John McWhorter on linguistics, welfare,� Bill Cosby, Al Sharpton, and his new book, Winning the Race.

Several years ago, John McWhorter went from being a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley to one of America’s premier authorities on black American culture and contemporary race relations. His 2000 book Losing the Race, which analyzes how black American progress has been stymied since the Civil Rights Movement by a three-pronged cultural mindset of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism, became a runaway New York Times best-seller.� Mr. McWhorter looked at other aspects of modern black American culture and race issues in his 2003 follow-up, Authentically Black.� Now a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, he returns with a new book entitled Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America, offering an even deeper examination of the state of African-Americans by examining the root causes of the problems plaguing poor black communities today, including persistent poverty, crime, drug addition, and illegitimacy.

Dutch Martin had the pleasure of interviewing John McWhorter about his new book, the lasting impact of Losing the Race, and what he foresees in terms of race relations and black American culture in the future.

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Dutch Martin: First of all, John, thanks so much for agreeing to answer a few questions for� this interview.� Before getting into your new book, Winning the Race, please tell� us briefly about your personal and professional background.

John McWhorter: I was born in Philadelphia in 1965 and had what I suppose was a classic post-Civil Rights black middle class existence. I have a BA in French, an MA in American Studies, and got my PhD in linguistics at Stanford in 1993. My first teaching job was at Cornell, and after a year I moved to UC Berkeley. In 2002, I took a year off to be a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York after I had developed a relationship with them over the previous couple of years, and in 2003 I decided to make the move permanent. So currently I am a linguist without dossier (I still do research and writing in linguistics, attend conferences, etc.) and am officially a Manhattan Institute employee.

DM:� I’d like to briefly discuss how the success of Losing the Race has changed your life.� There is no question that when the book came out in 2000, it all but turned the debate on contemporary race relations on its head.� What motivated you to write it?

JMcW:� I’m not sure Losing the Race� turned the race debate on its head, but I do get the feeling that it has played a small part in making views on race beyond hard leftist ones more acceptable in public discourse. My writing it was based on a series of chance experiences (rather than, as some suppose, me deciding to write a controversial book that would get me hired by a conservative think tank and get me on TV!). I had a hard time seeing the OJ verdict the way most educated blacks around me did, nor did I see the Million Man March as exactly progressive, especially in its exclusion of women. But then during the Ebonics controversy in late 1996, I was called upon for my view — simply because I was a black linguist at nearby Berkeley (the chance factor). When I told the media that I didn’t think Black English had anything to do with black students’ problems in school, I found much to my surprise that I was the only black linguist taking that view, and suddenly found myself sought after by the national media in a way that I never had before. What really struck me, though, was that many blacks and allied whites came to despise me for not saying that Black English needed to be used in classrooms — even though many of them a few years later told me that they basically agreed with my views. In other words, these people expected me to distort the truth when the cameras were rolling.

It was at this point that I first ran up against the leftist orthodoxy in academia, which I had never before had much reason to think about. I thought of myself as a good liberal — it was how I was raised — but I also have a hard time dealing with things not making basic sense. People were hating on me because I put logic over tribalism. It stuck with me.

In any case, still, no one would have ever heard of me again if there had not been, a year later, at Berkeley a massive outcry over the discontinuation of racial preferences. All over campus people were saying that preferences had been bringing students to campus whose low grades and test scores were the result of blue-collar incomes and underfunded schools. But it just happened that I was joint-appointed between Linguistics and Afro-American Studies, and thus had more exposure to black students in large numbers than I would have otherwise. (Again, so much was about chance — if I hadn’t had that double appointment then I wouldn’t have had such a perspective, would never have said anything, and would still be a happy linguist in California.) But from what I experienced every day, I could see that what made the black students — mostly middle-class — underperform was attitude, and that we were dealing with a cultural legacy of segregation, not just economics alone.

The empirical gulf between what I saw as the truth and what was being indignantly preached around me day after day really tore me up. It was the day that a black student said in my office that, as I recount in Losing, black students performing at the high level that mainstream admissions standards required would probably not be interested in the black community at Berkeley, that I was moved to bang out an essay on my thoughts.

