Review: "Authentically Black" By John McWhorter
By Margaret Snyder (11/02/03)
Such luminaries as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and Shelby Steele have long and eloquently borne witness to the flaws in the establishment’s view of problems relating to race.
With the publication, in 2000, of “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America,” John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Berkeley, brought the voice of a new generation of scholars to the debate. Now, he expands upon that book in nine essays brought together in “Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority.” He is distinguished from his august elders by having been born after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and grown up under the shadow of the liberal solutions to the problems of blacks.
His basic message continues to be that black America must rid itself of the defeatist attitude foisted upon it by post-Civil Rights black “leadership” and well-meaning liberal white condescension, namely that black progress cannot happen until society has been perfected. If we look at the progress of other oppressed groups, such as the Irish, who were mightily scorned at first, we find that social prejudice against them did not disappear entirely until after they became successful. I’m sure it was a sort of a two-step dance of, “some more success, a little less prejudice, some more success, a little less prejudice” until one day it was, “On St. Patrick’s Day we’re all Irish.”
Among the specific topics he touches on is the whining about stereotypes in television. You know: either they complain that the character is a stereotype or that the character is “not authentic”. Like all of the essays in this book, this one brings something fresh to the subject. In this case, it is a wonderful history of blacks in TV and how they were represented.
There is a good debunking of “diversity” in higher education, a wonderful critique of black history as it is generally taught (a depressing litany of helplessness, with the successes treated as flukes) and some concrete suggestions to improve it, including uplifting and fascinating stories about what ordinary folk accomplished against great odds in the half century following emancipation. Accomplishments that showed them to be unquestionably Americans, not Africans.
The first essay, “New Black Double Consciousness” sets out the main unifying theme. The double consciousness is the private/public attitude prevalent among blacks: in private, they acknowledge that the only way to rise is by their own efforts and that the obstacles are surmountable, but publicly they continue to speak doom and gloom and helplessness, so as to “keep whites on the hook”. He does his best to show that black fears of letting go of that public attitude are unfounded, and that letting go of it is necessary. I’m not the one to say whether he succeeds, but I could not agree with him more.
Another recurring theme is that ultimately, we will all partake of a single culture. He refers to the present multiculturalist metaphor of the “salad” as a “pit stop on the way to the melting pot”:
“Quite simply: any human society known to history where groups coexisted indefinitely while maintaining their distinctiveness has been one based on social subordination or caste distinction.”
Before anyone cries “cultural genocide”, let us remember that culture is not static and it flows both ways: For nearly a century America’s culture has been distinguished from that of other Anglophone white majority countries largely by the influence of its black members. I was reminded of a visiting European who, trying to put his finger on what makes Americans different, observed, “White Americans walk black.”
McWhorter takes the example of music and shows how black influences shaped much more than what we think of as jazz. He shows how impossible it is to imagine what our musical landscape might look like without these influences.
Culture can be neither imposed nor maintained by fiat, which is what multiculturalism/diversity pretends to do. We are more of a melting pot than we think and politicians and everyone else should get out of the way and let it happen. McWhorter is more optimistic than I that this will ever happen. I hope I am wrong and that one day it will be, “On Martin Luther King Day, we’re all black.”
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