Are Blacks Biased Against Braininess?

By Jack E. White

It's a safe bet that a new book by John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Berkeley, will make him a hero to the black-bashing crowd. Black, smart and only 34, McWhorter is being touted by his publisher as a maverick "more angry than Stephen Carter, more pragmatic and compassionate than Shelby Steele, more forward-looking than Stanley Crouch." McWhorter says he's uncomfortable being associated with authors acclaimed by white conservatives and slammed by many blacks--but, hey, it goes with the territory. If you're a self-described "proper-talking black guy who's had all the advantages," you've got to expect other blacks to be outraged when you claim that being a "culturally authentic" African American dooms you to being a dunce.

That's the thesis of Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America--that the lagging academic performance of African-American students isn't caused by the residual effects of prejudice or poor schools but by a "cult of anti-intellectualism" that has infected black America from the ghetto to the middle class. Black students, including those at elite universities, he says, "are really disinclined to think that hard" about subjects other than their own victimization. This dubious insight came to McWhorter in the days before California's Proposition 209 outlawed the use of race in admissions. After noticing that "the black students were the worst students on campus," he concluded they were held back by three "defeatist thought patterns":

--the Cult of Victimology, which leads blacks to blame their problems on racism;

--the Cult of Separatism, which makes blacks think that whatever whites do, they should do the opposite; and

--the Cult of Anti-Intellectualism, which holds that scholastic excellence is a white thing.

These tendencies are legacies of segregation and the denial of equal educational opportunities, McWhorter says. But today such attitudes have taken on a life of their own, and their destructive effects are worsened by racial preferences, which allow "black people [to] get the very best things doing less of a job than everybody else." Because black students' grades and scores on standardized tests were the lowest of any group at Berkeley, McWhorter says, many whites and Asian Americans figured that "blacks are just plain dumb."

Like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, McWhorter did not discover that racial preferences are the ruination of black folks until he had benefited from them. He writes that because his race was one of the factors that got him a doctoral fellowship at Stanford, "I was never able to be as proud of getting into Stanford as my [nonblack] classmates could be." But he didn't turn down the fellowship. Instead, he wants to spare future generations of blacks such anguish by immediately abolishing affirmative action, thereby bestowing on them "the gift" of competing as equals.

Oh, come on, Professor. I share some of your qualms about affirmative action, and I agree that the gap between black and white test scores is cause for alarm. But maybe because I'm the grandson of a freed slave who died with a book in his hands, the idea that there's a historic "pan-racial" black bias against braininess strikes me as absurdly simplistic. We've got a problem all right, but it reflects everything from the fact that white families on average have 10 times more wealth than black families, to the larger proportion of uncertified teachers in mostly black schools, to the hopelessness some black kids feel because so-called experts have told them so many times that they don't measure up. It's not going to be solved by merely exhorting blacks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

They're already doing that. In cities like Washington where dysfunctional school systems have been cheating poor black youngsters for decades, ambitious reform efforts are under way. Nationwide, 60% of blacks support vouchers that would help them find alternatives to failing public schools. Such evidence puts the lie to the notion that blacks don't value education. Sure, some of us think that being bookish is uncool. But that's not so different from what George W. Bush (whose mediocre grades and SAT scores would have kept him out of Yale had he not been the son of a powerful white alumnus) thought about some of his more scholarly classmates. And look where he is today.