claim to speak. For if McWhorter is correct — if the stark under- performance of most black students is not primarily a matter of such external factors as poverty or white racism but instead an internal effect of a culture which, formed in slavery and its aftermath, is poorly prepared to meet the demands of equality — then certain policy-implications immediately follow. Of these, perhaps the most important concerns affirmative action. In McWhorter's view, affirmative action, though a necessary measure when first implemented in the 1970's, has long been an impediment to black learning and should be dismantled. For as long as black students have reason to believe that their least efforts will be rewarded by affirmative action, now a quasi- permanent system of entrenched racial entitlements in higher education, they will continue to have no incentive to seriously engage with scholarship, will increasingly suffer from the resentment of those who feel that their interests have been sacrificed to promote the careers of less well-qualified candidates, and, perhaps worst of all, will never be certain that their achievements are, in fact, equal to those of others. Like it or not, these are issues with which the black intellectual establishment (as well as the rest of us) will soon need to come to terms. In stating his thesis as forcefully and elegantly as he does, John McWhorter has given them an excellent opportunity to do just that.