OCTOBER 6, 2022 UPDATE: In the course of this report—somewhere in the middle—I discuss crime data from the FBI. I should have pointed out that these data are estimates rather than complete tallies. We don’t know, for example, that there were 10,440 homicides in the U.S. in 2020, although the FBI says we do. I can only say that the estimates are reasonably accurate. For 2021, the FBI has changed its methods of compiling crime data, and Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown gives a nice discussion of the issues involved. I think my conclusions are still valid, but I should have offered at least a grain of salt in the course of my “analysis”.
When I first started writing this post, I assumed it would be long. Well, it’s now approaching “interminable”, which made me think I ought to put my conclusions first, in case anyone gave a damn as to what they were. I have two main conclusions, the first being that the U.S. needs to fully recognize and accept its racist past, which it has yet to do, and which large sections of U.S. society are actively determined not to do. The second is that “strong CRT”—the notion that any rule, any test that results in racial disparities is ipso facto racist and must be immediately abandoned—that, for example, 12.8% of all mathematics professors in the U.S. should be black—today!—is utterly nonsensical in either theory or practice. (Currently, the figure is about 1%.)
It is true, of course, that “no one” is demanding a revolution in the country’s mathematics departments—yet—but it is true that K-12 educators in “woke” jurisdictions across the country are joyfully embracing the notion that “trying hard” is out and that celebrating diversity should be the entire point of education. Clearly, educators are delighted at the notion that they no longer have to formally educate their students. Instead, they will simply have to teach them to repeat a new catechism of woke cliches abjuring all allegiance to the evil doctrines of the white capitalist patriarchy and they’re home free.
An extreme example—so extreme that it cost her her job—is one-time San Francisco school board president Gabriela Lopez, who “explained” that the drop in scores for the city’s students after the extended school shutdowns demanded by the teachers’ unions during the first two years of the COVID plague was an irrelevancy: “They are learning more about their families and their cultures, spending more time with each other. They’re just having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure, and the loss is a comparison to a time when we were in a different space.” The notion that the knowledge that black children naturally absorb is superior to the “white” learning that was devised simply to oppress them—a “space” from which we have most fortunately “moved on”—is highly convenient to the teachers’ unions, who have demonstrated repeatedly in woke cities like New York and San Francisco that they don’t really like teaching all that much, and would really rather stay home. The thought that this attitude might cost them their jobs has not yet sunk into them. They have gotten away with so much over the years that they can’t imagine they can’t do so again.
The deep penetration of “woke” thinking into America’s intellectual elite—illustrated by recent events at Princeton—a tenured professor fired for calling a black student group “terrorists”—and Yale Law School (again!)—suggest that the deleterious impact of this sort of thinking is going to continue for a long time. The need to “explain away” the continuing failure of black Americans to integrate themselves into the whole of American society—by condemning the whole of American society—is guaranteed to lead to failure if not disaster, for the causes of this failure lie less in the persistence of a once-overwhelming white racism than in the continuing persistence of black dysfunction (so, yes, I am blaming the victim).
The full achievement of economic equality for black Americans will not occur any time soon, largely because of the significant gaps in educational levels between black and white and Asian Americans (Hispanics are half way between blacks and whites and Asians), something I wrote about for 19 years (1996-2015) while working under contract with the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The major contributing factor to this gap—as I will argue later—is that large numbers of black Americans grow up with little family support in neighborhoods whose “street culture” is largely defined by physical prowess, physical intimidation, and physical violence, neighborhoods whose needs are administered to—in theory— by large, dysfunctional bureaucracies whose major purpose is not to provide services to low-income people but rather jobs to over-paid bureaucrats. “Woke” policies will only make these bureaucracies even larger and even more dysfunctional than they currently are.
In such neighborhoods the notion of “delayed gratification” is not profound but absurd. No one can predict or control the future. There may well not even be one. In 2019 blacks were five times as likely to be murdered as whites; in 2020 they were seven times as likely to be murdered, 90% of the time by other blacks. It is not at all unusual for black people in poor neighborhoods to know people—close friends or family—who have been murdered. Middle-class values are, I believe necessary for conventional success—which is what we are talking about—but there is no reason for these values to be practiced in cultures where they are unlikely to be rewarded.
Students who graduate high school with good grades in a standard academic curriculum are likely to achieve success in later life not because they have a good knowledge of Euclidian geometry or can state the causes of World War I but because they desire the social approval of those holding “standard” American middle-class values and have cultivated the sort of self-discipline necessary to obtain that approval consistently. Good grades are simply means to an end—which is why the very true fact that most American students know very little means precisely nothing. The American educational system largely meets the educational needs of the top 50% of students very well. The endless number of “experts” who insist that American schools are “lousy” are invariably in the top 5% of the distribution yet are not smart enough to understand that 95% of the population has different interests and goals than they do. Just because reading Proust or Gödel changed your life, or at least let you impress your friends, doesn’t mean it will have the same effect on others.
I do not know how to inculcate the middle-class values necessary for success in life. I do have a few suggestions for improving the lives of black Americans;
—End, not simply the war on drugs, which is spectacularly unsuccessful, but other victimless crimes as well, particularly prostitution and gun possession. “Banning” drugs, prostitution, or gun possession has no meaningful impact on these “vices”, but gives thousands and thousands of people criminal records, placing them in the hands of a criminal justice system that is often racist and always heavily biased against the poor. Legalization should be sweeping enough to prevent the continuing existence of a substantial black market. The entire criminal justice system has a vested interest in the arrest, trial, conviction, and incarceration of large numbers of people. They will resist meaningful legalization because they want the current system to continue. Legislators will very frequently invent legalization schemes that change little, giving them good publicity without alienating police unions and other politically powerful groups.
—Stop using traffic and other minor civil infractions as justification for imposing extravagant fines in order to finance bloated bureaucracies. Poor people often emmesh themselves in the criminal justice system by their unwillingness or inability to pay these fines and end up ruining their lives.
—Do NOT follow the example of somc “woke” prosecutors who simply avoid enforcing the criminal code against blacks, at least until such time as the corrupt white patriarchy recognizes the error of its ways. Reducing penalties for shoplifting, turn style jumping, etc. helps lead to a breakdown in public order that will only encourage the return of “conservative” and often compulsively punitive policies.
—End occupational licensing practices that convert what are little more than entry-level jobs into “learned professions”.
—End all environmental and other “quality of life” restrictions on development, which massively limit economic growth and cut people off from jobs. Also end rent control and any other sort of restriction designed to “protect” existing property owners and renters at the expense of newcomers. People who strive to protect and improve their neighborhoods by preventing growth—because they want to preserve “the reason why I moved here in the first place!”—manage to “forget” that they are both subsidizing themselves and excluding everyone else.
—Do NOT expect that any form of educational reform will close the educational gap between black and white students. The “independent variable” in student performance is not the teacher, not the school, and not the curriculum. It is the student. The policy reforms given here are intended to change the environment in which black children grow up. Pouring money into school reform, of any and all description, has failed for decades, as I will demonstrate in an extended rant to follow and will have no effect other than add to an already bloated and painfully dysfunctional bureaucracy, which approaches the Pentagon in both inefficiency and hypocrisy. Conservative reforms such as school choice have some merit, largely for keeping the middle and upper middle class invested in public schools, but the notion that this will create a “revolution” in student performance is false, because most students are driven by a desire for social acceptance, not intellectual stimulus.
—Expand income redistribution programs through programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which encourage work attachment and deemphasize those that don’t. “True” liberals insist on believing that giving everyone a middle class income will ensure that everyone will have middle class values, but this is not true. Dependence should not be subsidized.
—Finance these programs, at least in part, with a “real” estate tax, with appropriate safeguards to prevent its avoidance. There is no moral justification for allowing “lucky” people (largely white, of course) to effectively obtain large amounts of income tax-free. The argument that this wealth has already been taxed is specious. About 40% consists of unrealized capital gains, and the entirety is unearned income to the heir. The decedent is, well, dead, and thus does not count. If earned income is to be taxed, then unearned income must be as well. The incredibly privileged status of inheritance income is entirely the product of the extensive control of the entire legal process by the rich, a legal process that was, of course, instituted millennia ago very largely to protect their interests, and not to ensure “justice”. The current massively privileged status of inheritances under the federal tax code, and the near infinite number of legal devices created to evade even the minimal federal requirements, can all be eliminated by congressional action. The only obstacle, of course, is the greed of the rich and the ingenuity of their heartless legal minions.
—Stop coddling white people by pretending that our “City on a Hill” was not erected on the expropriation of the land of the native American population and the labor and lives of imported African slaves. For most of its history, the United States of America has been of the white people, for the white people, and by the white people.
—Stop coddling black people by humoring their embrace of anti-Semitic cranks like Louis Farrakhan, a man who has done nothing for black people except take their money, who as a young man called several times for the “removal”—aka “murder”—of Malcolm X. Farrakhan is nothing more than the black Donald Trump, less dangerous because less ambitious, yet equally corrupt. Black people are not children who cannot be expected to handle the truth.1
Okay, that’s enough ruminating/fulminating for one day. What will follow will be a very extended, quasi-historical explanation/justification of the conclusions stated here.
Race Matters
The U.S. has always been in denial of its racist roots. “American history” has always been “White History”. It’s just that white Americans never noticed it. They were so busy congratulating themselves on how wonderful they were, they failed to notice that the “wonders” of America were deserved for whites alone.
It is, in fact, quite “arguable” that the entire “Rise of the West”, aka “The European Miracle”, etc. never would have happened without the widespread oppression and exploitation of the non-white races of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The New York Times’s notorious “1619 Project”, which I’ve generally though not entirely faulted in the past, falls short by claiming that America’s original sin was racist exploitation of blacks, when in fact the British colonists were simply piggybacking on the general European exploitation of the indigenous American Indian populations of the Americas and black Africans, beginning in 1492 and perhaps even the earlier, when the Portuguese helped finance their explorations down and around the southern tip of Africa, seeking a western sea route to India, through the slave trade—of course, often buying Africans enslaved by other Africans, for African slavery long predated the arrival of the Europeans.
Walter Scheidel, in his excellent book of the economic history of Europe, Escape from Rome, cites a number of authors who argue explicitly that without the gold and silver the Spaniards obtained from their conquests in Latin America and their subsequent exploitation of the native population, the great “commercial revolution” in Europe that had begun prior to the Atlantic explorations would never have gained the power necessary to challenge and ultimately supplant the traditional landowning aristocracies that had effectively ruled all previous civilizations. The gold and silver was an immense stimulus to trade with the East, because the West had no products to sell that India and China wanted to buy. ”Specie” (gold and silver), on the other hand, was more than welcome.
Aggressive competition among European nations to exploit both the eastern and western trade led to a wide variety of improvements in navigation—and warfare—and the whole process fed on itself: profits encouraged innovation, and innovation fed profits, ushering in first the Spanish Empire, the first intercontinental empire in world history, and then the “Golden Age” of the Netherlands, the first culture that even hinted at the possibility of escaping the yet-unnamed “Malthus trap”. This would have been impossible without the whole-scale exploitation of first the Latin American and African populations, and, later, as the English colonies expanded, the conquest of Indian lands in North America. Of course, this was also accompanied by European conquests in Asia, which were constantly stimulated by improvements in western technology, making it increasingly feasible to project oppressive military force even over immense distances.
This “larger” picture is neglected by the 1619 Project, which wants to paint America as both uniquely oppressive, and entirely dependent for its flourishing on the exploitation of blacks alone. It is this mechanically “left” thinking—as well as frequently sloppy and lazy argumentation—that has deservedly earned the overall project the criticism it has so frequently received.
But a good deal of the criticism is itself dishonest, because the “city on a shining hill” depiction of the U.S., which has come in for extensive criticism, from various corners, over the years, is still, for the most part, far too shining. For example, even though the colonial Virginia legislature petitioned George III to prohibit the importation of slave into Virginia—often cited as “proof” that the colonists were opposed to slavery—the colonists did so largely because they feared there were “too many” slaves in Virginia, about 40% of the population, and they feared a revolt. In addition, Virginia slave owners were selling thousands of slaves every year to the “new South” (chiefly, North Carolina and Georgia), and the prohibition of “African” slaves would boost domestic prices. (Wikipedia and Conservapedia offer competing views of the issue.) During the debate over Virginia’s ratification of the U. S. Constitution, as described in Noah Feldman’s excellent biography, The Three Lives of James Madison, Madison acknowledged, on the one hand, that prohibiting the proposed federal government from abolishing the importation of slaves from Africa until 1808 was an unfortunate though necessary concession to the new slave states, but claimed that, overall, the new Constitution would be a big win for slaveowners, thanks to the fugitive slave cause.
At the Philadelphia convention, there had been no public discussion of the fugitive slave clause, probably out of a desire to avoid an argument over it. But the delegates to the Virginia ratifying convention could not know that [because the debates were held in secret, and Madison wasn’t going to enlighten his hearers]. Madison explained to them that “this clause was expressly inserted…to enable owners of slaves to reclaim them. This is a better security than any that now exists.” In order to get the constitution ratified, Madison—whatever his private beliefs on slavery—was willing to argue that the proposed constitution left slaveholders better off than they had been before.
Feldman also notes Madison’s most dubious defense of the notorious “three-fifths” clause in the Constitution, given in one of his famous “Federalist Papers”. The “great Virginians” like Madison and Jefferson consistently deplored slavery as a “great evil” but also consistently opposed any effort to limit it and were economically dependent upon it all their lives. It’s more than a little bit embarrassing to read the great Thomas Jefferson, while writing to a neighbor, speaking of his slaves essentially as livestock—“I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more valuable than the best man of the farm. What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption”—but that is what the author of the Declaration of Independence wrote. (Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, June 30, 1820 (“I consider”), Founders Online, National Archives).2
The 1619 Project falls down severely in its attempt to prove that the primary motivation for American independence was the slave owners’ fear that the British would abolish slavery. The first great center of agitation against British rule came from Boston, and, of course, Massachusetts was not a slave state, though northern merchants were active in the slave trade. There were in fact a number of issues that aroused the colonists, and the fear of abolition played a relatively minor role until, once the rebellion started, the British started to encourage slaves to revolt against their masters. For the British to use their worst nightmare against them naturally enraged the whites in the slave states, but by then the die was already cast.
