The State of Black America
Nathan Glazer, in the current American Interest Magazine, laments a paradox: that Barack Obama's rise to the presidency has "coincided with the almost complete disappearance from American public life of discussion of the black condition and what public policy might do to improve it." He then mentions a litany of "black" problems: the high incarceration rate, the near total collapse of public education in the inner city, the abandonment of integration as a worhty ideal, the staggeringly high black unemployment rate, and so on. I suppose he means to cast a barb at white America: you elect a black president and think you are off the hook for the legacy of nearly four centuries of slavery, segregation, and dehumanization. In other words, Mr. Glazer is lamenting the waning of white guilt in the Obama era. This was the guilt that so often animated his academic career, that was central to his public identitiy. Without windy discussions on how "public policy" might improve black America, he feels a little obsolete--as if Obama had stolen his relavance in the world.
I thank Nathan Glazer for this piece. It is rare to find so many of the corruptions of Great Society liberalism represented so succinctly in a single article--and without the slightest irony. My own "race fatigue" stops me from marching through them all. But the elephant in the living room that Mr. Glazer (and post-60s liberalism generally) misses is this: no people in the entire history of the world have been lifted up by a public policy debate over their problems. Public policy has shown itself to be utterly impotent in overcoming the legacy of oppression. Black students did worse on the SAT in 2000 than in 1990. By almost every measure there is decline in black America after 40 years of public policy interventions. White guilt always involves white blindness. What Mr. Glazer can't allow himself to see is the futility of government interventions in the uplift of black Americans. Wherever blacks decide to compete and move ahead, they do. When they don't decide, no interventions matter.
Here is what is now starkly clear: black Americans are responsible for their own fate. They always were--even in slavery--and they always will be. Nothing will ever mitigate this--neither white racism nor white guilt. We as blacks have to find our will to compete with all others in the modern world. Public policy cannot give us this or, once we have it, take it away.
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Jul '10
Re: The State of Black America
Shelby Steele is a national treasure.
Here's my read: a lot of starry-eyed folks voted for Obama in order to exorcise their white guilt.
And, fools though they might be, they now have every right to say, "We elected the First Black President. Now you're on your own...that means you, Peggy the Moocher."
It's going to be very hard, post-Obama, for black grievance-mongers to regain any purchase with the white community.
Edited on Sep 1, 2010 at 4:11pmJun '10
Re: The State of Black America
I'm sure I remember Bill Cosby telling this story: A young drug dealer started selling (heroin?) in the black neighborhood where Cosby grew up, and a group of fathers (they still had fathers) took this guy up on the roof of an apartment building, and told him how concerned they were that he might slip and fall someday, if he didn't make himself scarce. He got the message.
Jul '10
Re: The State of Black America
Could it also reflect some amount of self selection? I mean, a huge number of self-identified black people in America are more genetically non-black (i.e. hispanic, indigenous N.A., and euro-decendnts). Could it be that such people also tend to perform less well than others with similar genetic backgrounds, and therefore skew many of the studies referred to above? As I understand it, most of these studies have no scientific rationale for categorizing by race; it is completely dependent upon self-identification. (Personally, I see no rationale for categorizing by race at all, scientific or otherwise)
Jun '10
Re: The State of Black America
"Here is what is now starkly clear: black Americans are responsible for their own fate. They always were--even in slavery--and they always will be. Nothing will ever mitigate this--neither white racism nor white guilt... Public policy cannot give us this or, once we have it, take it away." Shelby Steele
Could a "white" man say this to a "black" man?
May '10
Re: The State of Black America
Why am I not surprised that his reckoning of problems does not include the fact that, while blacks constitute roughly 13% of the U.S. population, they account for over 35% of abortions? Eugenics is alive and well, with a tip of the hat from the Democratic Party.
May '10
Re: The State of Black America
In the days of slavery the worst thing a master could do was sell off members of a family piece-by-piece. Liberal social policy has succeeded beyond the dreams of Jim Crow.
In 1920, a survey of NYC showed that 85% percent of black children lived in a nuclear family. The general census in 1960 showed that was true for 80% of black children. By 2000 that fell to just 33%. So, what happened between 1960 and 2000? Government declared "war" on poverty. Poverty won.
May '10
Re: The State of Black America
Brilliant essay, Mr. Steele. Many thanks. A quick observation...
