by John H. McWhorter
In The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, W.
E. B. DuBois famously described blackAmericans as possessing what he calleda double consciousness, caught betweea self-conception as an American and as a
留學(xué)生dissertation網(wǎng)person of African descent. As DuBois puit, “The Negro ever feels his two-ness—an
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts,two unreconciled strivings . . . two warringideals in one dark body, whose doggedstrength alone keeps it from being tornasunder.”
As they so often do, DuBois’s teachingsapply as well to black Americans over a
century later. In that vein, the double consciousnesshe referred to is often claimedto describe modern black Americans, butwith an implication that this is becauseof whites’ resistance to blacks’ true inclusionin the American fabric.
But analysts who make such claims resistacknowledging that race relations in Americahave undergone seismic changes since1903. DuBois’s conception remains relevant,but only in a reflex evolved from theone that he described.Black America today is permeated by anew double consciousness. A tacit sensereigns among a great many black Americansoday that the “authentic” black personstresses personal initiative and strengthin private but dutifully takes on the mantleof victimhood in public.
For many people, the private orientationtoward personal empowerment will
sound unfamiliar—naturally, because mostof us experience black discourse only from
the outside and hear a discourse in whichvictimhood is enshrined at all costs. Thus
in the last presidential election, all but asliver of blacks voted for the presidentialcandidate committed to treating blacksas victims. When Harvard’spresident,
Lawrence Summers, asked Cornel Westwhy he had not written an academic book
in 10 years, West called him “the ArielSharon of higher education” and left the
school for Princeton, claiming that the Harvardestablishment was afraid that “the
Negroes are taking over.” When MichaelJackson’s fading popularity depresses sales
of his new recordings, he calls his producer
racist. And so on.
But that is only one part of the true story
about black Americans in our moment.
Many of these high-profile events are really
more a kind of theatre than anything
else.PolicyReport March/April 2003 Vol. XXV No. 2In This Issue
John H. McWhorter is an associate professorof linguistics at the University of California,Berkeley, a senior fellow at the ManhattanInstitute, and the author of severalbooks, including Authentically Black: Essaysfor the Black Silent Majority and The Powerof Babel: A Natural History of Language.He delivered these remarks at a http://www.400190.com/dissertation_writing/sociology/#p#分頁(yè)標(biāo)題#e#Cato seminarin New York City on November 15,2002. Continued on page 14
Double Consciousness in Black AmericaRep. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Senator-elect John Sununu (R-N.H.) discuss the role of Social
Security in the 2002 election at a Cato Hill Briefing on December 4. Both stressed that theiradvocacy of private accounts had helped their campaigns. See page 8.
Freedom in Hong Kong, p. 7Niskanen on divided government 2
Cato Handbook for Congress 3Sununu and Toomey:
Social Security in the 2002 elections 8
The futile war on drugsin Latin America 11Social Security reform in Europe 12Free enterprise in space 16
Cato Journal: taxes, inflation,and unemployment 17
Regulation: four views on smokingand government 17
Cato files amicus briefs 18
We gain a different perspective on what’sreally happening in the black community
from polls taken over the past 10 yearsThe New York Times has done polls of
roughly a thousand blacks from aroundthe country. In the year 2000, a mere 7 percentof blacks thought racism was the mostimportant problem for the next generationof Americans to solve. In 1990, 33 percentof blacks thought race relations in Americawere generally good; in 2000, 51 percentdid. In 1992, 29 percent of blacksthought progress had been made in racerelations since the 1960s; by 2000, 58 percentdid.
Black Conservatives at the Barbershop
Results like those square easily with
a black person’s ordinary experience. All
of the positions commonly deemed “black
conservative” are easy topics at a black
barbecue today. Bring these things up and
you are almost sure to have at least half
the room agreeing and the two or three
professional victimologists among the
group going away feeling on the defensive.
The recent movie hit Barbershop
nicely captured this. Aside from the very
brief knocks on Jesse Jackson and Martin
Luther King that attracted so much
attention, the film was full of ordinary
characters making casual observations
right out of Shelby Steele. At the Manhattan
Institute, Steve Malanga told me
that when he saw it, he kept wondering
whether I had written it, and I must admit
that when I saw it, I often found myself
thinking the same thing.
The problem is that when asked about
race issues in the presence of whites the
next day, the same people who sounded
a lot like Thomas Sowell the night before
often pause for a moment and then carefully
dredge up episodes of possible racism
they may have encountered in their lives,
claim that there aren’t enough positive
images of blacks in the media, and the
like.
In the black community today, there is
a tacit rule that black responsibility and
self-empowerment are not to be discussed
where whites can hear.