It is “interesting” that Élie Halévy, the great French “philosophic historian”, almost unknown in the U.S., in the first volume of his unquestionably “magisterial” history of England, England in 1815, attributed the cause of the American Revolution entirely to George III’s will to power. According to Halévy, George III was furious that the British Parliament, having placed the Hanoverians on the throne in the early 18th century, had taken the opportunity to limit the “natural” powers of Georges I and II. As Halévy saw it, George III wanted to be a proper European despot, in the manner of Frederick the Great, and the first thing a proper despot needs is a standing army. However, the British experiences in the seventeenth century, which had seen bouts of “despotism” both from the Catholic Stuart kings and the Puritan rule of Oliver Cromwell, had given both the Whig and Tory elites in England an invincible hatred of standing armies. To get around this, after the end of the Seven Years War, which ended so gloriously for Britain and also deprived the American colonists of any need for military protection from “New France”, George sought to maintain the army Britain had created to fight the French permanently in the colonies—very much, of course, at the colonists’ expense. One entry in Wikipedia—I’ve lost the link—said that it was “high-ranking officers in Parliament” who came up with the idea, though it’s hard to believe that they intended to forsake London. Alan Taylor, in American Revolutions, accepts at face value the British argument that the troops were “necessary”, something I find difficult to believe, because, after all, the French had been defeated. And it is worth pointing out that, in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson echoes Halévy’s argument in two of the charges against King George III: “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power”, and also indicts the king “For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.”
What is unquestionable is that Britain set out to manage the colonies more “efficiently” and tax them more heavily. While the taxation and other restrictions on trade pinched most tightly in New England, making Boston was the initial center of the reaction against Britain that eventually led to the revolution, there is no doubt that the active support of the southern planters, led of course by the Great Virginians like Jefferson and Washington, was necessary for the revolution’s eventual success. Southerners wanted to trade directly with Europe, hoping that this would enable them to obtain higher prices, and were also affected by the British decision to restrict western expansion across the Appalachians. Washington in particular had extensive investments in the “Western Reserve”—Ohio and Kentucky—investments that were highly speculative and would be entirely worthless unless recognized by a “friendly” governmental authority, recognition that, it seemed, the British crown would be very unlikely to offer. So, yeah, the colonists wanted ‘freedom”, all right, but a lot of that “freedom” was to make money any way they goddamned pleased, a “freedom” based very largely on the labor of African slaves and land obtained by conquering/exterminating the Native American tribes— a “shining city on a hill” for white people only.
It is true that, as Thomas Sowell and other conservatives have pointed out, bourgeois, capitalist Europe/USA, far from being the “worst” slave-owning society in history, was in fact the best, the first and only slave-owning society to realize that slavery was wrong, and, not only that, to abolish it—the first, and perhaps the most dramatic, act of the much-derided “bourgeoise idealism” on record—part, I would say, of the secularization of Christian idealism. But there are, as always, wheels within wheels, and many of those wheels are far from savory.
In the first place, while a great many late 18th century Americans knew that slavery was wrong, few if any could imagine, or desired to imagine, a truly integrated society that accepted black people as the full equal of whites. Active opposition to slavery—that is, organizing efforts not simply to abolish the slave trade but to end slavery itself—was far more common in the north, where there were, of course, far fewer slaves. In the south, anti-slavery “moderates” like Jefferson were always hoping that slavery would somehow go away all by itself—an argument/excuse that would persist for decades and would effectively be revived in the civil rights era as an excuse for not making a direct legal attack on segregation. Noah Feldman, in his biography of James Madison that I previously cited, tells us that Madison produced a very labored “plan” for ending slavery—“labored” as in grossly immoral, utterly absurd, and totally unworkable—one that, “slaveowner friendly” as it was, he never had the nerve to make public. The plan was for the federal government to conquer vast quantities of land from the Indian tribes inhabiting it—land now supposedly “owned” by the United States thanks to the Louisiana purchase—and then sell this land to white settlers, using the proceeds in turn to buy all the slaves in the United States from their owners at a “fair price” (my language) and then ship them all to Africa, because whites would never accept them as their equals, and, as a result, any attempt to create a free, racially integrated society could only result a hideous race war. So red men (and women) would be robbed of their land—driving them to “escape” to land so harsh and infertile that no white man wanted it, where they would (hopefully) succumb to hardship and starvation—so that black men (and women) could be shipped to a foreign land where they would almost surely die of hardship and starvation! Perhaps not “Nazi” but surely “Naziesque”! Thanks, father of the American Constitution!3
In “Catalyst”, James Oakes, author of The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution, has a nice article, What the 1619 Project Got Wrong, (nice and long), pointing out many of its errors in detail—beginning with its condescending, click-bait cliché, “Everything You Were Taught About American History Is Wrong,” posture—invalidated by any number of sources but most particularly by Howard Zinn’s “wildly popular” A People’s History of the United States, published back in 1980, selling over two million copies and serving as a textbook at both the high school and college level for decades, not to mention getting an extended shout out in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting, a text, moreover, replete with the same “Everything You Were Taught About American History Is Wrong” tone as the 1619 Project, despite being written, you know, 40 years earlier.4
So the whole “Only Now Can the Full, Shocking Truth of American Perfidy Be Exposed” shtick of the 1619 Project is nonsense, yet, as I’ve already suggested, even the “mature” version of American history tends towards the “glass 90 percent full” view of our virtuous past, rather than a “glass barely half full at best.” I am an unapologetic fan of “civilization”, and most particularly contemporary western civilization, but the benefits of civilization never reached much below the top 10% of the population until the dawn of the 20th century, and didn’t begin to reach the entire population until after World War II, when modern medicine, and modern technology, really started to become available to the masses around the world. That’s a long time to wait.
It is only since the cultural revolutions of the 1960s that American history has even begun to be honestly told. In my childhood during the 1950s, American popular history was filled with stories of the “taming of the West”, “How the West Was Won”—never “How the West Was Conquered”. The Mexican War, an outright war of conquest, motivated by the goal of obtaining more “slave-friendly” land, and opposed as such by Abraham Lincoln, was just something that happened, somehow. It’s very true that the “hidden truths” that Howard Zinn supposedly discovered back in 1980, and were then somehow “discovered” all over again for the first time by the 1619 Project (and presented in a grossly overwrought and one-sided manner by both5) were always there, on the record, until very recently the popular history of the United States was the history of white people only, and to a great extent this continues to be true to this day.
The picture historians presented of the lead up to the Civil War provides an excellent example. While “every” history notes that most Americans were not abolitionists—that abolitionists were often harassed and even lynched in the north, and that “No Slavery in the Territories” was the battleground that gave victory to the new Republican Party, but the slogan “Free Land, Free Men, and Fremont” deliberately hid the fact that “Free Men” meant “Free White Men Only” and no black men at all, slave or free.
This truth was not invisible. Bruce Catton, the “Dean” of Civil War historians back in the 1960s, gave a shockingly accurate account of the state of affairs circa 1860—one that I guess the “geniuses” behind 1619 Project never read—in his 1961 best seller, still in print, The Coming Fury. I will quote, quite extensively, as follows:
[T]he tragedy of the Negro, and of the America to which he had been compelled to come as a valuable but undesirable immigrant, was that his detention in servitude involved emotions deeper than the pit and blacker than midnight, convulsive stirrings in the nerve system that went beyond anything with which men of that day could cope intellectually. Beyond everything else, slavery was a race problem. It was the race problem, demanding attention at a time when Americans of the blood prided themselves on their inborn superiority to people who showed even minor differences in accent, in pigmentation, or in cultural background. No one was ready to face up to this problem.
As long as slavery existed, the problem did not have to be faced. Slavery did not solve the race problem, but it plowed around it. As a slave the Negro might be a strain on the conscience, but he was not really a bother, and those who thought he should not be a slave could spend their time happily denouncing his masters rather than reflecting on the limitless implications of the concept of the universal brotherhood of man. Enslaved, the Negro was under control and so was the race problem. But if he should be freed, en masse, all across America, he would have to be dealt with as a human being, and a nation whose declaration of independence began by asserting that all men were created equal would have to make up its mind whether those words were to be taken seriously.
This was what almost nobody was prepared to do. Even many of the Northerners who were most anxious to free the Negro were ready to agree that he ought to be deported as soon as he lost his chains. Lincoln himself felt this way, and with others who felt as he did he had urged that some sort of resettlement scheme be devised. Let the Negro be planted in Central America, in Africa, or perhaps in the dim lands on the far side of the misty mountains of the moon—anywhere at all, so long as it was not in America. Even slavery’s enemies had some small part in keeping slavery alive.
In other words, the great struggle over slavery prior to the Civil War was a struggle between two kinds of racism, one that wanted to enslave the black population of the United States forever, and the other that wanted the black population of the United States to disappear, or at least not to come into the free states.
The white population of the U.S. hated the prospect of economic competition from either Native Americans or African Americans. Indians were quite capable of switching their lifestyle from hunting and gathering or subsistence agriculture to commercial agriculture, but white populations wouldn’t allow them to do so. The Jacksonian “Era of the Common Man” emphasized “states’ rights” because it allowed whites in each state to dispose of the non-white populations as they pleased—driving out the Indians and tightening the already fearsome provisions applicable to the black populations—without fear of interference from the federal government with “larger” concerns. And so the most basic notion of “critical race theory”, that the pattern of U.S. history was decisively shaped by European racial prejudice—directed at both African and Native Americans—affirmed by American “giants” like James Madison and Abraham Lincoln alike—is largely valid. However, it can and must be pointed out that Lincoln, though he had no “solution” to the “Negro Problem”—really the “European Racism Problem”—nonetheless insisted that slavery ultimately had to be abolished anyway, regardless of the consequences, and, in fact, he did carry out that abolition.
After the Civil War, blacks in the south, where 90% of them lived, found themselves in an impossible situation. Deeply racist southern whites, enraged and embittered by defeat, constituted a majority in every state, and used bribery and terror in every locality where they didn’t, and quickly assumed political control of the south once the northern troops were withdrawn. The decision by the federal government to restore full voting rights to southern whites, probably unavoidable, guaranteed white oppression of blacks unless checked by constant federal supervision, and there was simply no political benefit to the Republican Party to maintain that supervision. They would never win southern electoral votes, and, anyway, they held the presidency throughout the rest of the 19th century and well into the early 20th without them.
The ”Progressive Era” benefited blacks almost nothing. Southern whites, terrified that the “Populist Movement” might unite poor whites and poor blacks against the ruling landowning class, turned a largely informal system of segregation into law. In many cases, northern “progressives” did worse than nothing. David Southern, professor of history at Westminster College, has written two books on this moral and political failure, The Malignant Heritage Yankee Progressives and the Negro Question and The Progressive Era and Race: Reaction and Reform, 1900 – 1917, that I confess I have not read, though I have read his excellent article “An American Dilemma After Fifty Years: Putting the Myrdal Study and Black-White Relations in Perspective”, which I’ll discuss later.
According to the Amazon blurb for the second book, “most northern progressives were either indifferent to the fate of southern blacks or actively supported the social system in the South. Yankee reformers obsessed over the concept of race and became ensnared in a web of “scientific racism” that convinced them that blacks belonged to an inferior breed of human beings. The tenures of both Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote more about race than any other American president, and Woodrow Wilson, who was reared in the Deep South, proved disastrous for African Americans, who reached their “nadir” even as Wilson led the United States on a crusade to make the world safe for democracy.”
All of this jibes very closely with what I’ve read from other sources. Teddy was notorious for his Anglo-Saxon swagger, and Wilson, trying to make the world safe for democracy, also worried frequently about making it “safe” for the continued domination of the white race. Yet there was some movement. On July 5, 1908, a race riot broke out in Springfield, Illinois. Socialist author William Walling was appalled by the violence, and wrote an article about it, The Race War in the North. Mary Overton, a social worker, read the article and organized a meeting to discuss ways to fight racism in the U.S. Although the group was largely white, among the other attendees was W. E. B. Du Bois. Eventually, the group formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Once the organization was formed, Du Bois was given a paid position as director of publications and research. In the decades to come, the NAACP would lead the fight against legal segregation, ultimately winning the famous case of Brown v. Board of Education.
In the beginning, however, change was almost nonexistent. In 1925, Du Bois published an extraordinary article, World of Color, in Foreign Affairs, describing in detail both the extensive contributions of non-whites to the Allies in World War I, almost invisible in accounts of the Great War that are being published today, and their fruitless attempts to have those efforts recognized, not to say rewarded, in the postwar era. Du Bois began his study as follows:
Once upon a time in my younger years and in the dawn of this century I wrote: "The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." It was a pert phrase which I then liked and which since I have often rehearsed to myself, asking how far was it prophecy and how far speculation? Today, in the last year of the century's first quarter, I propose to examine this matter again, and more especially in the memory of the great event of these great years, the World War. How deep were the roots of this catastrophe entwined about the color line? And of the legacy left, what of the darker race problems will the world inherit?
Most men would agree that our present Problem of Problems is what we call Labor: the problem of allocating work and income in the tremendous and increasingly intricate world-embracing industrial machine which we have built. But, despite our study and good-will, is it not possible that our research is not directed to the right geographical spots and our good-will too often confined to that labor which we see and feel and exercise right around us rather than to the periphery of the vast circle and to the unseen and inarticulate workers within the World Shadow? And may not the continual baffling of our effort and failure of our formula be due to just such mistakes? At least it will be of interest to step within these shadows and, looking backward, view the European and white American labor problem from this external vantage ground—or, better, ground of disadvantage.
With nearly every great European empire today walks its dark colonial shadow, while over all Europe there stretches the yellow shadow of Asia that lies across the world. One might indeed rede the riddle of Europe by making its present plight a matter of colonial shadows and speculate wisely on what might not happen if Europe became suddenly shadowless—if Asia and Africa and the islands were cut permanently away. At any rate here is a field of inquiry, of likening and contrasting each land and its far off shadow.
Unfortunately, no one was listening to Du Bois at that time. The underlying racist presumptions of white Americans continued well into the New Deal and beyond. For example, the entire American labor union movement, of which standard-issue liberals like Paul Krugman are so proud, was heavily racist. The whole point of a union is to ensure that only its members qualify for “good jobs”. Unions were always interested in shrinking the labor supply—many believed that they did so admirably in the nineteenth century when they fought against both child labor and women in jobs that were somehow supposed to be reserved for men. But they were also heavily opposed to allowing black men join their unions. The once legendary Wagner Act, passed during the New Deal, labor’s “Magna Carta”, specifically recognized the validity of racially discriminatory provisions in union contracts. “I never thought we’d see niggers in the bricklayers’ union,” said George Meany, head of the once-powerful AFL-CIO back in the 1960s, when pressure from civil rights leaders were finally forcing the conservative “craft” or “horizontal” unions6 to integrate. As Peggy Noonan recounts in her book, What I Saw at the Reagan Revolution, this was the moment when white working class voters began to desert the Democratic Party, when the Democrats started being for “them” and instead of “us”.
