The last time I saw my father he was pulling away from the curb in front of my home in suburban New York City, where he’d spent the weekend visiting his two toddler grandchildren and taking in a Yankees game with his only son. I asked him to call me when he got back to Buffalo, the city where I was raised, and where he still lived with my older sister and her two daughters. I don’t remember if he ever did, but a few days later my sister would phone to tell me that she had found him slumped over in his recliner when she arrived home from work one evening. Fourteen years after Mom had died, Dad was gone, too.
I have no recollection of my father ever living with my mother, or even much liking her. They married in 1964, had three children by 1972 (I was born in 1971), and would be divorced by the time Jimmy Carter took office. After the split they went out of their way to avoid speaking to one another, often using us children to communicate. Tell your mother this, or tell you father that, were common requests growing up as we shuttled back and forth between residences. But while their dislike of one another was palpable to us kids, it never seemed to interfere with our relationships with them. In fact, one of the few things they seemed to agree on was that the other was a good parent.
My sisters and I lived with our mother, but we had almost unlimited access to Dad, who took full advantage of his visiting privileges. The anthropologist Margaret Mead said that the ultimate test of any culture is whether it can successfully socialize men to willingly nurture their children. “Every known human society rests firmly on the learned nurturing behavior of men,” she wrote. “Each new generation of young males learn the appropriate nurturing behavior and superimpose upon their biologically given maleness this learned parental role.”1 I don’t know if my parents ever read Mead, but they certainly shared that sentiment.
Until the day he died my father was a constant presence in the lives of his children. Growing up, my sisters and I saw him Tuesdays, Thursdays, weekends, and holidays. My relationship with him was an especially close one that both he and my mother were keen to maintain. He checked my homework, helped me with my paper route, and spent hours at my side constructing and reconstructing my elaborate model train sets. My father and I were sports nuts. He taught me to hit, pitch, shoot, and tackle. He coached my Little League baseball teams. He had me on ice skates as soon as I could walk. We attended countless local college basketball games together, were Buffalo Bills season ticket holders, and regularly drove to Toronto to see the Yankees play the Blue Jays. None of this is especially remarkable fatherly behavior, of course, unless the father happens to be black. Fathers who live apart from their offspring are less likely to spend time with them, or contribute financially to their upbringing. My father distinguished himself by being there for us. And his behavior would become even more exceptional, statistically speaking, over time.
In 1965, when he was assistant secretary of labor for President Lyndon Johnson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was already warning that the black family was in a state of crisis. Although nine in ten children in America lived with their biological father in 1960, some one in four black kids did not. By 2011 33 percent of children in the United States would be living with their mothers, but not their fathers. Among blacks the number would climb to 64 percent, or nearly two in three.
“Though income is the primary predictor, the lack of live-in fathers also is overwhelmingly a black problem, regardless of poverty status,” reported the Washington Times in 2012, citing census data. “Among blacks, nearly 5 million children, or 54 percent, live with only their mother.” Just 12 percent of poor black households have two parents present, compared with 41 percent of poor Hispanic families and 32 percent of impoverished white families. “In all but 11 states, most black children do not live with both parents. In every state, 7 in 10 white children do.”2
Divorce helped to drive these numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the 1980s unwed parenthood was largely to blame. Today, more than 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. Only 16 percent of black households are married couples with children, the lowest of any racial group in the United States, while nearly 20 percent are female-headed with children, which is the highest of any group. Like most blacks, my parents knew (if only from the experience of friends and family) all about the strong links between broken homes and bad outcomes. They knew that the likelihood of drug abuse, criminal behavior, teen pregnancy, and dropping out of school increased dramatically when fathers weren’t around. And though they couldn’t save their marriage, my parents were resolved to save their kids. What this meant in practice was that they tried, with mixed results, to minimize the impact of America’s black subculture on their children.