Then, again just by chance, my agent — whom I had worked with when I wrote a book on the Ebonics controversy, Word on the Street that has probably sold a couple thousand copies in eight years — had a web page devoted to, usually, essays by the scientists who are the bulk of their stable. Once I wrote my essay, I pitched it to them just so that it would appear somewhere, as back then there was no way any newspaper or magazine would care about what I had to say. So they put it up, and even though this was before the internet was as entrenched as it is now, it elicited a certain response from the other scientists, and — I think this was the sequence — the New York Times then asked me for an op-ed based on it, rejected it as too right-wing, but were kind enough to pass me on to someone at the Wall Street Journal, who published the op-ed to, again, a certain response but that’s it. The hot issue at the time was the Lewinsky scandal, not race issues.

But on the basis of that, my agent asked me if I wanted to do a book-length manuscript on the subject. At first I said no — who would care what some linguist had to say about race? But I kept thinking about it and the agent kept pushing, and then there was something else fortuitous, which is that word processing makes writing physically and even mentally easier than it would have been twenty years before. And I write pretty fast. So I thought, why not? I thought it was time someone wrote about things like this, someone� who was “young” but not a kid, i.e. in their early thirties, and I thought some of the observations I had might be at least worth reading.

I also liked the idea of there being a book out there that let people know where I stood on such things, since it got a little wearying over the years that so many people of all colors had my politics written out for me just because of the color of my skin — which is no knock on them because at that time, “conservative” black perspectives were so marginal in the public conversation. There had been Shelby Steele’s magnificent book — but he was thought of as a kind of lonely “controversial” figure. Tom Sowell likes to keep things academic, and Glenn Loury’s views had already moved away from his older ones. Ward Connerly was thought of as just the devil incarnate, and in his call to get beyond race entirely, was unlikely to be embraced by people who didn’t agree with the usual leftist orthodoxy but weren’t ready to call themselves “just people” instead of black.

And in general, what I wanted to do was to address closely the convictions of that black leftist orthodoxy and show that there were other ways of looking at such things, rather than couching my views as if a right-leaning perspective were self-evident. I am still committed to persuasion over proclamation, which is why one thing I regret but could not avoid about Winning the Race is that it is longer than my preferred 280-or-so pages. There is so much argumentation that requires, I think, careful counter-argumentation, and that requires facts, points, and more facts.

DM:� Reading Losing the Race opened my eyes to ways that many blacks think that I had never been fully privy to.� It definitely gave me a better understanding as to why black students, as a whole and regardless of class, academically underperform compared to students from other ethnic and cultural backgrounds.� In particular, reading the section on anti-intellectualism brought back some vivid and painful memories for me personally of being ridiculed and ostracized for “acting white,” because I spoke correct English and took my education seriously.� What have been some of your own experiences dealing this anti-intellectual attitude from blacks?

JMcW:� Well, I describe a lot of them in Losing the Race. Basically, there is a certain sense that for black people, mental firepower is to be aimed at black issues, and that beyond that, close engagement with the scholarly is at best odd and at worst disloyal. For example, I recall an interview with a Latino Berkeley professor who was indignant that whites tended to assume that he was in the Latin-American Studies department. Well, in my experience, black people stereotype me in exactly the same way, including ones before I had any public presence and ones who today don’t know of my work. Now, it’s not as if this is universal — there are pockets in black culture where the nerd can be comfortable. But still, things like that comment about high-performing black students at Berkeley are indicative — imagine a Chinese-American student saying that, for example. It’s inconceivable.

The reasons black people often think that way are understandable — it’s a rejection of Establishment mores that took root especially in the late 1960s amidst the new oppositional “Black Power” ideology, which as I describe in Winning the Race had an influence far deeper than on hairstyles, movie plots and the new influence of artists like Amiri Baraka. And that oppositional ideology, as I have tried to stress in work after Losing the Race, took such hold not because black people are “crazy,” but because black people hurt inside after centuries of oppression. Alienation can provide a substitute identity — it can be, oddly enough, a comfort zone. But while it soothes the psychology, it hinders the sociology, so to speak. It helps hold us back.