In the south, of course, the whole pattern of segregation was, in effect, an informal “union” embracing all white workers, who were guaranteed access to all the “good jobs”. I have discussed the phenomenon of “white socialism”—the way the New Deal reforms were consciously crafted to exclude as many black workers as possible—in a number of posts—perhaps most succinctly here.7
It is a mistake to say that the New Deal ignored black Americans entirely. Harry Hopkins’ WPA (Works Progress Administration) provided black workers throughout the south with millions of jobs, hiring anyone without a job, so that the composition of the WPA workforce was disproportionately black, paying them “white” wages as well.8 And it was largely the federal judges and Supreme Court justices appointed by Franklin Roosevelt who began the judicial assault on legal segregation, dating at least from the 1944 ”white primary” decision, Smith v. Allwright, when the Supreme Court held, in an 8-1 decision, that the Democratic Party in Texas (and by extension in other states) could not exclude black voters from its primaries, reversing a unanimous 1935 decision, Grovey v. Townsend allowing the practice.9 Even though black Americans benefited substantially less from New Deal programs than whites, they quickly transferred their political allegiance to Roosevelt, giving over 70% of their votes to him in 1936, after giving over 50% of their votes to Herbert Hoover in 1932.10
Furthermore, the famous social programs, almost of them approved during either the Roosevelt or Truman administrations, that I have referred to as “white socialism”, really excluded more white than black Americans—discriminating above all against “the powerless”. The New Deal “masses” were very largely small farmers (who were landowners, after all), and organized labor. Both groups were almost entirely white, but there were far more white workers outside the magic circle—service workers, servants, the “hired men” who followed the harvests throughout the north and west, white sharecroppers) in the south (more numerous than their black counterparts, and almost equally oppressed), and in fact almost all the white working class in the south, who rarely belonged to unions.
Nevertheless, the basic structure of the New Deal/Fair Deal social programs fit quite well with the beloved CRT notion of “systemic racism”. One may point out as well that the “one drop of blood theory”, which very largely defined black-white relationships in the U.S. from, well, 1619 until 2007 or thereabouts, fits perfectly with notions of “white patriarchalism”. The “theory” (actually “prejudice” or “taboo”, of course) implicitly granted white men sexual access to every black woman, while denying, with the most extreme social prejudice possible, white women access to black men—and, of course, black men access to white women. The fact that this most vicious prejudice has largely disappeared is a “shocking” refutation of “full CRT”—the notion that the more racial prejudice seems to disappear, the more virulent it has become, so that white racial attitudes, while appearing to improve, are in fact worse than ever, because invisible! For my money, racial prejudice that is invisible is nonexistent.
If the United States exemplified systemic racism throughout most of its history, does this mean that one of most “shocking” charges of the 1619 Project, that the U.S. did not follow the political trajectory of Europe in establishing a “socialist” welfare state covering all citizens because of race is true? Well, yes and no. In an earlier post, I explained it this way, saying that there were two reasons for the failure of the U.S. to develop a welfare state comparable to those in Europe, one “good” and one clearly bad:
The good reason is that life was better in America than in Europe for the poor—the poor European, at least. Uniforms from the American Revolution show that enlisted men (“common men”) were as tall as officers, a phenomenon that did not start appearing in Europe until the 1960s. It’s true that life for the working class in the U.S. was harsh, surely until the 1950s, but in Europe it was much harsher.
The second reason is that life was not better in America than Europe for blacks—it was worse. Slavery was the worst of all, of course, but even after slavery ended racism was endemic throughout American society. The American labor movement was, prior to World War II, almost entirely and explicitly for white workers only. The “No Irish Need Apply” signs came down slowly, but the “No Blacks Need Apply” never did. Organized labor could barely take root in the South at all, because the very thought of poor blacks and whites combining drove the ruling class whites into a frenzy, causing a largely informal form of social segregation to be institutionalized during the Populist Era into an explicit one, a process entirely endorsed by poor whites, their racial prejudice proving stronger than their supposed economic interests, to the intense frustration of both liberal and libertarian theorists. In fact, segregation in the workplace was maintained informally in the North almost as efficiently as it was formally in the South, though in the North at least white workers could enjoy the benefits of unionization.
It’s been abundantly proved that both before and after World War II liberals in Congress acquiesced in social legislation that was racist in effect (and, in the case of federal housing assistance, explicitly racist) prior to the sixties. They could do so in relative good conscience, particularly in the early fifties, before the real migration of blacks out of the South began, because, except in a few areas in some big cities, their constituents were very largely white. Employer-provided health insurance, for example, a “substitute” for national health insurance, was provided at the employer’s discretion, which meant that unions could use their bargaining power to obtain this benefit for their members, as a effective tool for organizing. According to Wikipedia, by 1957, 75% of workers were covered by some sort of health insurance.
Employer-provided health insurance is a classic example of informal “white socialism”. Most people have no idea that they are effectively receiving a subsidy, since their health benefits are not considered “income” for tax purposes, even though they clearly are income. Furthermore, insurance companies have to insure every employee, and their family members, regardless of health status, something they clearly would prefer not to do, meaning that the burden of caring for those with poor health conditions is imperceptibly shifted to the healthy (young people, in most cases). Best of all, the more money you make, the more you benefit, since if your health insurance were counted as income, you would pay a higher tax rate than lower-income persons. A government-sponsored “welfare” program that provides a disproportionate share of the benefits to the rich and excludes the poor (disproportionately black, of course). How convenient!
Even though almost no one noticed, blacks were also very consciously from one of the biggest post-war “welfare” projects of all, the GI Bill, which few even recognized as welfare, though of course it was. This article in the Boston Globe, The GI Bill was one of the worst racial injustices of the 20th century. Congress can fix it., explains how the GI Bill showered benefits on white veterans while denying them almost in toto to black ones. This favoritism surely goes a long way to explaining why, even in the prosperous fifties, when black incomes did increase, the gap between black and white still widened.
This “take” on the GI Bill, based on previous scholarly research by, among others, Ira Katznelson, author of When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (2005), has been challenged by Suzanne Mettler, in her book, Soldiers to Citizens: The GI Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (2005). The two provide an interesting exchange in On Race and Policy History: A Dialogue about the G.l. Bill, with Katznelson getter the better of the argument, in my opinion (discussion in footnote below).11
Nonetheless, there was a sea change in racial relations in the U.S. after World War II, symbolized by President Truman’s 1948 executive order integrating the armed forces, along with Hubert Humphrey’s once-famous speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1948 when Humphrey challenged his party to “step from the shadow of states’ rights and into the sunshine of human rights,” prompting the “Dixiecrat Rebellion” that saw 35 southern delegates leave the convention, and, ultimately South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond’s unsuccessful presidential campaign.
It quickly became clear to the percipient that the days of legal segregation were doomed, though it would not be until the “Watergate” Congress of 1974 that public defense of legal segregation would disappear entirely. The response to this sea change were “interesting”. The history of the small Virginia city where I spent my boyhood, Falls Church, provides a nice illustration of the process. Although “Falls Church” had been an “township” in Northern Virginia since 1875, it did not become an actual city until 1948, two years before my parents moved there. According to Wikipedia, “[a]t 2.11 square miles, Falls Church is the smallest incorporated municipality in the Commonwealth of Virginia and the smallest county-equivalent municipality in the United States.”
So why does Falls Church even exist as a city? Even though I was only five when we moved in, it quickly became apparent to me that Falls Church City existed primarily for the sake of “Meridian High School” (until very recently, “George Mason High School” go figure), which opened in 1952, just outside the tiny city’s limits. But in 1948, Falls Church High School, located well within Falls Church City limits, opened its doors. So why was “Meridian” needed?
Because, because even though Brown v. Board of Education wouldn’t be decided until 1954, smart people could read the writing on the wall. Falls Church public schools would not be segregated by race—not legally, of course—but they would be segregated by economics. It is important to note that the city was not “rich rich”, the residents then as now consisting largely of government employees, and that southerners were conspicuous by their absence. In addition, there was a good mix of both Catholic and Jewish residents. Obviously, the purpose of the city’s incorporation was to finesse the race issue, and, in any event, “Meridian” was not integrated until my senior year, 1962-1963. Now, of course, almost 60 years later, Falls Church is clearly “woke”, as the name change indicates, and the make up of the school, instead of being all white, is, according to Wikipedia, 59% White (Not Hispanic), 6% Asian or Pacific Islander, 12% Hispanic, 4% Black, and 19% two or more races. But the change was a long time coming.
Most residents of southern states were not so percipient as Falls Churchians. Brown v. Board of Education, though a unanimous decision, burst like a bomb across the south. One non-southerner whose views on race were unfortunately changed for the worse by Brown was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. When he entered the Senate in 1952, Goldwater was quite probably more committed to racial integration than any other senator. He hired a black secretary and personally integrated the Senate Dining Room by insisting that she be allowed to eat there along with all the other Senate employees, something no “liberal” Democrat had ever gotten around to, for some reason.
Once in the Senate, however, Goldwater began to realize that he had less in common with many northern Republicans than he did with southern Democrats. Goldwater was furiously anti-communist, furiously pro-military, furiously hostile to the federal government, and, most of all, furiously hostile to labor unions. Southerners spoke his language, and he soon learned to speak theirs. By 1957 Goldwater was arguing, in effect, that southerners didn’t have to obey Brown if they didn’t want to—that the federal government had no right to enforce Supreme Court decisions that were decided “incorrectly”.
Goldwater’s 1964 campaign was “premature”, even though Alabama Governor George Wallace, the nation’s most “famous” segregationist, with his successes in three northern primaries—winning about a third of the vote in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland—demonstrated that a white “backlash” to the Civil Rights Revolution was already brewing. By 1968 the once dominant New Deal majority was in tatters, torn to pieces by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the bloody riots in Los Angeles, Detroit, and other northern cities, and further sabotaged by the disastrous U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
The sixties riots, and the massive increase in violent crime among urban black populations, was a disaster for liberalism. It was a defining article of faith among liberals that people were a product of their circumstances, and that once the barriers of segregation were demolished, all the black “outliers”—above average rates in poverty, unemployment, crime, drug and alcohol abuse, illegitimacy, desertion, domestic abuse, etc.—were supposed to disappear, as black people “naturally” reverted to middle-class behavior values and standards, which middle-class liberals fondly believed were universal, absent “special” circumstances, which could always be removed by rational planning. Instead, the outliers exploded.
The ”Bible” of American liberalism on the subject of race was the once legendary 1,000-page study by Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal and a team of experts, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, financed by the Carnegie Foundation of New York. The study’s findings gave a much fuller picture of black Americans than had ever been provided before, brutally depicting the effects of white racism, but, largely unconsciously, of course, putting a positive spin on the whole by its “optimistic” conclusion that once white Americans realized the unreasonableness of their prejudices, and faced the “dilemma”, that America, while promising liberty and justice for all, was denying these rights to blacks, they would rectify the racist practices woven throughout the fabric without delay, which in turn would cause the effects of centuries of racist oppression within the black community to vanish almost overnight, leading to the rapid integration of black America into the larger whole, eliminating the massive disparities documented in the study almost overnight.
The study was intended to be groundbreaking, and it certainly was. For decades thereafter, it was the primary source of information on black America. Unfortunately, the optimism of the report’s conclusion/vision of the future, which contrasted sharply with the picture painted by the actual data, was very largely taken as gospel by the liberal reformers of the fifties and sixties and found its embodiment in the long overdue passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, only to be painfully refuted by the riots and racial strife that were soon to follow.
An American Dilemma was a monument to the sort of sociology that was destroyed by its failure to solve America’s dilemma, the dilemma of racism in America, the failure of the optimistic, rationalistic mindset inspired by such thinkers as William James and John Dewey to comprehend the level of alienation experienced by American blacks, the level of bitterness and corruption that alienation could generate, and the simple fact that the optimistic notion that all human beings are fundamentally middle-class liberals at heart and will thus respond to the same “basic” cultural cues in the same manner that secular middle-class Protestants like James, Dewey, and Myrdal did was false.
The report received a remarkable contemporary critique from black novelist Ralph Ellison, available online here, which he was not able to publish in real time—it finally appeared in print in 1964. Unsurprisingly, Ellison, an “independent Marxist” (my phrase) at the time, does not much care for Carnegie’s decision to entrust the most comprehensive study of the position of black men and women in American society to a white man—part of a larger effort by the American sociological establishment to serve the interests of American capitalism, he thought—an argument that would be repeated frequently in years go to come. Ellison is not “communist” in his thinking, for he goes out of his way to note a sore point at the time, the decision of the Communist Party leadership to endorse the continuation of segregation in the Army in the name of “efficiency”, the fate of the USSR being more important than racial equality in the U.S.—but does accuse Myrdal of being, in effect, the lackey of American capitalism and seeking to use his study as a means of convincing American blacks to be more productive components of the American capitalist machine:
Myrdal sees Negro culture and personality simply as the product of “social pathology”. Thus he assumes that “it is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into American culture, to acquire the traits held in esteem by the dominant white Americans.” This, he admits, contains the value premise that “here in America, American culture is ‘highest’ in the pragmatic sense …” Which aside from implying that Negro culture is not also American, assumes that Negroes should desire nothing better than what whites consider highest. But in the “pragmatic sense” lynching and Hollywood faddism and radio are products of the “higher” culture, and the Negro might ask, “Why, if my culture is pathological, must I exchange it for these?”
In fact, if acceptance of American middle-class mores would have allowed black Americans to live lives similar to that of white middle-class Americans, it’s hard to see the point of Ellison’s objections. Fully integrated black Americans, if such a thing were possible, would not be exposed to lynchings. As for “Hollywood faddism and radio”, this is nothing more than left-wing “faddism”, complaining about popular culture because it doesn’t suit left-wing fantasies about what “the people” really want.
At one point, Ellison remarks, in a passage laden with both evasion and insight, that
For in our culture the problem of the irrational, that blind spot in our knowledge of society where Marx cries out for Freud and Freud for Marx, but where approaching, both grow wary and shout insults lest they actually meet, has taken the form of the Negro problem.
From Ellison’s point of view, the ruling classes in both the North and the South simply want to exploit black Americans for the benefit of Northern industrial capitalism and Southern agrarian capitalism. Although he hints at the “irrational” as an explanation of working class racial prejudice, he only hints at it, and prefers to see the oppressed condition of black Americans as simply an old-fashioned capitalist plot, conveniently leaving working class prejudice unexamined. I find Ellison’s faith in both Marx and Freud to be painfully dated—he recognizes that the two ideologies appear unable to accept the other as valid, but appears unwilling to push the matter to the ultimate, awkward conclusion that neither construct could endure much contact with “reality”.