For her part, my mother turned to the church. She was born in Alabama in 1938 and raised Baptist, but became a Jehovah’s Witness at the urging of an older sister in the mid-1970s. My mother, my sisters, and I attended services three times a week, and the congregation was integrated but mostly black. That included most of the church elders—married men who held down jobs, provided for their families, didn’t smoke or curse, spoke standard English, dressed in suits and ties, and took fatherhood seriously. My mother wanted them to serve as role models for me, and they did, even long after I left the religion voluntarily in my teens. In addition, most of my extended family in Buffalo were members of the church. The aunt who introduced my mother to the religion had adult children who were also Witnesses. Two of her sons were church elders with kids my age; a daughter was married to an elder and they, too, had children being raised in the faith. It was a large, extremely close clan, and the adults were counting on the religion to provide not only spiritual guidance for the children but also something of a refuge from a larger black culture that seemed to be rapidly coarsening.
My father, who was never involved with the religion, thought it most important that his children be educated. He was born in Florida in 1941, but in the 1950s his family move to Newburgh, New York, where he attended high school. He was an outstanding athlete, went to college on a football scholarship, and played professional football in Canada in the 1960s. When his playing days were through he returned to school and obtained a master’s degree in social work. I played my share of sports as a kid and he was always there to cheer me on, but Dad was adamant that schoolwork come first.
A year after I was born my parents left a predominantly black neighborhood and purchased a home hard by the University at Buffalo, my father’s alma mater. University Heights, as the neighborhood was known, was still predominantly white in the 1970s and 1980s—our nonwhite neighbors were mainly foreigners who attended the college or taught there—but black families like ours were starting to move in. Years later I asked my father why he and my mother had quit the black side of town. He told me that they didn’t like what blacks were doing to their own communities. He mentioned the crime, the abandoned lots, the graffiti, the litter, the unkempt homes. But his main concern, he said, were the “knuckleheads” and “thugs” whom he wanted his children far away from. He understood that some families didn’t have the means to leave, and he didn’t begrudge those who could move, but stayed anyway. But he wasn’t taking any chances with his kids.
My father spent most of his professional life working at a local psychiatric hospital run by the state. But he always had other jobs on the side, and they typically kept him in close contact with Buffalo’s black community. He ran a home for troubled boys when he got out of graduate school. Later he ran an after-school tutoring program for low-income kids in a depressed section of town. For a few years he even owned a bar and restaurant in a black neighborhood, and was able to provide some economic activity and jobs in the community. But when it came to himself and his family, he didn’t want to tempt fate. We lived around whites.
Of course, many of our friends and most of our extended family lived in the black sections of town. Growing up, my best buddy, Trevor, lived on the same street that we had before moving to University Heights. Like my family, Trevor’s was middle class. Like me, Trevor had a mother who was a Jehovah’s Witness and a father who wasn’t. His parents were married; he and his younger sister had a good relationship with their dad; and Trevor was a solid student who excelled in math and science. Buffalo had two selective public high schools that used entrance exams. Trevor attended one of them and his sister attended the other.
But Trevor’s neighborhood ultimately got the better of him. Over time, he was taken in by the knuckleheads and thugs. School became less attractive to him than running the streets. He drank and smoked weed. His language and attitude changed. Always a little quiet, he became sullen and much more withdrawn. He listened to gangsta rappers like the Geto Boys and Ice-T. Girls became “bitches.” He got into fights. He asked me why I hung out with “white boys.” We would cross paths from time to time as teenagers, but by the end of high school I hardly knew Trevor anymore. We lived in different worlds. He kept company with a crowd that I consciously avoided.