Why is it that so many blacks are uncomfortable#p#分頁(yè)標(biāo)題#e#
acknowledging the successes of
the race in public, beyond athletics and
entertainment? To the outside observer,
nothing could look more counterproductive.
But it’s based on a certain internal logic,
a guiding notion—so deeply entrenched
in modern black thought that it is rarely
declared explicitly—that until all racism is
extinct in the United States, any black success
is mere luck, and meanwhile most of
black America remains decisively hobbled,
unable to do more than show up.
Another conviction follows from this:
that the ills of black America can be undone
only by whites, rather than by blacks themselves.
Untold numbers of oppressed groups
worldwide have risen to the top through
their own efforts, amidst discrimination
much more concrete than any that most
blacks Americans encounter today. But in
everyday life, this is a rather arcane point,
and it gets lost in a consensus that black
Americans’ experience is somehow unique
in this regard. Black people roughly 60 and
younger have spent their mature lives in a
climate where it is assumed that black uplift
means “not letting whites off the hook.”
This phrase is heard so often among blacks
today that it is nothing less than a mantra,
spiritually resonant and virtually unquestioned.
Any author who claims he never reads
his Amazon reviews is being coy, I suspect,
and to illustrate what I mean, I’d like to
quote one from a black reader of my book
Losing the Race.
I’m hesitant to write this review. On
the one hand, I absolutely loved the
book, despite having started it hating
McWhorter from what I had heard
about him. As I read it, I found it
harder and harder to disagree with
him. However, I’m worried that
McWhorter’s argumentation will be
picked up by truly anti-black people.
. . . I’m troubled by the fact that white
people who already harbor prejudices
against African Americans now
have yet another weapon.
Polls give other indications that black
Americans today tend to assume that residual
racism is a decisive obstacle rather than
an inconvenience. In a 1991 Gallup Poll,
almost half of the blacks polled thought
that three of four blacks lived in the inner
city. One even sees black American scholars
laboring under this misimpression: in
1998, Manning Marable’s depiction of
black America in the New York Times was
that “a segment of the minority population
moves into the corporate and political
establishment at the same time that
most are pushed even further down the
economic ladder.” Marable is the head
of Columbia’s African American Studies
Department. Poll after poll shows that#p#分頁(yè)標(biāo)題#e#
blacks tend to assume that even if conditions
for themselves and their immediate
communities are good, they are much less
so for most other blacks. In the New York
Times poll of 2000, 72 percent of blacks
thought race relations were good in their
communities, but only 57 percent thought
they were good in America.
The New Double Consciousness
Where does this new double consciousness
come from? It is vital to understand that,
at heart, it is a symptom of a deep pain
among black Americans. The Civil Rights
Act freed blacks from legalized segregation,
but once freed, blacks met a new intellectual
and cultural climate that taught
that the Establishment was an agent of
repression and that its norms must be suspect
to any humane and sophisticated
American. This brand of thought tends
strongly to exonerate the individual from
responsibility for failings and weaknesses,
and encourages blaming the powers
that be as an urgent, and even enlightened,
activity.
Black Americans were especially susceptible
to this canard. For one thing, centuries
of abuse left the race with an inevitable
inferiority complex, well documented by
black academics and psychologists and
readily acknowledged even at black barbecues.
For a people with this handicap,
focusing on the evil of the system was a
fatal attraction, an ever-ready balm for a
bruised self-conception. I firmly believe
that any ethnic group would have fallen
into a similar trap, given equivalent sociohistorical
variables.
?The recent movie hit Barbershop was full of ordinary characters
making casual observations right out of Shelby Steele.?
14 • Cato Policy Report March/April 2003
BLACK AMERICA Continued from page 1
What this means, however, is that the
new double consciousness is not a cynical
ploy for power and favors. I am dismayed
whenever I see one more writer
supposing that black people adopt these
ideologies as a kind of politics. Professional
victimhood is a symptom of a deep
stain on the psyche of a race, and I believe
that there can be no true understanding
of our current racial dilemma without
understanding this.
The new double consciousness explains
almost any event having to do with race
that floats across our TV screens. For example,
recently Harry Belafonte called Colin
Powell a “house slave” for downplaying
some of his personal political positions in
his activities as secretary of state. But of
course, people of any color working in an
organization find themselves editing their
personal predilections in the name of group
solidarity. White people view this as how
real life works.
Belafonte, however, naturally regards#p#分頁(yè)標(biāo)題#e#
issues like, say, affirmative action as an
exception. If residual racism is a sentence
to failure rather than an inconvenience to
be surmounted, then certainly standards
must be lowered for all black people, and
just as certainly, if a black official refrains
from insisting on this, then we are faced
not with real life but with unequivocal
moral cowardice.