Ellison’s own solution naturally argues for a recognition of an independent validity for American “Negro” culture, that can and must be recognized by White America if anything like a just society is to emerge from the current state of class-based oppression. In his argument, Ellison nods to two of his culture heroes, Dostoevsky and James Joyce:
It does not occur to Myrdal that many of the Negro cultural manifestations which he considers merely reflective [of European civilization, which Myrdal sees as the only true civilization possible] might also embody a rejection of what he considers “higher” values. There is a dualism at work here. It is only partially true that Negroes turn away from white patterns because they are refused participation. There is nothing like distance to create objectivity, and exclusion gives rise to counter values. Men, as Dostoyevsky observed, cannot live in revolt. Nor can they live in a state of “reacting”. It will take a deeper science than Myrdal’s—deep as that might be—to analyze what is happening among the masses of Negroes. Much of it is inarticulate, and Negro scholars have, for the most part, ignored it through clinging, as does Myrdal, to the sterile concept of “race”.
Much of Negro culture might be negative, but there is also much of great value, of richness, which, because it has been secreted by living and has made their lives more meaningful, Negroes will not willingly disregard.
What is needed in our country is not an exchange of pathologies, but a change in the basis of society. This is a job which both Negroes and whites must perform together. In Negro culture there is much of value for America as a whole. What is needed are Negroes to take it and create of it “the uncreated consciousness of their race,” In doing so they will do far more, they’ll help create a more human America.
In 1994, on the 50th anniversary of the publication of An American Dilemma, David Southern, the historian of American racism of the Progressive Era cited above, devoted a whole book to Myrdal’s study, Gunnar Myrdal and Black-White Relations: The Use and Abuse of "An American Dilemma,". He also published a condensed version of his work in an article for the February 1995 issue of The History Teacher, An American Dilemma after Fifty Years: Putting the Myrdal Study and Black-White Relations in Perspective. As Southern notes
Although Myrdal's book predictably served as the reverential starting point for most race-relations writers for some twenty years, it quickly fell out of vogue in the second half of the 1960s. Then Myrdal often became a whipping boy in the heated academic debates about the race problem in the United States. After the civil rights movement fell on hard times in the late 1960s, shrill and contemptuous social analysts and racial activists blasted Myrdal's excessive optimism and his lack of emphasis on class and economics. Many caricatured the large and complex Myrdal report, frequently ripping it out of context and angrily viewing it through some distorting ideological lens. In 1980 Henry Fairlie of the New Republic hurled what he must have considered the supreme insult at presidential aspirant Edward Kennedy when he charged that the Senator's "staff has been raised on sociology readings from Myrdal."
Southern, in his review of responses to Myrdal’s work over time, often joins in the criticisms of American Dilemma as naïve, judgmental, and overly optimistic, though ultimately offering a fair amount of sympathetic language as well. Writing in the early 1990s, looking back at the reign of Reaganesque orthodoxy, which regarded “welfare” and affirmative action with withering contempt, Southern could barely offer even a suggestion of optimism. He drew extensively from a contemporary work by Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (1992):
Meanwhile, the statistics of social disintegration spiral ever upward. In his chilling 1992 book called Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, Andrew Hacker offers abundant evidence of the worsening plight of a large segment of the black population. He shows us that in 1950, for example, less than one-fifth of black families were headed by single women and less than one-fifth of the births were out of wedlock.
By the time Moynihan sounded the alarm about the crisis of the black family in the mid-1960s, about a quarter of black families were headed by females and about a third of all black births were out of wedlock. By 1990, Hacker informs us, 56.2 percent of black families were headed by a single woman and 63.7 percent of births were outside of marriage. Although non-black families are also in serious decline, the media has focused mostly on the lifestyles of poor and desperate blacks. As threatening images of the black underclass increasingly bombard the perceptions of non-blacks, the white majority inevitably discovers more excuses to resist further gains by all blacks.
Southern doesn’t attempt to explain, or even mention, the sea change that took place in sexual relations that occurred during the sixties, when the notion of “virginity”, which had largely defined sexual relationship in the western world for millennia, suddenly disappeared without a trace, along with the stigma of divorce, illegitimacy (to an extent), and even (in the last decades) homosexuality. He doesn’t consider why these changes proved so much more disruptive among blacks than whites, treats the issue of the massive rise in urban crime—whose negative impact on employment opportunities was, I think, a “forbidden” subject among social scientists—only by citing black authors, and, unsurprisingly, does not attempt at all to discuss attempts to develop a distinctive black culture, efforts that, to a great extent, in my opinion, not only failed, but proved counter-productive.
It is not surprising that, once blacks in America lost their fear of overwhelming white retributory violence, they were delighted to reject a “civilization” that had enslaved and humiliated them for centuries. The so-called “Enlightenment” found room for precious few who were not of the proper color. Even more, blacks who did see value in western civilization, and who could imagine finding achievement and recognition in it, were often hobbled by fear of “selling out,” and successful blacks who did unashamedly adopt “white” values, like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, were bitterly denounced as “race traitors” who had sold out their African heritage for a mess of honkie pottage.
There is a fascinating instance in the life of Dostoevsky, recounted in Joseph Frank’s massive biography of the great Russian, when he was living in a prison camp in Siberia following his participation in a plot on the Czar’s life. Fyodor found, to his embarrassment, that all “real Russians” hated him, because he was middle class, educated, and could speak French. They were, for the most part, brutal and unapologetic criminals: they were proud of their murders—really the ultimate proof of manhood—rather than tormented by them, in the manner of Raskolnikov, the supposedly corrupt product of “western” thinking. Dostoevsky found he “belonged”, not with his “fellow” Russians, but the handful of Polish revolutionaries imprisoned with him, men who, like him, spoke French and had ideals. Once when the Russian murderers were being exceptionally coarse and drunken (since escape was essentially impossible, discipline in the camp was lax), one of the Polish prisoners exclaimed in disgust—“they are animals!”
Dostoevsky, torn between two worlds, finally and proudly cast his lot with the Russians. It didn’t matter if they were dirty, vulgar, and vicious. They were Russian and so was he! He would not be deracinated, like Turgenev, but a man of the soil, the black Russian soil. “Everyone” recognizes Dostoevsky as the greater writer, compared to Turgenev, but his political agenda—Russia conquering the “decadent” west, never came true in his lifetime and never looked less appetizing than at the present. I would remark that in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, also translated as The Devils, largely a portrait of the violently anti-traditional “Nihilists”, the real hero—I read the novel very differently from many others —is Stepan Verkhovensky, a dreamy “useless man”, the great staple of the Russian novel—and, ultimately, Hamlet himself, the prince of indecision. In “real life”, Dostoevsky’s “philosophy” played out in the form of an absurd Russian nationalism, mixed with a highly unpleasant anti-Semitism.
The black voices that Ellison called for did surface in the years following World War II, most notably Ellison himself, with his great novel Invisible Man, published in 1952. But he seems to have been overwhelmed by that novel’s success, for he fell largely mute thereafter, failing to complete another work of fiction. My highly subjective take was that he was infuriated—justly, I think—by the Manhattan hullabaloo over Norman Mailer’s florid, self-promoting essay The White Negro (1957), which effectively claimed that the “true Negro” was not an elegant man of letters, as Ellison aspired to be and very largely was, but a drunken, instinctual, amoral bad ass lusting after “apocalyptic orgasms,” a figure whose dimensions, it seemed, could only be limned by a middle-class, Harvard-educated Jewish intellectual like Norman Mailer, rather than anyone who actually happened to be black. The fact that the literary establishment of New York, whose approval Ellison courted and had very largely received, abandoned him as, in effect, last year’s fad for Norman’s meretricious tripe fatally deprived Ellison of the self-confidence he needed to complete a second novel. Though Ellison lived throughout the glory days of the Civil Rights Era, he played a very minor role throughout.12
His place as “spokesman” for the “new Negro” was easily taken from him by James Baldwin. Fully as “aesthetic” as Ellison (Baldwin very much admired Henry James), Baldwin was far more outspoken and seized the moment in works like Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963), both struggling with questions of black identity and harshly criticizing white hypocrisy. His attacks on “top down” efforts at integration—pushed in a paternalistic, self-congratulatory manner by white liberals—caused a sensation, though their full implications were always refined away by white liberals, who wanted blacks to be grateful for the crumbs that were being offered to them.
Baldwin was to be supplanted in turn by “true” voices of the ghetto, most spectacularly by The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1971), who had all the street cred the elegant Baldwin lacked. Malcolm X’s career, including his famous comment on the Kennedy assassination—“chickens coming home to roost”—allowed Americans to view a black America that rejected all American values, or at least sought to do so. After Malcolm X came a deluge of black nationalist outpourings, some remarkable, and some not. The arrival of black female authors—a very distinctive part of the overall feminist movement— was particularly important.
The great burden that all black writers shared was the burden of success: “real’ acceptance meant acceptance into the larger white world, with all its temptations of recognition, financial success, and taming. There was nothing a black intellectual wanted less to hear than to be told “you’re one of the good ones”. Roger Wilkins, a leading activist in the civil rights era, wrote an engaging memoir, originally entitled Blue Chip Nigger (1982) (people could talk like that back then), but chastely rechristened as A Man's Life: An Autobiography for today’s more ballless13 times. In his book, Wilkins ruefully recounted the corrupting pleasures of acceptance, the very real pleasures of “nice things” and of being admired and accepted by intelligent, accomplished people—an acceptance that is largely—though not entirely—admirable—not condescending, not self-congratulatory.
And yet. No matter how high Wilkins climbed, he never seemed to make a “real” difference. As you climb, the innocent, pure joy of the barricades vanishes, and the embarrassing feeling grows that you do not want to return to that life. Your new life is too comfortable. You like your new friends. Many of your old ones seem pushy and shallow now, uncaring for the things that you have learned to care about, like literature and “ideas”. They envy your success and think you’ve gotten too white. At the same time, you think you’ve left them behind for a reason, and you’re right. But the more you succeed, the lonelier you become, and the greater social revolution—the erasure of the great gulf separating blacks and whites—never occurs. The Dostoevskian dilemma is never resolved.14
Over and over again, black writers slide into a bitter, reflexive black nationalism, railing compulsively against “white America” and insisting that racism is worse than ever, when in fact it is not, despite the wide economic gaps. The leading black author today is unquestionably Ta-Nehisi Coates, an author I find tendentious and heavily sarcastic, again possessing the sort of street cred that both black and white audiences seem to find irresistible. His autobiographical sensation The Beautiful Struggle (2008), amplified in his later collection of essays Between the World and Me, places enormous emphasis on the constant fear a black man faces, emphasizing the unprovoked killings of black men by police as a way of off-loading the black on black violence he encountered growing up in Baltimore.
Coates desperately, and dishonestly, dismisses the whole issue of black on black crime by saying what is true, that the vast majority of murders involve people who know each other, so naturally blacks murder blacks, just as whites murder whites. End of story.
In fact, the story doesn’t end there. According to the FBI’s interactive “Crime Data Explorer”, in 2020, a year in which the homicide rate increased dramatically, particularly among blacks, there were 10,440 homicides in the U.S.. In 5,832 cases, the offender was listed as black, while in 3,981, the offender was listed as white. For victims, the figures were 5,839 black, and 4,187 white. In 2019, the latest data available, for the cases where the race of both offender and victim were known, there were 2,594 “white on white” murders out of 3,299 total (about 80%), and 2,574 black on black murders out of 2,906 total (about 90%). Data from the 2020 Census show the U.S. population figures for whites and blacks (self-identified) as 61.6% white and 12.4% black—five times as many whites as blacks. In 2019, blacks were about five times more likely to be murdered than whites, while in 2020, they were seven times as likely to be murdered than whites. Murder is the leading cause of death among young black men, and it is not too much to say that one of the leading causes of death among young black men is other young black men. Ta-Nehisi Coates knows this, but doesn’t want you to know it.
The “crisis” of black on black crime has been ongoing for decades. Every black person in the U.S. is cognizant of it, though they may not wish to discuss the matter in front of white people. Virtually every black organization in the country has sought to address it, but without success. The level of black on black crime in many urban areas represents a profound obstacle to black economic progress, but it is a topic “off limits” to liberals, while conservatives either ignore it or use it as an opportunity for demagoguery.
The black revolt that began back in the 1960s, now more than 50 years ago, was in effect, a test, a test of liberalism’s ability to rethink its fundamental concepts—a test that liberalism signally failed. The notion that human nature was rooted in passion rather than reason—or passion and reason both—was unthinkable to liberals, so they didn’t think it. They couldn’t comprehend the hatred that blacks felt for the condescending treatment liberals had bestowed on them for decades—paternalistic, self-congratulatory, patronizing, and humiliating as it was—as though blacks ought to be grateful to whites for removing their foot from black America’s throat—after having pressed hard on it for more than three hundred years. They couldn’t comprehend it, so they pretended it didn’t exist.
Black conservatives like Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas argue that liberals destroyed black families and black economic enterprise with their “generous”, guilt-driven welfare.15 They have half a point, at best. White liberals did change, for example, the rules regarding eligibility to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the “original” welfare program replaced by the Clinton administration back in 1996, allowing aid to be given to “illegitimate” children and no longer enforcing the “no man in the house” rule, but they did so in large part due to pressure from black social workers and other black professionals. Liberals, desperate to get black people “inside” American society, lacked the courage to say “We aren’t excluding you because you’re black; we’re excluding you because you’re not middle class.”
It is notable that, contrary to the “libertarian” arguments advanced by conservative black thinkers like Sowell and Thomas, disparities between black and white families, in terms of out of wedlock births and “dissolved” marriages were substantial before the Great Society reforms of the mid 1960s. The famous/infamous “Moynihan Report, issued by the Johnson Administration in 1965, and widely attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, largely recycled information from Myrdal’s earlier work, noting that, in 1940, long before “welfare” in any form became available to “never married” families, the out of wedlock birth rate for blacks was 16.8%, compared to 2% for whites. By 1963, the rates had increased to 23.6% and 3% respectively. The report also says that, at the time of the report’s writing, of the estimated 1.8 million illegitimate black children in the country, less than a third were receiving welfare payments.16 For comparison, one can note that in 2012, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, the out of wedlock birth rates for blacks and whites had increased to 63% for blacks and 32% for whites, reflecting the enormous impact of the sexual revolution on sexual behavior since the 1960s. The question is, why hasn’t the “soaring” out of wedlock birth rate for whites, causing the disparity between the two races to shrink dramatically, hobbled white economic progress over the same period of time.