At the time, Trevor’s “white boys” comment stung. I did have a number of white friends on account of the schools I attended. So long as we could afford it, my father sent me to private institutions, where black students were scarce. I went to public schools in seventh, eighth, eleventh, and twelfth grades, but I wound up in honors classes where the vast majority of kids were white. My two sisters, to my father’s chagrin, opted for the neighborhood public schools. Nor did they take to the church, which distressed my mom. Both of them fell in with the wrong crowd, willingly. Indeed, they largely rejected the middle-class values that our parents labored to instill in us. And notwithstanding the geographic distance, soon they were sliding into Trevor’s world. We lived under the same roof, but I spoke, dressed, and generally behaved in ways that were not only different from my siblings but associated in their minds with “acting white.” The teasing was good-natured for the most part, and I didn’t let it get to me, but it was constant throughout my adolescence. It came from friends and family, from children and adults, from fellow congregants in the church, and on one occasion from a black public-high-school teacher who mocked my standard English in front of the entire class after I’d answered a question.
I very much enjoyed school. I was outgoing, athletic, made friends easily. But it wasn’t just the social life that attracted me. I also liked learning. I liked books. I was curious about the world. I wanted to be smart, not because I associated it with being white but because I associated it with my father. Dad was smart, and I wanted to be like Dad. I didn’t avoid black friendships, but most of the people I came across who shared my sensibilities, particularly about education, were white. There were other studious black kids around, but not many, and there seemed to be fewer as I got older. The reality was that if you were a bookish black kid who placed shared sensibilities above shared skin color, you probably had a lot of white friends.
By contrast, the Trevors were everywhere. I was related to them, attended school with them, worshipped with them. These were black kids from good families who nevertheless fell victim to social pathologies: crime, drugs, teen pregnancies, and a tragically warped sense of what it means to be black. Some were ghetto kids from broken homes with the odds stacked against them. But a surprising number were middle-class children from intact families who chose to reject middle-class values. They were not destined for Buffalo’s mean streets. They had options and they knew better. Yet the worst aspects of black culture seemed to find them, win them over, and sometimes destroy their lives. My black peers were getting pregnant and fathering children. My cousins were compiling criminal records and doing drugs. My parents did what they could, but in the end neither the church nor University Heights proved impenetrable. By the time I graduated from high school my older sister was a single mom. By the time I graduated from college my younger sister was dead from a drug overdose. A short time later Trevor would also be dead, and his sister would also be a single mother.
The kind of ribbing that I experienced as a child would follow me into adulthood, where my older sister’s children would take to deriding my diction. “Why you talk white, Uncle Jason?” my niece, all of nine years old at the time, once asked me during a visit. Turning to her friend, she continued, “Don’t my uncle sound white? Why he trying to sound so smart?” They shared a chuckle at my expense, and I was reminded of how early these self-defeating attitudes take hold. Here were a couple of black third graders already linking speech patterns to race and intelligence. Moreover, they had determined that “sounding white” was something to be mocked in other blacks and avoided in their own speech.
The findings of academics who have researched this “acting white” phenomenon are thoroughly depressing, and demonstrate that my experiences are neither new nor atypical. Here is basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar describing his experience as a studious kid at a predominantly black Catholic school outside of Philadelphia in the 1950s:
I got there and immediately found I could read better than anyone in the school. My father’s example and my mother’s training had made that come easy; I could pick up a book, read it out loud, pronounce the words with proper inflection and actually know what they meant. When the nuns found this out they paid me a lot of attention, once even asking me, a fourth grader, to read to the seventh grade. When the kids found this out I became a target . . .
It was my first time away from home, my first experience in an all-black situation, and I found myself being punished for doing everything I’d ever been taught was right. I got all A’s and was hated for it; I spoke correctly and was called a punk. I had to learn a new language simply to be able to deal with the threats. I had good manners and was a good little boy and paid for it with my hide.3
In the late 1990s the black residents of Shaker Heights, Ohio, an affluent Cleveland suburb, invited John Ogbu, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, to examine the black-white academic achievement gap in their community. Roughly a third of the town’s residents were black, and the school district was divided equally along racial lines. Yet the black kids trailed far behind whites in test scores, grade-point averages, placement in high-level classes, and college attendance. Black students were receiving 80 percent of the Ds and Fs.