Another example is how much black
scholarship on popular entertainment is
based on smoking out stereotypes in characters
that few of us would immediately
view in that way. Television today depicts
black Americans in all walks of life; it is
hard not to see a successful middle-class
black person on TV if one channel-flips for
longer than about 10 minutes. This contrasts
so sharply with the situation just
20 years ago that I never cease to be amazed
at it.
Yet Donald Bogle’s book Primetime Blues
two years ago nimbly framed just about
anything any black performer does on
television even today as coded versions of
stereotypes that trace back to minstrel
shows. Bogle is not seeking political patronage.
As a post–Civil Rights Act black American
thinker, he has been imprinted with
a sense that his job is to show that racism
never dies, that until there is no racism at
all in the United States, to be black remains
a tragedy.
History also gives us contrasts with
today that illuminate the new double consciousness.
In 1954, the black singer Marian
Anderson did a tour of Asia that was
broadcast on the old show See It Now.
One black viewer wrote a letter of protest
in which she complained that the special
had focused on tragedies like the Little
Rock episode and the fact that the DAR
had barred Anderson from singing at Constitution
Hall, but had not said much about
“the many of our race who are on top.”
I find that statement unimaginable from
most black writers today—to focus on successful
blacks would be seen as a distraction
from focusing on the negative.
This is not an accident.
The Coming Change
However, I believe that we are on the
brink of a sea change in the new double
consciousness. There are now millions of
black Americans whose memories begin
after 1980: they barely remember the Reagan
presidency, Atari, LP records, or McDonald’s
hamburgers packaged in Styrofoam
boxes; they think of Cheers as vintage television,
and they do not remember a world
without VCRs. More to the point, they
missed the Black Panthers and Burn, Baby,
Burn, and signs are that quite a few of them
are less imprinted by the double consciousness
than their parents.
In a poll by Yankelovich Partners for
Time and CNN in 1997, only 38 percent#p#分頁(yè)標(biāo)題#e#
of black adults said race relations in America
were generally good, but 63 percent
of black teens did; and 56 percent of black
adults said that discrepancies in employment,
housing, and income were due to discrimination
rather than failure to take advantage
of opportunity, while only 35 percent
of black teens did.
Also, my conviction is based on recent
personal experience. There is a fable that
black conservatives end up hunkering down
in their living rooms against universal condemnation
from the black community. I
have not experienced this. Certainly, mainstream
reviews of Losing the Race were
mostly hostile. But that was because the
March/April 2003 Cato Policy Report • 15
?The race that reaches the mountaintop is one that embraces with
vigor its achievements and teaches its children that doing so in the
face of obstacles only makes the victory sweeter.?
media always give books by black authors
to leftist black academics to review. In
the meantime, since August 2000 I have
received well over a thousand letters, emails,
and phone calls about the book from
blacks who agree with what I wrote, and
every article I write or television appearance
I make elicits more. In the Bay Area,
where I am especially well known because
of local media coverage, I am stopped on
the street by a black person who agrees
with me at least once every single day of
the week. Now, the double consciousness
issue is an urgent societal problem, and
thus I am not patting myself on the back
for being approached for autographs at
Starbucks. I mention this experience because
it shows one thing: there are massive numbers
of black Americans out there who are
ready for a new discourse.
After all, it’s not as if anything I have
ever written or said has been exactly rocket
science. Our modern race problem is less
intractable than often supposed. Modern
black Americans are well poised to embrace
the opportunities now available to them,
and most have already done so. The problem
that remains is a particular cognitive
dissonance—since the 1960s, black Americans
have been taught that our successes
are mere statistical static because our fates
are ultimately in the hands of others. This
distracting notion stems from a perversion
of sociological analysis that came to reign
in the 1960s, and its counterintuitive, antiempirical,
and spiritually destructive nature
is increasingly clear to more and more black
Americans.
Our job is to disseminate the message
as widely as possible that the race that
reaches the mountaintop is one that embraces
with vigor its achievements, trumpets them
to all who will listen, and teaches its children#p#分頁(yè)標(biāo)題#e#
that doing so in the face of obstacles
only makes the victory sweeter. I have come
http://www.400190.com/dissertation_writing/sociology/to spend a year in New York to help in
precisely that effort, and I think that if we
can change the general context that young
blacks live in—and show older blacks that
the sky does not fall in for us if we paint
ourselves as victors rather than victims—
then in about 25 years, the “race question”
that bedevils us will be an issue from the
past. ■