DM:� How did people (blacks, whites, students, other academics) generally respond after Losing the Race was published, and how has your life changed over the last several years?

JMcW: Predictably, the reviews from academics and top journalists were almost all scathing. But it quickly became clear that these people were just a sliver of the black population. I immediately started getting an avalanche of mail from black people all over the country who loved the book, while the hate mails were just a trickle (and, for some reason, became even less than that after about a year and a half). It’s often thought that Losing the Race was simply condemned by “black people” and left me a “controversial” fellow all alone. But actually, the book was embraced by black people of all walks (I still get occasional letters from black men in prison who like it and have lost count of how many copies of it I have sent to prisons). Much to my surprise, it is now regularly assigned in classrooms, such that I can expect every November and April to get a bump of mails from high school and undergraduate students asking questions about it in preparation for final papers. I once got an odd message from someone at HarperCollins (who publishes the paperback version) marveling that Losing the Race somehow just “sells itself” year after year without them having to do much to publicize it. There is nothing stranger to me than when I give a talk at a university and a bunch of students come up afterwards with copies of that book — well-thumbed! — asking for me to sign it. I never expected anything like it, especially five years later.

But there it is. And I guess it has “changed my life.” Based on it, I started being asked to write for magazines and newspapers regularly, and on the basis of that I have come to be seen as a commentator on race in general rather than just black students in school. Also, the media — as well as a lot of people out there who follow race issues — seem to have also realized that I am not, for whatever it’s worth, a right-wing ideologue but just someone who tries to make some kind of sense of things and lets the chips fall where they may. As such, venues like National Public Radio seem to allow me� a place at the table, which I like, since I grew up listening to NPR and still am a huge fan.

Gradually it got to the point that I had, basically, two careers, and I find that I like it. One problem with academic work — in linguistics, for example — is that you cannot expect that any more than a hundred or so people will ever actually read anything you write in most cases, and I was always nagged a little as to how significant what I was doing was in anything but an abstract, noble sense of building on the stock of human knowledge. I have tried to get past that in linguistics by writing accessible books like The Power of Babel, but even there, only so many people will ever be interested in your little subject no matter how you couch it. But with my race work, I get to engage in commentary on real-life, urgent events.

But — for me, that alone also feels unfulfilling: there is nothing more inert than an editorial from four years (or even four months) ago, and Losing the Race is already becoming a period piece and will be only dimly comprehensible to young black people in about fifteen years. Plus, communicating in the media rarely allows you to get into detail or really represent all of the contours of an issue the way academic work does.

Moreover, my race work is always “controversial,” open to many interpretations and stirring people in their guts. That’s stimulating but exhausting. In academia, it’s about the facts, the argument, period, and even though I am “controversial” there too (my work on creoles has made me Public Enemy Number One among a certain cohort in academic linguistics, but that’s another story and about as uninteresting as my commentator one), the emotions cannot run as high, and the issues are more concrete.

So — one day not too long ago, for example, I did one of the morning tapings of News and Notes with Ed Gordon on NPR, hopped on a subway uptown and spent a few hours researching the influence of Cornish on English in the Middle Ages at Columbia University, came home and did a radio interview on whatever the race issue of the week happened to be, worked on a handout for one of the linguistics conferences I was about to attend, finished Cornel West’s Democracy Matters and outlined the review I was assigned to write for it for the New York Sun, and then later that night stayed up till three AM banging out part of a chapter of the first draft of Winning the Race. Gradually I have realized that this is, basically, “me.”

DM:� In Authentically Black, your main point is that publicly cloaking black America in a mantle of perennial “victimhood” against an “ever-present” white racism (while privately stressing initiative and education) is for many blacks a cultural “badge of honor” as well as a balm to assuage personal/cultural insecurity.� How did you come to this conclusion?