Nationwide, the racial gap in education is well documented. Black kids are overrepresented among high-school dropouts and students who are not performing at grade level. Black scores on the SAT and other standardized tests are far lower on average than those of whites. The achievement gap begins in elementary school and widens in higher grades. By the end of high school the typical black student is several years behind his white peers in reading and math. The usual explanation of this is class inequality. Blacks don’t perform on the level of whites because they come from a lower socioeconomic background and their schools have fewer resources, goes the argument. But what Ogbu found is that this problem transcends class and persists even among the children of affluent, educated black professionals.
“None of the versions of the class-inequality [argument] can explain why Black students from similar social class backgrounds, residing in the same neighborhood, and attending the same school, don’t do as well as White students,” wrote Ogbu. “Within the Black population, of course, middle-class children do better, on the average, than lower-class children, just as in the White population. However, when Blacks and Whites from similar socioeconomic backgrounds are compared, one sees that Black students at every class level perform less well in school than their White counterparts.”4
Ogbu and his team of researchers were given access to parents, teachers, principals, administrators, and students in the Shaker Heights school district, which was one of the country’s best. And he concluded that black culture, more than anything else, explained the academic achievement gap. The black kids readily admitted that they didn’t work as hard as whites, took easier classes, watched more TV, and read fewer books. “A kind of norm of minimum effort appeared to exist among Black students,” wrote Ogbu. “The students themselves recognized this and used it to explain both their academic behaviors and their low academic achievement performance.”5 Due to peer pressure, some black students “didn’t work as hard as they should and could.” Among their black friends, “it was not cool to be successful” or “to work hard or to show you’re smart.” One female student said that some black students believed “it was cute to be dumb.” Asked why, “she said it was because they couldn’t do well and that they didn’t want anyone else to do well.”6
Ogbu found that black high-school students “avoided certain attitudes, standard English, and some behaviors because they considered them White. They feared that adopting White ways would be detrimental to their collective racial identity and solidarity. Unfortunately, some of the attitudes labeled ‘White’ and avoided by the students were those that enhanced school success.” The behaviors and attitudes to be avoided included, for example, enrolling in honors and advanced-placement classes, striving for high grades, talking properly, hanging around too many white students, and participating in extracurricular activities that were populated by whites.
“What amazed me is that these kids who come from homes of doctors and lawyers are not thinking like their parents; they don’t know how their parents made it,” Ogbu told the New York Times in 2002. “They are looking at rappers in ghettos as their role models, they are looking at entertainers. The parents work two jobs, three jobs, to give their children everything, but they are not guiding their children.”7
Indeed, Ogbu found that it wasn’t just the black kids who were academically disengaged. Few black parents were members of the PTO. Participation in early-elementary-school programs designed primarily for black children was spurned by black families. And white parents tended to have higher academic expectations for their kids. “From school personnel reports of school authorities, interviews with students, discussions with parents themselves, and our observations, we can confidently conclude that Black parents in Shaker Heights did not participate actively in school organizations and in school events and programs designed to enhance their children’s academic engagement and achievement,” he wrote.8
But in at least one important respect, Ogbu faulted the school system itself for the achievement gap. It turned out that teachers were passing students who did not perform at grade level. The practice was widespread, particularly in kindergarten through eighth grade, and well known among students. And the teachers who were setting lower standards for black kids had “good intentions,” he reported. But it had the effect of leading some black kids to believe that they were doing better in school than they really were. Other kids simply didn’t try as hard as they would have otherwise. When Ogbu asked students why their grades were poor, “they would say that they did not take their schoolwork seriously because they knew they were going to be passed into the ninth grade anyway.” Ogbu’s team of researchers also noted that in classes where most of the kids were black, teachers expected less of the students in terms of homework, even going so far as to de-emphasize its importance. Obviously, school officials aren’t responsible for the poor attitudes and lack of effort among black kids, but ignoring or indulging this isn’t going to help close the learning gap.