This locomotive fueled by "white guilt" was losing steam even before Barack Obama's election. Aside from the obvious advances in race relations over the last 50 years, the changing demographics of a place like California are making the white guilt/black entitlement equation irrelevant. "White people" who have any genealogical connection to America before emancipation, or to the period of severe structural racism, are a shrinking minority in this state. The growing groups of Asians and Hispanics have their own stories to tell (and grievances too), and guilt over treatment of blacks in not in there.
The Obama presidency seems to signal that the black middle class has found traction and is taking control of it's future. The problem of persistent black poverty is better understood as a problem of poverty; the attention to race is really a distraction.
Re: The State of Black America
"I thank Nathan Glazer for this piece. It is rare to find so many of the corruptions of Great Society liberalism represented so succinctly in a single article--and without the slightest irony."
My comment is pretty simple: Those two sentences are the loveliest, and most devastating, I've come across in any essay in weeks. A gorgeous demolition.
May '10
Re: The State of Black America
Shelby mentions "the futility of government interventions in the uplift of black Americans." That seems true, certainly, but gov't interventions have been quite effective at undermining black America: subsidizing fatherless homes for four decades, for example. Wonder if we've reached the point where the most effective social policy is now to undo previous social policy. Welfare reform comes to mind: surely that was in some significant way beneficial to black families. Would rolling back food stamps, school breakfast programs, subsidized daycare, Medicaid, and the like also help to undo the dependence culture? Maybe.
So government does have a role, just not the one utopians wish it to have. And maybe Mr. Glazer's acknowledgment of previous failures is progress to that end.
Edited on Sep 1, 2010 at 5:59pmJun '10
Re: The State of Black America
Aaron Miller
Why am I not surprised that his reckoning of problems does not include the fact that, while blacks constitute roughly 13% of the U.S. population, they account for over 35% of abortions? Eugenics is alive and well, with a tip of the hat from the Democratic Party. · Sep 1 at 1:00pm
One need only to look at the placement of Planned Parenthoods in this country to realize their goals. "More children for the fit, less for the unfit," as Margaret Sanger the founder of PP said. She also said things like: "The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.... We are convinced that racial regeneration, like individual regeneration, must come 'from within.' That is, it must be autonomous, self-directive, and not imposed from without."
Her goals continue to this day in the 'organization' she started.
Jul '10
Re: The State of Black America
I agree wholeheartdely with Mr. Steele's comments. The point implied but not made explicit in his post is that while public policy cannot solve any population's problems, it can make things much, much worse.
The solutions forwarded by the enlightened public policy establishment have largely served to ameliorate dysfunctional behavior. My amateur take is that post-WWII blacks, as they began to be freed from the constraints of Jim Crow, had started to fall into a very typical "immigrant" pattern of progress. That pattern was horribly disrupted by the policies of liberal (in the best sense) whites who were desprate to "help".
That help served to escalate the rise of socially stable blacks (which emerged as thriving middle class black population) while essentially destroying the black lower classes.
The hardest thing in America may well be for a member of the trapped black underclass to fight through the web of public policy and social convention and actually succeed onj the same terms as other Americans. And we have "enlightened" liberal public plicy to thank.
Re: The State of Black America
What I truly find so devastating with Shelby's analysis is that it correctly identifies "white guilt" as one of the key reasons why the entire sick scaffolding of public policy initiatives wreak such havoc on the black family, and the black citizen.
These programs aren't about helping anyone. They're not about outcomes. They're not about change.
They're about making white people feel better about themselves. Talk about malignant narcissism! Even when white liberals are talking about black people, they're really just talking about themselves.
Aug '10
Re: The State of Black America
The rest of his article indicates that interest in, and discussion of, the "black condition" was waning for a few decades before Obama ever got elected. So the last two years are completely within trend. Why the sudden shock? Was Obama explicitly promising to jump start the race discussion? I must have missed that bullet point on his campaign web site...
Aug '10
Re: The State of Black America
"Here is what is now starkly clear: black Americans are responsible for their own fate. They always were--even in slavery--and they always will be." Even if this weren't so, isn't imperative that all, not just black, Americans live this way. How debilitating must it be to have ever ready excuse of racism to blame for all your failings, never to be forced to take the hard and sometimes quite unpleasant look at the person you see in the mirror every day. Believing you can shape your own destiny drives one to make the choices and take on the responsibilities that make that so, or at least it gives you a shot at it. Succumbing to the fatalism of racism or some other popular determinism is a sure path to failure.