The issuance of the Moynihan Report, which essentially blamed the worsening socio-economic gap between blacks and whites on the collapse of the two-parent family among black Americans, provoked a furious response of the left, and had precisely the opposite impact that Moynihan intended. Any social analysis that “blamed the victim”—taken from the title of a book, Blaming the Victim, written by William Ryan specifically in response to the Moynihan Report—became forbidden and, as a matter of public policy, very largely remained so until a Republican Congress and a Democratic president combined to pass welfare reform legislation, known as “TANF”, which, at the tail end of the Obama administration, came under increasing attack from the “Woke Left”, black and white alike, though the current state of the Biden administration at this writing (summer of 2022) probably (and fortunately) precludes any attempt to rework it to resume subsidizing dependency, which continues to be an obsession on the left.
How Liberals Got Woke
The twin failures of the post-war “consensus liberalism”—its failure to comprehend, much less solve, the domestic cultural explosions that began in the late sixties and continued unabated for decades after, along with its complicity in the war in Vietnam—proved disastrous for liberalism as a whole but particularly for the proud consensus liberals who controlled the American academy and saw themselves as the intellectual leaders of the country. All at once they were disconnected from the country, which moved right, and their students, who moved left. Non-negotiable demands, shouting down of opposition, and a deep romanticizing of rebellion and violence became the order of the day, and, of course, have most recently been reborn. The humanities and the social sciences frequently became captive to some variety of “new left” thinking, even though, politically, new left liberalism, embodied most dramatically by the presidential campaign of William McGovern, proved utterly disastrous, ushering in 20 years of Republican presidencies, broken only by Jimmy Carter’s fumbling four-year term, which pleased almost no one.
America was swinging right, but the academy was swinging hard left, creating new disciplines, like black studies, feminist studies, and, a bit later, gay studies, that were effectively separate domains, exempt from criticism from outsiders, though often subject to fierce intramural power struggles that were, of course, of no concern to anyone else. (This particular form of intllectual hypocrisy is now being duplicated in the Washington, DC public school system)
The academy needed a justification for its alienation from the rest of society, one that would provide both solace and justification—one that would, ultimately, “prove” that they were too good for America, and found it in a variety of European sources, such as the Frankfurt School, which dated back to the early twenties, and sought, among other things to explain—as in “explain away”—the failure of the “masses” to behave in a suitably revolutionary manner. European thinkers continued to struggle with their dialectic in the post-war era, when the masses became even less revolutionary, and far more bourgeois, thanks to the “European Miracle”. The influence of American popular culture, already a problem since the twenties, became even more of an irritant, particularly in the sixties, when American rock and roll became permanently embedded in the youth culture. European thought had always been profoundly, unconsciously elitist—one reason American culture was so often disliked—and new levels of profundity and obscurantism had to be attained to maintain the old posture.
I have never read, with any depth, any European thinker after Nietzsche—I saw nothing but more layers and layers of obscurantism, all driven by the need to separate one’s self from the bourgeoise as an end in itself. Ever since Kant, it seems to me, European thought has been deeply reactionary in its hatred and contempt for empiricism in general and the exact sciences in particular as something vulgar and common and unworthy of a gentleman. In the contemporary American academy, this has been slightly transmuted, allowing the dismissal of any appeal to science as “white” or “patriarchal” or both—the real reason being, of course, that they can’t understand it, or that it tells them something they don’t want to hear, or both. It doesn’t matter if it’s Hegel or Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche or Heidegger or Husserl or Sartre, or Foucault, the bottom line is always the same—the superiority of the “elect’, however they may be defined, and a limitless contempt for the “common man”.17
Closely allied to this in contemporary “thinking’ is a massive rejection of both contemporary society and its supposedly glorious past (the greater purpose, of course, of the 1619 Project). Marx had already “unmasked” the bourgeoise and its cult of “progress” (though Marx, of course, did believe in progress), arguing that things were getting worse and worse, rather than better and better—the same argument that Rousseau had made a century earlier. Post Marx, the basic tool of unmasking has been Nietzsche’s notion of the Wille zur Macht—that all of human activity can be viewed as nothing more, or less, than a struggle for power. I have criticized a contemporary version of this argument, given in David Kennedy’s A World of Struggle, pointing out that by unmasking bourgeois virtue as a mere hunger for dominance, he unmasks himself as well, for, by his standards, there is nothing wrong with “hypocrisy”—as long as it works.18
Throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies the Marxist dream/fantasy of European intellectuals that they would “soon” assume control of society as the vanguard of the proletariat continued to fade, and, of course, disappeared entirely with the collapse of communism. But as the positive half of the Marxist dream was dissolved in the continuing triumph of the bourgeoise, the importance of the second half—the unmasking of the bourgeoise—became ever more paramount, became the intellectual’s entire function. And so Foucault and others strived to “prove” that the more the bourgeoise succeeded, the more wicked they in fact became: the oppressed were their own jailers, because they believed the bourgeoise’s lies! A “classic” tactic of Foucault and those he’s influenced is to cite barbaric practices from the past and insist that in the current day the form has changed but the substance has not. In the 1619 Project, for example, the extent of racism in present-day American schools was demonstrated by citing a textbook from 1863—used not in the United States of America but the Confederate States of America. Well, close enough!
Yet this tactic assumes the bourgeois values it attempts to subvert. If there is no such thing as objective values, why is it “wrong” to be barbaric or cruel or racist? Shouldn’t the philosopher treat society with the detachment of an entomologist rather than the fervor of an Old Testament prophet?
The great expansion of the middle class following World War II, as well as the conspicuous lack of revolutionary passion of the remaining working class, put a particular strain on would-be revolutionaries looking for someone to lead. As is well known, Herbert Marcuse, a prominent member of the Frankfort School, had a massive influence on the New Left back in the 1960s, helpfully “explaining” that the social class that would initiate the final and greatest revolution, in which the expropriators would finally be expropriated, did not have to be Marx’s beloved proletariat, completely reversing the master’s thought. In fact, the revolutionary class could be students! Which made a lot of sense to the New Left, who were, of course, almost all students and who very largely detested the white working class, both out of pure snobbery—they barely graduated from high school and they wear white socks! How lame is that!—and because the white working class was often racist, hated hippies, and generally supported the Vietnam War.
It was Marx’s conviction that the Revolution would inevitably succeed, because the logic of capitalism would eventually reduce every occupation to one that could be filled by unskilled labor, making the proletariat almost the entirety of the population—though he still denied that it could, much less should, come through free elections, because the essence of revolution is that it is self-validating, and not dependent on its success at complying with supposedly “fair and impartial” rules, which in fact do not exist. The Revolution should not be bound by anything other than itself.
Marcuse, by rejecting the notion that the proletariat had to be the revolutionary class—a reaction, really, to the fact that European and American workers were clearly far from revolutionary—decided, as William F. Buckley had already done, albeit for far different reasons, that “mere numbers” should not necessarily determine policy. The enlightened few had the right and indeed the duty to suppress the many whenever the many got it wrong.
This sort of thinking was extremely useful to the “new academy”, both in silencing dissent during internal power struggles and explaining the “false consciousness” of the unwashed who failed to follow their lead—preening themselves on their superiority to the many, a superiority that was in fact confirmed by the many’s rejection of it.
An additional turn of the screw was provoked by the New Left’s revaluation of all values when applied to American foreign policy, and, eventually, to American history itself. The “Old Left” was instinctively “Western” in its values. However much they detested the bourgeois, they never doubted that Western Civilization was “Civilization”. Marx, in his denunciations of the wickedness of British imperialism, never denied that British exploitation of India was, in essence, simply replacing feudal exploitation of the masses with the new, improved capitalist variety. What was happening was cruel, but “necessary” if the Indian masses were ever to be meaningfully “free”, as they would be fully courtesy of the inevitable socialist revolution that would follow their current “immiseration”, free as they had never been before. Similarly, American progressives never thought for a moment that American Indian cultures were remotely on a par with the West, and that while settlers’ treatment of the Indians was often brutal and cruel, the ultimate benefits of civilization—that is to say, western civilization—were inestimable. Whether there would be any Indians around to benefit was another matter.
This long tradition was all flipped on its head by the new cult romanticizing anything that wasn’t a product of Western Civilization, sentimentalizing peasants, guerillas, and anything “primitive”. As Susan Sontag so memorably put it, “The white race is the cancer of human history.” Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, would prove a seminal work, “exposing” generations of European scholars as either overt or covert racists. Said, born of a Palestinian mother and an American father and educated in the UK, had a field day exposing the multiple hypocrisies of a multitude of “experts” on “the East”. I have read Orientalism and, in my very limited opinion, it’s almost all true, but a long way from what one might call “the whole truth”.
For the most part, the authors Said is, most effectively, attacking, were men born in the 19th century, before World War I, when western superiority was taken for granted. Furthermore, one can dare to remark that western scholarship, however blinkered it may have been, was superior to that of its competitors. Why, for example, was it a Frenchman who translated hieroglyphics using the Rosetta Stone? And why was it British scholars who deciphered cuneiform? The secularization of scholarship that took place in the Renaissance, when applied to the Bible itself during the secularization of religion that took place in the Reformation, ultimately led to a new kind of scholarship, one that could, and did, prove more powerful than any traditional value system, whether Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, or Confucian. Furthermore, the West spread its net far wider than any previous culture. Edward Gibbon’s smug gibe, “Chinese historians excel all others both in their knowledge of their own history and in their ignorance of all other peoples’,” is smug indeed, but not that far from the truth. Western civilization sought to go intellectually beyond itself as no previous civilization ever did, and in doing so, together, of course, with a great many other advantages, developed an intellectual power that, centuries after it reshaped Europe, is relentlessly reshaping the world—often disastrously, to be sure—but irresistibly as well.19
But Said’s ideas paralleled the thinking of many other writers in other non-western cultures. Western scholarship was not merely smug and self-regarding and condescending, it was a tool of western colonialist capitalist oppression. Once more, the western liberal pose of dispassionate, value-neutral scholarship and thought was unmasked as literally the last word in oppression, all the more insidious for its bland exterior. Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Columbia University, provides an update on Said’s non-western critique of western “understanding” of non-western cultures, seen, essentially, as both justification and tool of western oppression, in this interview with Len Gutkin at the Chronicle of Higher Education—a skeptical one, it must be said, which throws a good deal of shade on the woke folk:
A lot of the postcolonial literature takes the prevailing Orientalist narrative and just reverses the signs on everything. Things that before were described as constructive and beneficent on the part of the West are now described as evil and exploitative, but the picture of the world remains roughly the same in both cases. Virtually all agency is still with whites, with powerful people. If you ask certain scholars, “How did ISIS come about?” they’ll talk about Sykes-Picot carving up the Middle East into arbitrary states, they’ll talk about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, U.S. meddling in Syria — and it’s not that those narratives are wrong per se. But they’re definitely incomplete. They’re focused exclusively on elites in the West, in Europe, in America. There’s no point in the story where some ordinary Iraqi or Syrian picks up a gun, and aims it at somebody else, and willfully pulls the trigger. When non-Westerners appear in the story at all, they’re like motes of dust being blown around by the “real” actors. That’s profoundly condescending, and it’s not really a picture of the world that’s any different than the imperial one in terms of who has agency and power.
Contemporary postmodernist thought is “necessary” to the intellectual elites in the U.S. and Europe and the non-European world because it explains away their failure to assume any sort of leadership role in today’s global society, defined as it is by the detested reign of neoliberal capitalism, their moral superiority affirmed by the fact that no one listens to them. Like Freud before them, they hold any criticism directed at them as self-refuting proof of their own righteousness.
In the U.S. the advent of the neoliberal age was announced by the stunning triumph of the Reagan counter-revolution in 1980. The culture war that Reagan had fought as governor in California during the sixties was replicated on a national scale. Academics in the public universities were particularly hard hit. Not only were they politically impotent, the great enrollment boom of the sixties and seventies was drawing to a close, creating a massive oversupply of grad students. At the same time, state politicos, increasingly tired of hearing how corrupt and racist they were, started cutting university funding, letting virtuous academics starve even while soulless Wall Street thugs and Silicon Valley hustlers were making billions. There was, it would seem, no end to bourgeois perfidy!
The rewards at the top of society were indeed exploding, as a variety of geniuses figured out how to use computers to tap into an enormously expanding world economy to obtain fortunes that would dwarf any robber baron’s. Billionaires, once unheard of, became a dime a dozen, while literally millions edged from “middle class” to “upper middle class”, worrying less about crab grass and mortgages and more about renewable energy—renewable energy and waterfront property. The modern cult of competitiveness and credentialing was born, and, with it, postmodern guilt. Students who made their way into the top undergraduate and graduate schools knew, on the one hand, that they certainly had worked hard to get there, but also knew on the other that, for the most part, what they really excelled at was playing the game—acing advanced courses, whether the subject be the postmodern novel or linear algebra, not because the classes were interesting in themselves or relevant to their intended field of study, but because they were “advanced”. What spare time they had apart from studying was devoted to competing in the sports that would be most likely to improve their chances of acceptance at their “target” schools, and/or engaging in all sorts of “charity work”, the more fashionable and selfless the better, for the same reason. As a capper, once they actually arrived on campus, the whole game would start again, and indeed, would even continue out in the real world, without end. Where was the substance?
The substance, of course, would be guilt. How could they excuse the privilege they had striven for all their lives to earn—for the sake, really, of possessing it as an end in itself—other than by denouncing that very privilege, and hope that the passion of the denunciation would wipe away the stain of the possession—might even allow the possession to continue? As I wrote, a few years back, which I can now only look back on as the “good old days”:
It’s a tragic fact that the greatest cause of modern liberalism—racial, and now sexual, equality—has curdled into the contemporary obsession with “privilege”, which often explicitly rejects the basic tenets of liberalism—the devotion to free speech and free thought. The “multiculturism” of the modern academy—a debased version of what a true multiculturism could and should be—forbids dissent and aggressively rejects the notion of objective truth in order to facilitate the mini-empire building of petty academics. As with any fashion, the fashion for combating privilege and abolishing microaggressions, cultural appropriation, and other colonialist sins provokes an unending cycle of one-upmanship—everyone struggles to top the topper. Privileged groups—e.g., students at the elite colleges and universities—are under the greatest pressure to denounce their privilege, both to excuse and to justify it, with the palm inevitably going to the most privileged of all, who have the most privilege to reject, Proust’s “wit of the Guermantes” refurbished for a new age and a new hypocrisy. (The duc, and particularly the duchesse, de Guermantes were gifted at parading ostentatiously contemporary values while maintaining all their ancient privileges.)