Today’s civil rights leaders encourage blacks to see themselves as victims. The overriding message from the NAACP, the National Urban League, and most black politicians is that white racism explains black pathology. Ogbu’s research shows that this message is not lost on black youth. “Black students chose well-educated and successful professional Blacks in Shaker Heights and elsewhere in the nation as role models,” he noted. “However, the role models were admired because of their leadership in the ‘collective struggle’ against White oppression or in the civil rights movement rather than because of their academic and professional success or other attributes that made them successful in the corporate economy or wider societal institutions.”9
There was a time when black leaders understood the primacy of black self-development. They fought hard for equal opportunity, but knew that blacks have to be culturally prepared to take advantage of those opportunities when they arrive. “We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too,” Martin Luther King Jr. once told a congregation. “We can’t keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.” Today we have people trying to help blacks by making excuses for them. Thus, the achievement gap is not the product of a black subculture that rejects attitudes and behaviors conducive to academic success; rather, it results from “racist” standardized tests or “Eurocentric” teaching styles. Multiculturalists like Geneva Gay, a professor of education at the University of Washington–Seattle, tell us that black kids are underperforming in public schools because of how they’re being taught.
“Standards of ‘goodness’ in teaching and learning are culturally determined and are not the same for all ethnic groups,” she wrote.
The structures, assumptions, substance, and operations of conventional educational enterprises are European American cultural icons. A case in point is the protocols of attentiveness and the emphasis placed on them in classrooms. Students are expected to pay close attention to teachers for a prolonged, largely uninterrupted length of time. Specific signs and signals have evolved that are associated with appropriate attentive behaviors. These include nonverbal communicative cues, such as gaze, eye contact, and body posture. When they are not exhibited . . . students are [unfairly] judged to be uninvolved, distracted, having short attention spans, and/or engaged in off-task behaviors.
Gay said that if the U.S. school system would do a better job of accommodating the “cultural orientations, values and performance styles of ethnically different students” instead of “imposing cultural hegemony,” then black kids would “feel less compelled to sabotage or camouflage their academic achievement to avoid compromising their cultural and ethnic integrity.”10 In other words, black kids are being asked to sit still in class, pay attention, follow rules, and complete homework assignments—all of which is a huge imposition on them, if not a racist expectation.
One major problem with this theory is that it can’t explain the performance of other nonwhite students, including black immigrants, who readily adjust to the pedagogic methods of U.S. schools and go on to outperform black Americans. Even black immigrants for whom English is a second language have managed to excel in U.S. schools. When public-school officials in Seattle (which is home to a significant number of African foreign nationals) broke down test scores by specific home language, they found that “African-American students whose primary language is English perform significantly worse in math and reading than black students who speak another language at home—typically immigrants or refugees.” Just 36 percent of black students who speak English at home passed their grade’s math exam, compared to 47 percent of Somali-speaking students. In reading, 56 percent of black students who speak English passed, while 67 percent of Somali-speaking students passed. And kids from Ethiopia and Eritrea scored even higher than the Somali students.11 A 2007 study published in the American Journal of Education found that although immigrants were just 13 percent of the U.S. population, they accounted for more than a quarter of the black students at the nation’s twenty-eight most selective colleges and universities. If “Eurocentric” teaching methods, rather than cultural values, explain poor academic outcomes among black natives, how to explain the relative success of black immigrants from backgrounds much more foreign than those of their U.S. counterparts?
Another nonwhite group that has thrived academically despite supposedly biased teaching methods is Asians. More than half of the 14,400 students enrolled in New York City’s eight specialized high schools in 2012 were Asian, even though Asians make up just 14 percent of the city’s public-school students. To appreciate their dominance, consider the racial makeup of the city’s three most selective public schools—Stuyvesant High School, the Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Technical High School—all of which require an admissions test. In 2013 Stuyvesant, which is 70 percent Asian, offered admission to 9 black students, 177 white students, and 620 students who identified as Asian. The breakdown at Bronx Science was 25 blacks, 239 whites, and 489 Asians. At Brooklyn Tech, the numbers were 110, 451, and 960, respectively.12
What’s remarkable about the racial differences is that while most of the black and white kids at these schools come from middle-class and affluent families, many of the Asians are immigrants, or the children of immigrants from low-income households where English isn’t the first language spoken or in some cases isn’t even spoken at all. When WNYC, the local NPR affiliate in New York, looked at 2012 admissions data for these selective schools, it found that a disproportionate number of the students lived in an Asian immigrant community in Brooklyn. “An analysis by WNYC found more than 300 students from three zip codes in the vicinity got into the city’s specialized high schools last year,” the radio station reported.