JMcW:� You could say that I came to that conclusion from endless conversations with black people who readily say things I would agree with (or Bill Cosby) but bristle when such things are said in clear language when whites can hear them. In my conversations with so many people, what I hear is a deep discomfort not with what I am saying, but in how what I am saying may be misinterpreted by people “out there.” But we have to wonder just what, in the concrete sense, we are worried about. When we see that universities’ commitment to racial preferences is now so culturally embedded, for example, that even George Bush cannot come out and criticize them when the Supreme Court is about to render a decision on the issue, or that the University of California schools, after racial preferences are barred in that state, dutifully craft a “disadvantage” metric in their admissions policy in order to address societal inequity by other means, then it is hard to perceive an ever-threatening “backlash” against blacks in that realm. Similarly, no one could get elected today proposing (Lord forbid) to abolish welfare programs entirely.

I think few people could truly identify evidence that anything Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Armstrong Williams, myself, or anyone else has said or written has led to any “backtracking” of this kind. Rather, what disturbs people is the sheer airing of any message beyond one depicting us as eternally “owed” and powerless. To them, this is just not the proper “tone” to be struck. This strikes me as evidence that we are to stress our own strength in private, but that we cannot trust the mainstream public to understand that our doing this will not mean that we need no help from the powers that be. They think that the public thinks of it as either-or: that either we are dependents or we pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, and that given a choice between the two, the bootstraps would be better. I suppose I am “controversial” in insisting that this underestimates what the public believes — or at least the part of the public that has any influence on legislation.

DM:� On a slightly different subject, I’d like to take you back to May 17, 2004� — the 50th Anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision.� As keynote speaker at a black-tie commemorative gala in Washington, DC, actor/comic/philanthropist Bill Cosby waylaid the audience and left members of the modern-day civil rights establishment in attendance reportedly “stone-faced.”� In short, Dr. Cosby excoriated poor blacks for not taking advantage of the opportunities that Brown v. Board and the legal victories of the Civil Rights Movement made possible, chastised the poor command of the English language that many ghetto youth exhibit, mocked the romanticized view that many blacks have of Africa, and took low-income blacks to task for not being responsible parents� — and he sugar-coated nary a word.� (Since then, Dr. Cosby has taken his tough-love message of personal responsibility on the road to low-income communities across the country.)� How did you react when upon hearing about Cosby’s speech?

JMcW:� I imagined that the usual suspects of the black punditocracy would assail Cosby as ignorant but that Cosby’s cuddly persona, iconic status, and unquestioned bona fides as a Real Black Man would make it hard to entirely dismiss him. I guess that came true. Cosby’s not a professional scholar, and so naturally some of what he said does not stack up to scientific evidence. And I suppose he puts across the message in grumpy fashion — but then, how effective is it when one more person says the same things with a smile, as countless people do in churches and at assorted public assemblies roughly once a day somewhere in America? To the extent that Cosby is stressing that the patient has to play a key part in learning to walk again even if the oppressor broke his legs, he is, quite simply, correct — and because of his place in the culture, is uniquely situated to get that message across.

DM:� Now on to your new book, Winning the Race.� What was the impetus in writing it?

JMcW:� Winning the Race is a response to something else that I think distorts how we are taught to see black issues. Since Losing the Race, I have realized that many thoroughly smart people think that it is “simplistic” to suppose that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Great Society legislation were enough to allow us to succeed. There is a certain take on black history since then that is thought to mean that what we need is a Second Civil Rights Revolution to fix new problems that hit blacks starting in the 1950s.

The idea is that there was a cocktail of factors that laid the ghettoes low even if legalized discrimination was abolished. Factory jobs moved to the suburbs and left uneducated blacks with nowhere to work. The black middle class moved out of the slums, and left poor blacks with no “role models.” Housing project buildings encouraged crime because they didn’t face the street and had long, dark stairwells where criminals could hide out. Highway construction dissipated blacks’ sense of “community.” Drugs “came in” and, well, what else could you expect?