Since I wrote those words, the issues of race and sexuality have all been supercharged by sensational instances of police killings of black men and women, recorded as never before courtesy of Steve Jobs’ iPhone, the #metoo movement, which finally exposed in full detail the toxic levels of sexual abuse prevalent in American society, and the “new” transsexual movement, which opened up whole new worlds of correctness to explore and deplore. As far as an outsider, particularly an ancient one like myself, can tell, students and faculty generally vie with one another to see who is the more passionate—except for the occasional victim. The hapless sense of impotent rage that grips the academy when it confronts the real world finds some release when a very real in-house villain can first be located and then tossed and trampled in the campus ring—a pattern that has spread to the outside world wherever elite graduates find employment—the Silicon Valley giants, the liberal media, and elite foundations and non-profits.20
Much of the immediate turmoil over CRT issues—one third, perhaps—is related to the paucity of blacks in the upper reaches of academe, business, and the professions. The simple, unfortunate fact is, that is not going to be remedied any time soon. People have already lost their jobs for saying that the “talent pool” for blacks is thin, so I won’t say that, even though I don’t have a job, but I will say that the number of black high school students who are academically prepared to do high level undergraduate and graduate work is small. For almost two decades I wrote about the National Assessment of Educational Progress under contract with the National Center for Education Statistics, and I will rely on NAEP data to make my point.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress was last administered at the grade 12 level in 2019. At that time the percentages of students in the top four racial/ethnic groups in the nation’s public schools were as follows: White, 47%; Hispanic, 27%; Black, 15%; Asian, 5%. While NAEP results only indicate how students do score on NAEP, a separate organization, the National Assessment Governing Board sets policy for NAEP, including “Achievement Levels” that indicate how well students should score (in the Board’s opinion), setting three levels—Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. Roughly speaking (roughly, because I’ve forgotten the name of the report that made this argument), students at the Proficient level should be ready to perform college level work without remedial courses. In 2019, the most recent NAEP Grade 12 report, achievement level results for the four major groups for “at or above Proficient” and “Advanced” were as follows, first for mathematics and then for reading: White students, AA Proficient, 32%; Advanced, 4%; for Hispanic students, AA Proficient, 11%; Advanced, 1%; for Black students, AA Proficient 8%, Advanced, less than 1%; Asian students, AA Proficient, 50%; Advanced, 14%. For Reading, White students, AA Proficient, 47%; Advanced, 9%; for Hispanic students, AA Proficient, 25%; Advanced, 3%; for Black students, AA Proficient 17%, Advanced, 1%; Asian students, ABA Proficient, 49%; Advanced, 13%.
According to a Census Report, also in 2019, About 13.1 Percent Have a Master’s, Professional Degree or Doctorate, about 3.2% of Americans have a professional degree, and about 4.5% have a Ph.D. With a handful of exceptions, these people will be drawn exclusively from the population of students scoring at or above Proficient and indeed, for the last two categories, almost exclusively from those scoring at Advanced. Wells Fargo executive Charles Scharf was forced to apologize for saying that the black “talent pool was very limited”, which was indeed inelegant phrasing, but if he had spoken more “correctly”—that few blacks graduate from high schools performing at an academic level that would make it likely for them to excel in post-secondary studies—I doubt if his words would have received a more sympathetic reception. But he would have been accurate.
As is well known, American colleges and universities, both public and private, have gone to extraordinary lengths to overcome the paucity of well qualified black high school graduates—particularly by disadvantaging high-performing Asian students, a strategy that has come under increasingly effective legal attack, and is likely to be significantly reduced in the future. At the graduate level, and at the high end “talent pool” referred to by the unfortunate Mr. Scharf, no strategy has proved successful.
A good deal of the energy expended in the name of critical race theory is to somehow wipe away the implications of these facts. Decades of concerted national efforts at educational “reform”, pursued from both the right and the left, have had no real impact on these figures. I undertook a long, informal review of educational reform efforts back in 2017, in a post titled A Limo at Risk, Part I: A skeptical view of American education reform, 1983-2017. Part II never materialized, but the conclusion of Part I, that, nationally, these efforts ended uniformly in failure still stands. Kathryn Paige Harden, professor of psychology at the University of Texas, in her recent work, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality provides a more learned discussion of many of the same issues—that, to be blunt, an enormous amount of money has been wasted on programs that have provided no tangible results, programs that are pursued out of an unwillingness of admit failure—the domestic equivalent of the kind of thinking that kept the U.S. in Afghanistan for 20 years while achieving nothing—and an unwillingness to disassemble a large but functionless bureaucracy, functionless except to maintain its own existence.
This was in fact “predicted” by another enormously controversial, politically incorrect report from the Johnson era, the “Coleman Report”—officially, Equality of Educational Opportunity, a massive (737 pages) statistical study based on an analysis of both student performance and thousands of questionnaires filled out by students, teachers, and administrators. The full report, over 700 pages, does not seem to be easily available online. However, an excellent review of the study the Coleman Report at Fifty: Its Legacy and Implications for Future Research on Equality of Opportunity, by Karl Alexander and Stephen L. Morgan, published in 2016, is available. Writing from the vantage point of 2016, Alexander and Morgan provide what might be called a “skeptical” overview of the study:
The effort was little more than an empirical parsing of the association between children’s test scores at various grade levels, on the one hand, and measures of family background and school resources, on the other. The focus on school resources and family background was aimed at identifying the relative weight of possible causative factors, but the design and framing were poorly suited to the task. The data, and so the analyses, were cross-sectional, not longitudinal, and so not well suited to causal attributions, while at the level of ideas, the EEO lacked an account of how children’s school performance developed over time in response to conditions at home and at school, and it had even less to say about how children’s performance developed in response to changes in conditions at home and at school, as would have been the ideal.
As Alexander and Morgan explain, the study’s conclusion explicitly contradicted the standard liberal assumptions about the reasons for below average academic performance among black students. “In thumbnail,” the study found the following:
differences across schools in average achievement levels were small compared to differences in achievement levels within schools;
the differences in achievement levels detected did not align appreciably with differences in school resources other than the socioeconomic makeup of the student body; and
family background factors afforded a much more powerful accounting of achievement differences than did any and all characteristics of the schools that children attended.
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, writing in the Johns Hopkins Magazine, also in 2016, proclaimed Coleman Report Set The Standard For The Study Of Public Education (Coleman was also from Hopkins). Dickinson noted that Coleman had really only one positive policy recommendation derived from the study: “The research results indicate that a child's performance, especially a working-class child's performance, is greatly benefited by his going to school with children who come from different backgrounds.” “If you integrate children of different backgrounds and socioeconomics, kids perform better.” (Coleman’s words)
What Coleman was really saying, however, is that if you place working-class kids in with middle-class kids (or, really, black kids with white kids), peer pressure will drive the working-class kids to absorb the achievement-oriented standards of their middle-class classmates—which implicitly assumes that the working-class kids will be in the minority. Of course, at the time, if American schools were “perfectly” integrated, they would have been more than 80% white.
This, of course, was not where American schools were headed, Brown v. Board of Education or no, both because of white flight and the rising tide of black nationalism among blacks, which sought compulsively to avoid situations whereby blacks could be influenced (or, worst of all, judged) by whites in any way. Coleman himself opposed “forced integration”, known as “busing” at the time, on the pragmatic grounds that it would only spur white flight. Of course, the brutal riots of 1968, the year of Martin Luther King’s assassination, did the job far more thoroughly, though well-meaning though overweening federal judges continued to order forced integration for years go come, prompted by a painfully simplistic and optimistic view of human nature.
The report drew a very interesting conclusion about the mindset of “average” black versus white students from the study. “It appears that children from advantaged groups assume that the environment will respond if they are able enough to affect it; children from disadvantaged groups do not make this assumption but in many cases assume that nothing they will do can affect the environment—it will give benefits or withhold them but not as a consequence of their own action.”
I will give two extensive quotations from books by black men about growing up in a “disadvantaged” neighborhood, Geoffrey Canada’s Fist Stick Knife Gun (1995) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Beautiful Struggle. Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, grew up in the South Bronx, and said that he grew up in an atmosphere of “abandoned houses, crime, violence and an all-encompassing sense of chaos and disorder.” Here is his account of his first encounter with “life in the streets”.
I remember them [his brothers] coming inside one afternoon having just come back from the playground. There was great excitement in the air. My mother noticed right away and asked, “Where’s John’s jacket?”
My brother John responded, “This boy . . . this boy he took my jacket.”
Well, we all figured that was the end of that. My mother would have to go and get the jacket back. But the questioning continued. “What do you mean, he took your jacket?”
“I was playing on the sliding board and I took my jacket off and left it on the bench, and this boy he tried to take it. And I said it was my jacket, and he said he was gonna take it. And he took it. And I tried to take it back, and he pushed me and said he was gonna beat me up.”
To my mind John’s explanation was clear and convincing, this case was closed. I was stunned when my mother turned to my oldest brother, Daniel, and said, “And what did you do when this boy was taking your brother’s jacket?”
Daniel looked shocked. What did he have to do with this? And we all recognized the edge in my mother’s voice. Daniel was being accused of something and none of us knew what it was. Daniel answered, “I didn’t do nuthin’. I told Johnny not to take his jacket off. I told him.”
My mother exploded. “You let somebody take your brother’s jacket and you did nothing? That’s your younger brother. You can’t let people just take your things. You know I don’t have money for another jacket. You better not ever do this again. Now you go back there and get your brother’s jacket.”
My mouth was hanging open. I couldn’t believe it. What was my mother talking about, go back and get it? Dan and Johnny were the same size. If the boy was gonna beat up John, well, he certainly could beat up Dan. We wrestled all the time and occasionally hit one another in anger, but none of us knew how to fight. We were all equally incompetent when it came to fighting. So it made no sense to me. If my mother hadn’t had that look in her eye I would have protested. Even at four years old I knew this wasn’t fair. But I also knew that look in my mother’s eye. A look that signified a line not to be crossed.
This was the environment of Canada’s childhood—a world without “fairness”. If you suffer an injury, no one is going to help you. If you have something nice, sooner or later, someone will take it away from you, unless you can resist them with superior force. Now from Coates, describing an encounter with his father over Coates’ loss of his house keys.
Where’re your keys? he demanded.
I don’t have them, I mumbled.
He was standing in the living room, off from work, always off from work at the most awful times. House keys seem small, but to my father they embodied everything about me that could someday get me killed.
Well, where are they?
This kid at school took them from me and threw them in the trash.
Did you pull them out?
No.
Did you pop the kid in the mouth?
No.
What did you do?
Nothing.
Again, the same moral. If you don’t stand up for yourself, everything will be taken from you. This is the war of all against all. Life in the ghetto frequently is nasty, brutish, and short. For the record, I find Canada’s book far superior to Coates, whose memoir strikes me as evasive, fearfully overwritten, and very often meretricious. The rapturous reception given this book suggests that the white intellectual appetite for “dangerous” black writers rather than sensible ones remains unabated.
It is not surprising that growing up in a neighborhood where the murder rate is five to ten times the national average breeds despair. A teenager in a bad neighborhood needs a gang far more than he needs a thorough grasp of either the real number line or the Federalist Papers. Yet educational reformers of all stripes are convinced that, in effect, since this shouldn’t be the case, we can pretend that it isn’t the case, and, eventually, it won’t be the case. But this has never worked, and never will. We have poured money into education for decades, thinking that the independent variable must the school—the teacher, the curriculum, the whatever—while in fact it is not. The student is the independent variable, and the student is the product of both his/her immediate environment and cultural heritage—his peer group and parents. And black Americans are the recipients of a painfully damaged cultural heritage. The implications of this burden were recently discussed in an article in the Bulwark, Race and Place: How Community Disparities Affect Inequality, by Lawrence Eppard and Erik Nelson, faculty members at Shippensburg, Pa. and Brigham Young Universities, respectively, that draws on a variety of studies to document the dysfunctional impacts of harsh urban environments.
But cultural heritage does not mean genetic heritage. I reject entirely the notion that blacks—specifically, sub-Saharan Africans—are genetically less intelligent than other human populations. I do believe that there are genetic differences between Africans and, say, Europeans, for race, and that these differences should be pursued freely at American colleges and universities, as Dr. Harden is doing, but, like Dr. Harden, I see no reason to believe they determine intelligence. “Race” is both a biological reality and a “construct” and it is important to keep the two separate. However, it is also important to remember that constructs—that is to say, cultures—are defined as much by environment as will.
Geographer Jared Diamond, in his famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, described how geography shaped the evolution of human cultures around the globe, pointing out that entirely adventitious circumstances could both create and inhibit the development of “advanced cultures” that were, ultimately the product of chance rather than any form of “natural evolution” following necessarily from the overwhelming power of human reason. Black conservative author Thomas Sowell’s Race and Culture provides similar arguments, and I have discussed, in thoroughly piecemeal fashion, arguments from several other books, Why The West Rules—For Now, by Ian Morris, Walter Scheidel’s Escape From Rome, and Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome. People somehow find it “shocking” that the great empires of reason that civilizations, east and west, have erected, were, to a great extent, the product of “good luck” rather than a self-generating, “natural” evolution of human nature that was somehow hard wired by “Nature” to result in the contemporary civilization that we experience—to our frequent discomfort—today, but such, I believe, is the case. The great hallmarks of civilization, writing and mathematics, were originally developed for purely utilitarian—and generally oppressive—purposes. It was only after the passage of millennia that they became adapted for “philosophical” purposes. Furthermore, I find it impossible to imagine modern science without the decimal number system, but that system was invented only once, in India, well over a thousand years before reaching the west, passing through Muslim civilizations before reaching Europe. Yet it was European mathematicians who developed fully and used it to create modern science. The handful of Italians who took the “Arabic numerals”, ultimately passing them onto the French, the British, and the Germans, were surely not genetically superior to their Indian and Muslim predecessors. But they lived in a different cultural setting, which supplied the possibility for transformational development that the earlier civilizations did not.
To choose a widely different example, six pre-Columbian civilizations in Meso and South America developed written languages. No North American cultures did so. Did they differ genetically? I don’t think anyone thinks so. No one is surprised that the Eskimos don’t have a written language. It may seem that the entire sub-Saharan expanse of Africa “should” have produced at least one written language, but that is a mere prejudice. The African population was hampered by unfavorable geography and climate, a variety of tropical diseases, lack of domesticable animals, lack of a staple along the order of wheat, or rice, or corn (“maize”), or potatoes. They were surrounded by a unique fauna (animal population) that, unlike any other in the world, had millions of years of experience with two-legged apes. This, of course, is little more than random speculation, but more informed speculation would likely produce more significant results.
