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Are Hard Work and Persistence Really “White Things?”
A few days ago, NRO reported that law professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander started a firestorm by writing an opinion piece that extolled bourgeois values such as education, employment, hard work, marriage, and charity. Worse, the co-authors pointed out the fact that all cultures are not equally beneficial and constructive. Worst of all, they criticized “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”
Inevitably, the two professors were accused of racism by some on the left. Apparently, things like valuing hard work, grit, and persistence is something only white folks do. Well. I wonder what minority football, basketball, and baseball players think of that. Would they agree that they got where they are by avoiding hard work? Would they agree that grit and persistence are “white” traits?
Two of the world’s greatest living economists, Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, happen to be black. Did they succeed by avoiding hard work and education? American physician and surgeon, Charles Richard Drew (also black), developed improved techniques for storing blood. Did he do that after dropping out of school?
Isn’t claiming that only white people care about things like learning, honesty, jobs, and kindness sort of, well, racist?
Published in General
You’ve obviously never worked on a law journal.
Before I met the kids I used to babysit as a teenager, I believed that good reading habits could be nurtured by a good environment, and they probably can be, to a point. But those kids! I grew up with lots of older cousins who who started having kids when I was 4 years old: I was used to being around lots of different kids; the kids I was related to loved being read to, loved to read when they became old enough to do it, loved talking, and loved watching TV. I assumed that the entire human race was the same way, until I started babysitting.
The little girls I babysat refused to be read to. They just totally refused to sit while I read them a book. Even stranger, they outright refused to watch television: they said that it was boring. And my attempts to engage them in conversation mostly failed: when I asked the kids in my family a question, they would (and still do) usually come up with a cute or clever response, or at least a response. The little girls I babysat would just give me a perplexed look, and then they would get fresh:” You are stupid”, or “Shut up” were common responses. They were almost always very well behaved kids-energetic, but well behaved, so I didn’t take offense to their rude responses. They just seemed to have no idea what I was trying to do, or how to react to it. Their parents were wonderful people, and they were well loved and cared for, but their way of relating to people was totally different from what I was used to: they wanted physical action and play 100% of the time. No reading, no tv, and very little conversation.
They did well in school, and are successful adults, but it seems easy to believe that they probably hated school more than most people do.
My “race fatigue” has led me to a realization – in light of the fact that we just celebrated (or tolerated) Labor Day – that it (compared to say, Christmas) is an “A-list” holy-day of the progressive religion. That led me to wonder what might be the “B-list holidays. Answer: B-Labor Day or belabor day = the other 364 days of every year in America (365 on leap year), where the rest of us are endlessly, doctrinally harangued on the subject of race. It is inescapable. It has come to pervade the air we breathe, the water we drink. Pardon me while I retch.
Just to interject, your place of birth is neither luck nor “accident”, your parents, grandparents, somebody made choice to benefit their children/decedents. This idea that we “luck” into our place of birth is a fallacy that helps persist marxist thinking. No other mother and father could have given birth to me. I could not have been unlucky and been born in eritrea. These are not possible outcomes. Can we please stop harming our cause by persisting this terrible thought.