Those three zip codes include parts of Sunset Park, Borough Park and Dyker Heights. They were among the 20 zip codes with the most acceptances to the elite high schools. Yet, the average incomes in those three zip codes are low enough for a family of four to qualify for free lunch (they range from about $35,000-$40,000 a year). That’s striking because most of the other admissions to the elite schools came from middle to upper class neighborhoods.
The report went on to explain how diligently the families prepare for these admissions tests. It turns out that the most popular weekend activity for middle-school students is test preparation. While the parents work six or seven days a week in menial, labor-intensive jobs, the children, beginning in sixth grade or earlier, are preparing for high-school entrance exams. “Even the lowest paid immigrants scrape up enough money for tutoring because those high schools are seen as the ticket to a better life.”13 The parents push the children to do well academically, and the students in turn encourage one another. The culture places a high value on education, and the results speak for themselves. So while multiculturalists are busy complaining about teaching methods and civil rights leaders are busy complaining about standardized tests, the Asian kids are busy studying.
Education is not the only area where an oppositional black mindset has been detrimental to social and economic progress. Black cultural attitudes toward work, authority, dress, sex, and violence have also proven counterproductive, inhibiting the development of the kind of human capital that has lead to socioeconomic advancement for other groups. But it’s hard to see how blacks will improve their lot without changing their attitudes toward school. A culture that takes pride in ignorance and mocks learnedness has a dim future. And those who attempt to make excuses for black social pathology rather than condemning these behaviors in no uncertain terms are part of the problem. “The middle-class values by which we [middle-class blacks] were raised—the work ethic, the importance of education, the value of property ownership, of respectability, of ‘getting ahead,’ of stable family life, of initiative, of self-reliance, et cetera—are, in themselves, raceless and even assimilationist,” wrote race scholar Shelby Steele. “But the particular pattern of racial identification that emerged in the sixties and that still prevails today urges middle-class blacks (and all blacks) in the opposite direction. This pattern asks us to see ourselves as an embattled minority.”14
Black culture today not only condones delinquency and thuggery but celebrates it to the point where black youths have adopted jail fashion in the form of baggy, low-slung pants and oversize T-shirts. Hip-hop music immortalizes drug dealers and murderers. On a 2013 album Jay-Z, one of the country’s richest and most popular rappers, referenced one Wayne Perry in a song. Perry was a hit man in the 1980s for one of Washington, D.C.’s most notorious drug lords. He pleaded guilty in 1994 to five murders, and received five consecutive life sentences. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2010, President Barack Obama expressed his affinity for rappers like Jay-Z and Lil Wayne, whose lyrics often elevate misogyny, drug dealing, and gun violence. At the time of the president’s interview, Lil Wayne was imprisoned on gun and drug charges.