So, in my opinion, it comes down to “culture” rather than genes. Not only did African slaves come from non-literate cultures, what culture they did have was brutally stripped from them, first by their African “brothers” who captured them and sold them to Arab and European traders, and, in the Americas, by their owners, who deprived them of their languages and traditions, made or destroyed their families at will, abused and exploited them sexually, denied them education, denied them, for the most part, even the sparse spiritual comforts of religion, and destroyed their families for profit.
For over three hundred years, American blacks lived in a culture that despised them, and encouraged them to despise themselves. As a general rule, I suggest that it is impossible for the great majority of people to “succeed” in life without being driven by a desire for society’s approval. But how can you seek the approval of a society that despises you? How could you do that without despising yourself?
The Past 40 Years: Liberal Failures versus Conservative Contempt
During the Reagan era, the Republican Party, and conservatism in general, abandoned black America, something I described years ago in a post labeled It’s Whiter than White: It’s Republican White!. Reagan despised the American civil rights movement, which he regarded explicitly as “communism”, and sympathized with the segregationists, whom he admired passionately for being staunchly anti-communist and defended their “right” to practice racial discrimination, though he claimed not to be one himself. Reagan actively courted the white South, endlessly praising “States’ Rights”, the beloved southern euphemism for segregation and the “southern way of life”.21 He grossly praised the apartheid government of South Africa, absurdly claiming that “they fought beside us in all our wars”, a statement astounding in its total and complete inaccuracy. And that’s just for starters! (Go to footnote 1 of this post for a bit more on Ronnie and race.)
The leading intellectual lights of the Reagan Administration were eager to lend a hand. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Antonin Scalia repeatedly emphasized their contempt for Brown v. Board of Education, deliberately playing up to the deeply held southern fantasy that legal segregation should have been allowed to stand. They also asserted the unconstitutionality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed segregated business practices, as did rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. Economic stars Gary Becker and Milton Friedman (both Nobel Prize winners), happily chimed in, “explaining” that the magic of the free market would automatically erase segregation, because it wasn’t “efficient”, though somehow they never noticed that the “efficient” free market hadn’t erased segregation for more than a hundred years following the Civil War. They also never noticed that slave markets had endured for thousands of years all around the world, while free markets never existed anywhere until sometime in fifteenth century, and then emerging only around the English Channel between England and the Netherlands—almost as if there were more to heaven and earth than dreamt of in their philosophy. At the same time, while Reagan conservatives furiously defended the legality, if not the desirability, of segregation—that is to say, affirmative action for white people—they furiously assaulted even the constitutionality of affirmative action for black people. Uprooting affirmative action programs wherever they existed was a full-time obsession with the Reagan-era Justice Department, a practice enthusiastically supported by Reagan federal court appointees.
The free-market economics of Becker and Friedman became the official domestic policy of the Republican Party during the Reagan era. The free market solved all problems, demanding “virtuous” behavior as the guarantor of success, infallibly doling out proper measures of success and failure with no need for government intervention. The less government did, the better.
Unsurprisingly, Republicans in power said one thing and did another. Although they talked incessantly of cutting “big government”, cutting spending, and balancing the budget, they invariably did the opposite, increasing the size of government, increasing spending, and, because they did keep their promise to cut taxes (disproportionately for the rich, of course), massively increasing both deficits and the national debt. Reagan, the ultimate big government/entitlement foe, increased taxes (on low and middle income folks only, of course) in order to shore up Social Security and Medicare, the two “worst” programs, according to libertarian dogma, because it freed people from the beneficent discipline (ultimately) of having to worry about their health and future. And Regan’s successors guarded them passionately as well, George W. Bush famously adding a prescription drug program to Medicare without bothering to provide any funding for it at all.
The Republicans’ supposed devotion to small government was simply a cover for their desire to eliminate “welfare”—any program that targeted the poor— and to return to the “white New Deal”, which provided generous income redistribution programs to themselves, but no one else.
Both liberals and conservatives misunderstood Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which provided payments to single mothers, a program that I wrote about for a good 16 years, from 1980 to 1996. The program was the ultimate conservative whipping boy, a program supported as blindly by many liberals as almost all conservatives opposed it. Ronald Reagan, trying to be a “nice guy”, once claimed that most AFDC recipients wanted to be off welfare, but were somehow trapped on it by stupid bureaucrats. Well, nice “try”, Ronnie. Most recipients—80%—not only wanted to get off welfare, they did so, exiting within two years. However, 20% did not want to get off welfare, and stayed on much longer, consuming 80% of the program costs. Liberals refused to acknowledge that poor people could be “bad”—could consciously and effectively exploit government programs to avoid work—and suffered grievously at the polls for their willful self-delusion. It took Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress to pass effective welfare reform back in 1996, now denounced, of course as the ultimate neoliberal sellout. (For more on liberal dishonesty, go here.
Many “welfare” programs—food stamps, school lunches, Medicaid—were effectively income distribution programs, with intended payoffs in improved health and happiness among the poor. If you don’t think these are worth paying for—because all happiness should be “earned” and that the resultant discipline is “worth it” (I don’t)22—you can oppose them on that ground. However, conservatives had a much stronger point in critiquing government programs that were supposed to change people’s lives rather than simply ameliorate them. For example, the “Head Start” program, initiated in 1965 by the Johnson administration, has served tens of millions of children, and spent tens of billions of dollars. A 2014 article in National Affairs, The Dubious Promise of Universal Preschool, by David J. Armor and Sonia Sousa, used the dubious performance of Head Start to denounce the Obama administration’s proposal for universal preschool programs. The simple fact is, virtually every study of Head Start concluded that the program failed to improve the long-term academic and behavioral performance of the participants. The study also argues that supposedly “higher quality” pre-school programs, independent of Head Start, show little superiority to Head Start, suggesting that the whole notion of achieving substantial results from this sort of early intervention is unrealistic, an argument strengthened by a recent study of a state-wide preschool program in Tennessee that found the program had negative results for its participants.
Yet the money wasted on pre school programs (which could, of course, be defended as simply day care if they didn’t harm their participants) is almost trivial compared to the money wasted on massive increases in spending on K-12 education, driven in large part, surprisingly enough, by a report issued during the Reagan administration, A Nation at Risk, though the trend started long before. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) , per pupil spending rose from $6,691 in 1970 to $15,424 in 2017.
While it is very often claimed by “experts”—who very typically have upper middle class standards for judging what counts as educational “progress”—that we got nothing for that increase, when student performance is broken down by race, there is very strong evidence of substantial improvement for black students, but not for whites, from about 1970 to the mid or late eighties, after which time scores either show little improvement or decline.
The evidence for this is the “Long-Term Trend” NAEP assessments conducted by NCES, based on a nationally representative sample of students, assessed in reading and mathematics at ages 9, 13, and 17. (Disclaimer: I wrote about NAEP under contract with NCES from 1996 to 2014.) The assessment was last administered in 2020 for ages 9 and 13, the program being curtailed due to the coronavirus before the age 17 assessment could be completed.
For age 9 reading, there has been substantial progress for black students since the first assessment, a pattern seen for other age groups as well, in both reading and mathematics. In 1971, the year of the first assessment, white students had an average score of 214 on a 0-500 scale, while the average for black students was 170, a gap of 44 points. In 2020, the scores stood at 228 and 205, respectively, the gap falling from 44 points to 23. For age 13 reading, the gap stood at 39 points in 1971 (261 to 222), narrowing to 24 points in 2020 ( 269 to 244).
The age 17 long-term reading assessment was first administered in 1975 and last administered in 2012. In 1975 the gap was 52 points (293 to 241). By 2012 it had fallen to 26 points (295 to 269).
In mathematics, the age 9 white-black gap narrowed from 32 points in 1978 (224 to 192), the year of the first assessment, to 25 points in 2020 (250 to 225), while the age 13 gap decreased from 42 (272 to 230) to 35 (291 to 256). In age 17 mathematics, the gap in 1978 was 38 points (306 to 268), falling to 26 points in 2012 (314 to 288).
Examination of student results for all the intervening assessment years indicates that, for the most part, gaps closed, to the extent that they did close, prior to the year 2000. One can speculate—and I will—that it was not until the 1970s that schools all across the country—the south in particular—began to address the educational needs of the “lower half of the distribution”—lower performing students. As late as 1960, there was no such thing as a “high school drop out”. Until that time, a very substantial percentage of students joined the work force at age 15 rather than 18, or later. Previously, high school had only been for the middle class. In the 1970s, in effect, the entire population became middle class, or at least were treated as such. Previously, schools had been happy to push out low-performing students, who were difficult to deal with. Now, everyone was supposed to graduate.
With the collapse of the Cold War, conservatives in the first Bush administration realized that they needed to prepare the Republican Party to seek national support on domestic issues, and the one they chose was education. There was genuine concern among conservatives with the continuing failure of most black Americans to reach a level of relative financial and educational equality with white Americans, though they found this emotionally convenient to blame this on liberal policies, not incidentally hoping to undercut the power of the teachers’ unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—one of the most potent liberal lobbies in the country.
While there was, in fact, much reason to criticize large urban school districts in the U.S., where a great many black and Hispanic voters consistently backed massive, barely functional bureaucracies, not because they did a good job educating students but because they did a good job creating “good” (good and permanent) jobs for adults, people like Education Secretary William Bennett and Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn spent much of their time exploiting and distorting educational data to “show” how bad Democratic policies were, ignoring the fact that, all through the 1980s and into the 1990s, scores for black and Hispanic students were increasing, as measured by the Education Department’s own data, as illustrated by the preceding paragraphs.
In fact, the “reform” conservatives made the same erroneous assumption their liberal foes, that all humans are intrinsically middle-class in their values, strongly desiring social approval and willing to exert substantial effort to obtain it, even to the extent of mastering, for a short time, at least, such absurdities as the Pythagorean theorem, or, even—perhaps—“imaginary” numbers. Conservatives put all the blame on liberal reformers, whose response to low scores was simply to dumb down the instruction so that black and Hispanic students could pass it—on the condescending assumption that blacks and Hispanics were simply lacking the ability to perform at the level of whites—“the soft tyranny of low expectations”—“soft tyranny” being a concept developed by one of the neocons’ most beloved icons, Alexis de Tocqueville . Over and over again, conservatives insisted that if you set high standards, all students will automatically respond and meet those standards. This assumption was, and is, false.
In some cases, conservatives based their arguments on their own experiences with working with black and Hispanic students. They never realized—or never permitted themselves to realize—that they were, unconsciously, “creaming”—concentrating their efforts, as they naturally would, on the students who seemed to be “getting it” and ignoring the rest.
Interestingly, frustration with the AFT and the NEA did not abate when the Clinton administration came into power in 1993. Clinton, in his experiences as governor of Arkansas, had already formulated a conviction that the teachers’ unions had become far too comfortable with a dysfunctional status quo, and that their notions of “reform” were limited to no strings attached increases in funding for teachers and schools, with any sort of evaluation of the efficacy of instruction absolutely forbidden. The rift between the “paleo” and “neo” liberals was becoming pronounced.
The Republican reign in Congress that began in 1995 prevented Clinton from undertaking any significant education initiatives, but when George W. Bush was “elected” president in 2000—with a little help from the Supreme Court—he was determined to strengthen the Republican Party’s reputation among Americans as “pro-education”, building on what was known, in Texas, at least, as “the Texas Miracle”—a significant increase in student performance across the board, for all of Texas’ large white, black, and Hispanic populations. Bush teamed with Democrats in Congress to forge a largely bipartisan reform package, known as “No Child Left Behind”, which had considerable momentum throughout both of Bush’s two terms and into the first term, at least, of Barack Obama, despite the Bush administration’s subsequent, disastrous, focus on the “War on Terror”.
Unfortunately for the cause of educational “reform”, No Child Left Behind proved a painful failure as well. The overall effect of the program was to force schools to concentrate on improving the percentage of high school seniors who “passed” state competency tests in reading and mathematics—tests mandated by the act itself but to be devised by each state for its own use. Naturally, schools put all their focus to students who were unlikely to pass the test on their own but could do so with a moderate amount of extra coaching, while continuing to ignore students at the very bottom, and reducing resources for high-performing students, who could be expected to pass on their own.
The Republican educational reformers—most of them—were not hypocrites, at least not consciously. The “Texas Miracle”, though not really a miracle, really did improve K-12 education in Texas, though, in my skeptical opinion, it did not much more than bring Texas in line with what had occurred in many northern states a decade or so earlier. The Texas Miracle, which I discussed at some length in my long piece, A Limo at Risk, was largely initiated by then Texas legend H. Ross Perot in 1984, who basically wanted to transform the Texas educational system from one largely catering to a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, middle-class one.
The early impact of the “Texas Miracle” cannot be accurately measured, because there are no federal NAEP data on state-level performance until 1992. Comparing Texas scores in grade 4 mathematics for Texas compared to the national average and California and New York State for the years 1992 and 2019, for blacks, whites, and Hispanics, we see the following:
Texas, 1992: white, 230; black, 199; Hispanic, 208. Texas, 2019: white, 254, black, 233, Hispanic, 238.
National, 1992: white, 227; black, 194; Hispanic, 201. National, 2019: white, 249, black, 224, Hispanic, 231.
New York, 1992: white, 228; black, 197; Hispanic, 197. New York, 2019: white, 245; black, 218; Hispanic, 225.
California, 1992: white, 221; black, 182; Hispanic, 190. California, 2019: white, 250; black, 224; Hispanic, 225.
For this one indicator, in 2019 Texas appears to be outperforming both California and New York, and the nation as a whole, particularly for black and Hispanic students. The pattern is similar for grade 8 mathematics and grades 4 and 8 reading, except that there has much less improvement in reading scores over time—if any. (There are no comparable grade 12 results at the state level.) There was improvement in math scores after passage of No Child Left Behind, but not in reading, and, for grade 8 math, a decline in scores since 2011 both for Texas and nationally.
All NAEP data are based on samples and thus are estimates, though highly accurate ones. For this reason, all comparisons between scores need to be tested for statistical significance. I have run significance tests for grade 4 2019 mathematics only, for national (public school students only), California, Florida, New York, and Texas—the four “mega states”, conveniently divided into two “liberal” and two “conservative”, using the “NAEP Data Explorer”, described here. Florida scores, not given above because Florida did not participate in the early state NAEP assessments, are as follows: white 254, black 236, Hispanic 241. All scores for California and New York are lower than the national average, and all scores for Florida and Texas are higher than the national average, with the single exception of white students in Texas, whose average score is comparable to the national average.