If this historical analysis were correct, then indeed, black America is still owed a “debt” and will stand still until that debt is paid. But I don’t think this historical saga is correct. In Indianapolis, factory jobs stayed where they were, and the ghettoes still turned upside down. On the “exodus of the black middle class,” I am unaware of a single other group in human history where we are told that when all of them are poor, they end up shooting each other in the faces because there are no doctors and lawyers around. The housing projects were struggling but stable places until welfare laws were changed in the late sixties and created multigenerational families of people who barely knew work or fatherhood — a largely untold chapter in black history that I devote a chapter to in Winning the Race. As to drugs, heroin was a scourge in black neighborhoods long before crack — but never destroyed the fabric of the community in such a way. The difference was in a breakdown of community norms. This was partly because of that hideous new welfare legislation that transformed AFDC from a safety net (good) to a lifestyle (awful). It was also because by this time, the new mood in the sixties elevated oppositionalism over coping. The two are not the same thing.

So, Winning the Race is my attempt to get down to cases about such things. There are people, and a lot of them, who think that anything a black “conservative” says is deep-sixed by this historical analysis. I think they’re wrong — there are other facts that this “good-thinking” perspective neglects. My hope — and we’ll see if it is realized — is that we can get past the idea that disagreeing with thinkers like Michael Eric Dyson is simply a sign of ignorance or a lack of compassion.

DM:� You make a very strong case as to how the adoption of a counter-cultural, oppositional identity (cloaked in what you call “therapeutic alienation”), and the expansion of welfare precipitated the cultural downward spiral of poor blacks from the late-1960s onward.� As one who grew up in a welfare-dependent family, this subject really hits home with me.� Looking back on what welfare dependency has done to poor blacks over the years, how do you think the original supporters of open-ended welfare such as Columbia University social work professors Frances Cox Piven and Richard Cloward feel about it now?

JMcW:� I am quite aware that they are unrepentant. They are committed leftists, and as far as they are concerned, the fact that the people they brought onto the welfare rolls were no longer spending their lives working as maids is a plus, even if the movement’s goal of forcing a guaranteed income never bore fruit.

I, for one, cannot look at pre-1966 America, where indeed the typical black woman labored in drudgery till the end of her life, as a good thing. Nor, however, can I see post-1966 America, where that woman’s daughters so very often never worked steadily at all and passed that lifestyle on to their own daughters, as any better. Given widening opportunities in the 1960s, things could have been better than the way it used to be, and certainly better than the way it was after 1966.

DM:� In the final chapter of Winning the Race, you make the case for a New Black Leadership as well as a new way of thinking for black Americans.� How do you think the Jesse Jacksons, Julian Bonds and Al Sharptons of the world, as well as “icons” of radical black academia such as Eric Michael Dyson and Cornell West will receive your book (that is, if they even bother to read it)?

JMcW:� Well, you have it right there. How many people, in general, read long nonfiction books? We’re all so busy. Especially if the book is written by someone they classify as evil? And then, when it comes to high-flying superstars, they don’t need to engage people like me nattering away at the margins of their lives; they’re famous, adored, and busy. So — I once did a radio debate with Jesse Jackson and got the impression that he was only dimly familiar with my work if at all (and perhaps as such there was no friction) so no, he will not read my new book. Julian Bond once very smoothly but decisively refused to acknowledge my presence when we were on a talk show together with some other people except for when the camera was rolling — he was probably slipped something I wrote against the modern NAACP in 2001 and thinks of me as slime, so no, he will not read my book. I find it unlikely that Reverend Sharpton has much of a relationship with the printed page, and so he will not read Winning the Race and may never have heard of me. Dyson is harder to say: we met once and all was fine despite how differently we think. Maybe someone will ask him to review it. West, from what I see, is not given to engaging detractors on race issues: he is a very busy man, and is more “prophet,” as he puts it, than interested in historical analysis and the problem-solving mindset. He and I are in different businesses and so I doubt he would curl up with my book.

I am more interested in reaching people beyond that elite.

DM:� Thanks again, John, for your time, and all the best with the new book.

Originally published by Townhall.com.