Rappers have long expressed pride in spreading degeneracy among black youths. “You walk into a fourth or fifth grade black school today,” Chuck D of Public Enemy told the Village Voice in 1991, “I’m telling you, you’re finding chaos right now, ’cause rappers came in the game and threw that confusing element in it, and kids is like, Yo, fuck this.”15 Meanwhile, liberal sages are preoccupied with “contextualizing” this cultural rot. Cornel West describes rap as “primarily the musical expression of the paradoxical cry of desperation and celebration of the black underclass and poor working class, a cry that openly acknowledges and confronts the wave of personal coldheartedness, criminal cruelty and existential hopelessness in the black ghettos.”16 Michael Eric Dyson, the sociologist and television commentator who credits rappers with “refining the art of oral communication,” says that “before we discard the genre, we should understand that gangsta rap often reaches higher than its ugliest, lowest common denominator. Misogyny, violence, materialism, and sexual transgression are not its exclusive domain. At its best, this music draws attention to complex dimensions of ghetto life ignored by many Americans.”17 Psychiatrists James Comer and Alvin Poussaint tell parents that the nonstop profanity used by black kids today is nothing to get worked up over. “Profanity is profanity, period, and not part of the black language style. On the other hand, you should not let words like fuck, shit, ass, and motherfucker cause you to have seizures, see red, or run for the Bible,” the authors explain. “Today the use of ‘motherfucker’ has so changed that some young blacks use it as a term of endearment and respect. The terms ‘shit,’ ‘bitch,’ and ‘nigger’ also serve as both epithets and expressions of endearment within sections of the black community.”18
Black intellectuals, it seems, are much more interested in attacking those who are critical of these black cultural expressions. When black officials in Louisiana and Georgia moved to pass indecency laws aimed at the proliferation of youths who refused to cover their backsides in public, Dyson criticized not the kids or the culture but the proposals, telling the New York Times that proponents had “bought the myth that sagging pants represents an offensive lifestyle which leads to destructive behavior.” And Benjamin Chavis, the former head of the NAACP, vowed to challenge the ordinances in court. “I think to criminalize how a person wears their clothing is more offensive than what the remedy is trying to do,” said Chavis.19
In 2004 the comedian Bill Cosby was the featured speaker at an NAACP awards ceremony commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Cosby used the occasion to offer a stinging critique of contemporary black culture. He said that blacks today are squandering the gains of the civil rights movement, and white racism is not to blame. “We, as black folks, have to do a better job,” he stated. “We have to start holding each other to a higher standard.” Today in our cities, he said,
we have 50 percent [school] dropout [rates] in our neighborhoods. We have . . . men in prison. No longer is a person embarrassed because [she is] pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father.
Here are some other excerpts from Cosby’s address:
People putting their clothes on backwards—isn’t that a sign of something going on wrong? Aren’t you paying attention? People with their hats on backwards, pants down around the crack . . .
Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t land a plane with “Why you ain’t . . . ” You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they’re moving ahead on this . . . these people are fighting hard to be ignorant.
Five or six different children—same woman, eight, ten different husbands or whatever. Pretty soon you’re going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to . . .
What the hell good is Brown v. Board of Education if nobody wants it?20
Cosby received a standing ovation from the audience that evening, but the black intelligentsia wasn’t so kind. Dyson took him to task for “elitist viewpoints” that overemphasized personal responsibility and “reinforce[d] suspicions about black humanity.”21 The playwright August Wilson said he was “a billionaire attacking poor people for being poor. Bill Cosby is a clown. What do you expect?” Theodore Shaw, then head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said the speech was a “harsh attack on poor black people” that ignored “systemic” racism. Commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates agreed, noting that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow—that is, the actions of whites—was primarily responsible for black behavior today, and that “Cosby’s argument—that much of what haunts young black men originates in post-segregation black culture—doesn’t square with history.”22
Actually, it does. In Philadelphia circa 1880, 75 percent of black families and 73 percent of white families were comprised of two parents and children. In Philadelphia circa 2007, “married-couple families account for only 34 percent of African American family households, while white married-couple families account for 68 percent of white family households,” according to the Urban League of Philadelphia. Was there less racism in America, structural or otherwise, fifteen years after the end of the Civil War than there was a year before Barack Obama was elected president? In 1847 Philadelphia—that is, prior to the end of slavery—historians report, two-parent families were more common among ex-slaves than freeborn blacks. And Philadelphia was no outlier. Nationwide, data from every census taken between 1890 and 1940 show the black marriage rate exceeding the white rate. Liberals want to blame the “legacy” of slavery and racism for the breakdown of the black family and subsequent social pathologies. But the empirical data support Bill Cosby.