Thus, two of the most liberal states in the country are significantly underserving white, black, and Hispanic students, as compared to two of the most notoriously conservative ones, Furthermore, even considering the higher cost of living in New York State, particularly in the New York City area, New York is grossly overpaying for substandard performance. According to the Education Law Center, in 2021 the per pupil expenditures in the four states were as follows: California, $14,258; Florida, $11.003; Texas, $12,079; New York, $26,631.
It is “obvious”—though the data shown here, and virtually limitless amounts of confirming data available elsewhere will convince almost no one—that mere investment in the existing educational structure will have no significant impact on the underperformance of black and Hispanic students in both K-12 and postsecondary schooling. Neither will changes in school structure, such as greater emphasis on charter or private schools. Charter schools and other selective admissions schools (Boston Latin, Bronx School of Science, etc.) are necessary, I think, to maintain middle and upper middle class support of public education in big cities, but are not the “answer” to overall low scores. Many charter schools show no better results than comparable standard public schools. Those that do accomplish this by attracting students whose parents have the familiar middle-class values. Again, the variable is the student, not the school.
Two of the most accomplished advocates of charter schools on the right, Chester Finn and Frederick Hess, come to this reluctant conclusion in their books Troublemaker (Finn, 2008), and letters to a young education reformer (Hess, 2017). Finn, a former assistant secretary of education during the first Bush administration, and Hess, senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, both make half-hearted calls for “more information” for parents, even though they know that is not the problem. The problem is, a great many parents do not want “challenging, demanding” course material for their children. They want their children to be happy, and most children define happiness in terms of popularity, the acceptance of their peers, not the love of knowledge, or acceptance at a competitive college. Often, parents will move their children out a school because the classes are “too hard”, rather than because they are too easy.
Private schools represent a great danger, thanks to the follies of the teachers’ unions, who shut down education in blue states and cities for a full year longer than necessary, thanks in large part to the stupidity of the Democratic Party, desperate to please its “base”, not realizing that they were embracing a dead weight that would sink them both. The prolonged shutdown of public schools, coupled with the “woke” campaign against selective public high schools, holds the potential for destroying support for the public school system in many blue states, particularly when conclusive interstate performance data for 2021 becomes available from NAEP, as it soon will do. If public schools in blue states won’t give kids from upper middle class families the kind of education their parents want them to have, they will move their kids to private schools, which are far more amenable to parental control. And, step by step, funding for public schools will decline, and public schools in blue states will become what Betsy DeVos says they already are.
Have We Made Any Progress?
The short answer is “yes”, even though the gaps between black and white are massive, and dismaying similar to those identified by both An American Dilemma and the ever-controversial Moynihan Report. I will begin, shockingly enough, with the “good” news.
It is almost unknown these days, but the original, absolute bottom line justification for segregation was that it was necessary to prevent what was abysmally called “miscegenation”—racial intermarriage. Even 20 years ago, I would say, the informal barriers to interracial couples were formidable. Today, it is common to hear individuals—celebrities in particular, of course—described as “half black” or “partly black”. Thirty years ago, certainly, that would have sounded absurd. You were either black or you weren’t. There are, certainly, a great many people in the U.S., possibly a majority, who would object to an interracial marriage involving a close family member, though the number whose notion of “fitness” is defined almost entirely by social class is already quite large, and surely growing.
Furthermore, the reach of the welfare state, which usually does not show up in poverty statistics—cited by the right to show that “nothing works” and by the left to show that so much remains to be done—has been greatly expanded, so that blacks and whites receive relatively equal coverage, while the benefits available—Medicaid in particular—have grown enormously. It is thus perhaps not as surprising as some might think that black life expectancy has increased in the past 50 years from about age 65 to 75, and the gap between black and white has dropped from about 10 years to no more than 3 and a half.
The gaps in family income and wealth remain enormous. As I have suggested, at length, these problems will not be addressed by educational “reform”, whether advocated by the right or left. A recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Wealth Gaps between White, Black and Hispanic Families in 2019, by Ana Hernández Kent and Lowell Ricketts, puts the problem in painful perspective, Relying on the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), Kent and Ricketts found the following:
A typical (median) white family owned about $184,000 in family wealth; a typical Black family owned $23,000; and a typical Hispanic family owned $38,000.
The median wealth gap between Black and white families of 12 cents per $1 of white wealth is largely unchanged over the past 30 years, while the gap between Hispanic and white families, 21 cents per $1 of white wealth, slightly improved but remained large.
Black, Hispanic and white families had more wealth at the average—$143,000, $249,000 and $962,000, respectively—than at the median. These findings are a function of the wealth distribution within each racial and ethnic group: There are few very wealthy families, but their vast amount of wealth pulls the average up.
The median, or 50th percentile, the figures are as follows: Black, $23,000; Hispanic, $38,000; and white, $184,000. At the 75th percentile, which is below the average, attesting to the “vast amount of wealth” at the top, the average black family has about 20% of the wealth of the average white family, while the average Hispanic family has about 30%. Painful, but at the 25th percentile, the figures are genuinely horrible: the average black family has only 1% of the wealth of the average white family at the 25th percentile, while the average Hispanic family has 14%. Clearly, millions of black families have simply no resources at all.
I gave my ideas for “reform” in the first part of this essay. The only one having immediate impact was the call for an expanded earned income tax credit, offensive to the currently dominant paleo-liberal paradigm for its underlying principle that membership in a society confers responsibilities as well as benefits, regardless of any past history, however shameful.
Obviously, the road to healing white America’s original sin is a long one: from 1619 until 1954, it was a road scarcely trodden, and remains “remarkable” how little has been done even today, thanks to hypocrisies on both the right and left, and among both blacks and whites. For example, the career of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has been the source of much impassioned comment across virtually the entire spectrum of American intellectual thought, but I have never ever read anyone mention the most important thing about Chavez: that he was not a white man. Similarly, the sources of the racial tensions in many northern states, like Wisconsin and Michigan—white residents, living mostly in suburbs and small towns, complaining about crime-ridden big cities with costly, dysfunctional bureaucracies that do nothing but provide do-nothing jobs for lazy bureaucrats (largely white ones, in many cases)—are almost completely ignored. Mainstream media icons like the Washington Post and the New York Times will report and comment for weeks at a time if a white woman is rude to a black man, but have nothing to say about the rancorous racial divides that fester for decades like the ones mentioned above, because any discussion would “send the wrong message”.
Conservatives simply have no ideas at all. Black conservatives like Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas blame everything on white liberal “welfare”, ignoring the fact that black voters strongly support such programs, and, where they hold the majority, vote unceasingly to expand them, and also fail to explain why blacks are so much more likely than whites to be corrupted by them.
Self-proclaimed white conservative wonks like Paul Ryan (a frequent object of ridicule in these pages) and Yuval Levin simply appeal to the magic of the marketplace to infallibly reward hard work and punish sloth, ignoring the fact that said magic only handed out rewards to white people for several centuries, while punishing all the rest, and also ignoring the fact that, in all their proposals for “reform”, they leave the sacred cows of “white socialism” birthed by FDR and LBJ untouched—the discipline of the marketplace magic alleviated for me but not for thee.
Since I am handing out lectures I should include black Americans as well. The deep fears that blacks have of white society—that to trust is to simply set oneself up for victimhood, the lack of self-confidence in themselves to master “white” knowledge, the sense of cultural isolation—even of cultural “treason”—if they do “make it”, if they do succeed in white society—these are not issues that can be addressed by rational discourse, but only through experience. And how to begin?
The experiences of Barack Obama himself illustrate the obstacles that lie in the path of black Americans. I was very largely disappointed by President Obama’s eight years in office, a disappointment expressed in many posts, though possibly most directly in this one, Barack Obama, still not getting it after all these years. Much of the article is devoted to critiquing Obama’s policies, but an appreciable amount also concerns his attitude as a black man towards white society. Obama often urged black men to be good husbands and good fathers, advice that many black men who were good husbands and good fathers found irritating and condescending. I think the example of both his career and that of his wife were more inspiring than his advice.
But at the same time President Obama showed a painful lack of comprehension in his comments about the celebrated racial incidents that occurred during his presidency. Regarding the killing of Treyvon Martin by George Zimmerman, Obama said “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon and I think they [his parents] are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves.” This left me with the unpleasant feeling that the president was saying that when a white man injures a black man, well, we know all we need to know: the white man must be guilty, an attitude that he very unwisely displayed early in his presidency in the incident of the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, which I discussed at length in the “Afterwords” of the post linked above.
When a man of Barack Obama’s wide experience and success in the upper reaches of American “white” society can display such a deep, instinctive distrust of it, we can see the heritage of centuries of oppression, the deepness and sensitivity of the scars that that oppression left, scars that will not be healed by “woke” cliches, will not be resolved by rational argument, but also will not be resolved by protecting blacks from all criticism on the grounds of prior oppression—treating them, essentially, as children, who can’t be expected to handle the truth. As I have earlier observed, much racist bigotry has disappeared. True acceptance of interracial marriage and interracial couples—once recognized only in theory and never in practice—has occurred. The identity of so many “minorities” within American society—Catholics, Jews, Asians, Hispanics, gays, and evangelicals, as well as blacks—have been in a state of flux for many years—a flux very often trending towards greater acceptance, coupled, inevitably, with loss of a previous sense of self.
These issues cannot be comprehended in full by either those inside the group or those, like myself, who are on the outside. I am ultimately optimistic, but I am optimistic by habit. My readers will have to reach their own conclusions.
1. Virtually every favorable article dealing with the Black Muslims will include an anecdote about how the Muslims “made the streets safe”, somewhere, a long time ago. There is not one street in America that is safe thanks to the Black Muslims. The Black Muslims are headquartered in Chicago, a city that is losing major employers because of continuing high crime.
2. I found this little gem in Alan Taylor’s excellent study, “American Revolutions”, published in 2016.
3. Feldman discusses Madison’s “theory”, noting most of its “inadequacies”, on pp. 671-673 of his biography.
4. The neglect of Zinn, not to mention Herbert Aptheker (b. 1915), an “open” communist who wrote dozens of stridently left-wing books focusing on U.S. race relations, and many others, is undoubtedly a combination of ignorance and vanity on the part of the project’s authors. Well, you’re only young (and stupid) once.
5. I am far from an expert on the content of either Zinn’s book or the 1619 Project, but from my “sampling” I would say that Zinn is (almost) always accurate, albeit aggressively one-sided, while the 1619 Project often offers ridiculous hyperbole and false arguments that are either the product of conscious deceit or “passion”.
6. So called because they organized workers in the same trades across companies, rather than “vertical” unions that organized all the workers in a single company.
7. Sharecroppers, one of the most hapless of all populations, were largely white, but also included almost all the black farmers of the south.
8. For a good century, the only jobs available to black workers in the south that paid wages equal to whites were federal jobs.
9. The Texas Politics Project explains in full the continuing efforts of Texas to exclude black voters from the state’s Democratic Party’s primaries that, in the 1920s, had resulted in two unfavorable Supreme Court decisions before getting it “right” in 1935.
10. Party Realignment And The New Deal (U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives)
11. Briefly, Mettler points to extensive black participation in vocational training programs below the college level, and, citing interviews she did with black participants, concludes that the experience tended to make such participants more active in the fight for racial equality, both personally and as citizens. (It does not seem to occur to her that the causality might run the other way: blacks confident of their ability to improve their lives might be more likely to sign up for vocational training and fight for racial equality.) Mettler concedes that whites benefited much more from both the housing and college-level educational benefits, which is conceding a lot, so that her point strikes me as quite overdrawn. My own opinion is that neither Mettler nor Katznelson really deal with argument that, while it’s “arguable” that both whites and blacks reaped benefits from actually participating in activities provided under the GI Bill, only whites reaped the financial rewards, because the level of racial prejudice in American society, both legal and informal, denied such rewards to blacks. For example, many of the relatively few blacks who did graduate from college found themselves confined to the same jobs they could have gotten without going to college. Whites benefited much more from the GI Bill than blacks did, not because the GI Bill itself was racist (not explicitly so, for the most part), but because American society was, in both the north and south.
12. Hilton Als has an an excellent review of Arnold Rampersad’s don’t meet your heroes biography of Ellison, In the Territory A look at the life of Ralph Ellison.
13. Word “accepts” “ballless”. WTF?
14. Dostoevsky himself resolved it, in part, through his great novels—The Brothers Karamazov, in particular—largely by ascending to a realm of intense spirituality that transcended earthly issues—though his consistent “theme”—that “liberalism” leads inevitably to murder—remains entirely unpersuasive. The many murders he knew in Siberia were not liberals, and the liberals he knew there were not murderers. Furthermore, the spiritual fervor he portrays so stunningly in his novels is entirely devoid of the absurdly nationalistic religious brew he concocted, and advocated for, in “real life”.
15. One may unkindly remark that both black leftists and black conservatives blame whites for black dysfunction. As I say, they have at least half a point.
16. Full text of the report, officially titled The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, is here. In 2013, the Urban Institute issued a dispassionate follow-up, The Moynihan Report Revisited.
17. It appears that Hannah Arendt “forgave” her mentor/lover Martin Heidegger’s deep involvement with the Nazi Party, which ended only when he realized that he would be expected to obey orders rather than give them, because he refused to apologize. The truly great man always treats the masses with contempt.
18. Nietzsche himself notes that his frequent attacks on the “slave morality” of Christianity for undermining and ultimately supplanting the “noble morality” of pagan Greece and Rome is self-contradictory: if Christianity “won”, and if success is the only criterion for value, then doesn’t Christianity’s success prove that it’s “better”?
19. This smug, western secularist’s conclusion that would be indignantly by most of the rest of the world. I “confess” that I remain unrepentantly secular and unrepentantly liberal.
20. Most of my moans (probably) regarding this and related phenomena can be found here and here. (And here’s a real phenomenon: Word only recognizes the Latin plural of “phenomenon” as correct. Hillbillies need not apply!)
[^21}: Paul Krugman wrote a “nice” column on Reagan’s catering to southern sensibilities on the occasion of Reagan’s death.
22. I do think these programs could, in large part, be folded into an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, which would be more “portable”, not depending on the vagaries of state public assistance laws, and would also encourage a commitment to employment, which I feel should be stressed. At the same time, I do not feel that the “market” guarantees an equitable reward for work. Throughout all history, there is an invariable trend for the rich to get richer, and I do not think there is a similar trend regarding “virtue”.