There is a much stronger case to be made that efforts to help blacks have had more pernicious and lasting effects on black attitudes and habits than either slavery or segregation. Social welfare programs that were initiated or greatly expanded during the 1960s resulted in the government effectively displacing black fathers as breadwinners, and made work less attractive. Even before Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty began in earnest, New York and other states had already been expanding their social welfare programs. And despite the best intentions, the results were not encouraging.
“The number of abandoned families had grown enormously in the 1960s,” explained Harvard social scientist Nathan Glazer.
More liberal welfare eligibility and benefits were one factor that had encouraged this increase. More generally, the constraints that traditionally kept families together had weakened. In some groups they may not have been strong to begin with. Our efforts to soften the harsh consequences of family breakup spoke well of our compassion and concern, but these efforts also made it easier for fathers to abandon their families or mothers to disengage from their husbands.23
Moreover, these efforts were taking place during a period of civil rights gains and declining anti-black bias, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan explained to an interviewer in 1967:
In the South . . . there were a great many outcomes—situations, customs, rules—which were inimical to Negro rights, which violated Negro rights and which were willed outcomes. Intended, planned, desired outcomes. And it was, therefore, possible to seek out those individuals who were willing the outcomes and to coerce them to cease to do so.
Now, you come to New York City, with its incomparable expenditures on education; and you find that, in the twelfth grade, Negro students are performing at the sixth grade level in mathematics. Find me the man who wills that outcome. Find the legislator who has held back money, the teacher who’s held back his skills, the school superintendent who’s deliberately discriminating, the curriculum supervisor who puts the wrong books in, the architect who builds the bad schools. He isn’t there!24
Ideally, welfare dependency should be a passing phase, and for most people it is. But for too many black families it has become the norm, and even those who escape it often return. The Economist magazine, citing a 2011 Chicago Federal Reserve study, noted that “roughly 60% of black Americans whose parents had an above-average income fell below the average as adults. The figure for whites was 36%.”25 An earlier Pew study found that some 45 percent of blacks (versus 15 percent of whites) who were born into the middle class in the 1960s had slid into poverty or near-poverty. Since it is unlikely that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow are hopscotching generations, perhaps something else is to blame. By retarding or otherwise interfering with black self-development, government programs have tended to do more harm than good. And black elites who choose to focus on the behavior of whites are encouraging these youngsters to do the same, and thus perpetuating the problem.
A sad irony of the black cultural obsession with avoiding white behavior is that the habits and attitudes associated with ghetto life today can be traced not to Mother Africa but to Europeans who immigrated to the American South. From 1790 until the Civil War, approximately half of the white population of the South “was of Irish, Scottish, or Welsh extraction, and about half of the remainder had originated in the western and northern English uplands,” according to Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture. These immigrants brought their Old World habits and patterns to America and passed them along to the people who lived around them, which included most black people in America. Social critics of the period, including Frederick Law Olmstead and Alexis de Tocqueville, contrasted the behavior of these immigrants with those from other regions of Europe who settled in the northern United States. So have modern-day scholars of nineteenth-century Southern culture, like McWhiney, Forrest McDonald, and David Hackett Fischer. And what’s fascinating about their descriptions is how much they resemble black ghetto culture today. In the opening essay of his 2005 book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell neatly summarized some of these findings:
The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. This oratorical style carried over into the political oratory of the region in both the Jim Crow era and the civil rights era, and has continued on into our own times among black politicians, preachers, and activists.26
Most whites have of course abandoned this behavior, and have risen socioeconomically as a result. How ironic that so many blacks cling to these practices in an effort to avoid “acting white.” And how tragic that so many liberals choose to put an intellectual gloss on black cultural traits that deserve disdain. The civil rights movement, properly understood, was about equal opportunity. But a group must be culturally equipped to seize it. Blacks today on balance remain ill equipped, and the problem isn’t white people.