Black Self-Making

An "aria" on free will and community

This excerpt from my latest conversation with John is short but, I think, pretty sweet. People often dig into their own ideological positions, whether they be left or right. This entrenchment can prevent us from listening to views from the other side that deserve a fair hearing. But it can also blind us to the ways that shared, unspoken assumptions quietly determine the parameters of the argument.

In this part of the conversation, I try to give voice to one of those unspoken assumptions: The idea that black people in America somehow lack free will and self-determination. The left and the right have different explanations for this supposed state of affairs, but they amount to the same assumption. This assumption is not only mistaken, it’s profoundly damaging. I explain why below.

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GLENN LOURY: I'm trying to make an analogy between the assumption that historical circumstance and oppression and suffering have precluded applying the presumption of free will to the victims of American racism and the assumption that partially genetically influenced expressions of intellectual ability, as measured by test scores, preclude African Americans from performing in a college classroom or avoiding some social dysfunction like criminal behavior or something like that.

The predeterminism element of these arguments. One argument comes from the left. It says history has dealt blacks a bad hand and we have been oppressed and we have been beaten and abused. What can you expect but that you would see pathological behavior? It's fixed by the historical inheritance. The wealth gap is what it is because we didn't get the hand down from our parents because they didn't get the hand down from their parents. What can we do? The crime rate is what it is, the test scores and what they are, et cetera. Fixed by history. Predetermined.

And the genetic argument. It's in your genes. What can we expect? Do the best you can. We'll respect you as a human being, but we won't expect you to be doing calculus and we won't expect you to be performing at a high level. And if we see that you're not a good parent or that you break the law frequently or that you're more often involved in violence, while we regret that, we can't say that we're surprised. Because after all your genetic et cetera.

Well, those arguments have something in common with one another. And from a spiritual—not religious—point of view, from the point of view of thinking the human being—unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, we have a spirit, we have a will, we have a capacity to make ourselves. We can be self-critical. We can, notwithstanding the givens, which are our historical inheritance, whether it be genes or some kind of sociopolitical structure, nevertheless, will ourselves to be differently in the world than what has been the case. We can be better.

And I say that not just for individuals. And this is really the second point I want to make. I say for communities, the collectivity. We have a collective consciousness, a cultural orientation which we can influence with our literature, with our politics, with our public life. We can teach our children differently. We can hold up ideals they can be reflected in our journalism and in our art and in our social life. There's a better and a worse way of living. We can say to the gang bangers who are killing each other on the streets of Chicago like crazy—last weekend was a horrible weekend—we can say to them "be better."

We mean that you can live differently than what you're living. And we can hold that up as an ideal. A good black person would not live like this, would not neglect to take care of their children, would make the best out of their opportunities. Sloth is bad. Self-pity is bad. Live a life of dignity.

But if you embrace this predeterminism—whether it be a genetic or a cultural-historical predeterminism—and say all the outcomes are already fixed, you make it almost impossible for a community to marshal its moral resources on behalf of teaching its members what it means to live rightly and to live well. It's a demoralization, it's a fundamental demoralization to take these predetermined positions, it seems to me.

JOHN MCWHORTER: Glenn, that was too good. That was an aria.

Thank you.

And I'm annoyed now, because … Will you please send that to the Times? Will you please write that up? Because I'm sitting here thinking I want to write it. But then I'd be stealing it from you. You do it. That should be inviting. I hate to say that, but ...

Thank you very much, John. I appreciate the feedback.

And, audience, you should know this is not staged. That was all spontaneous. But yeah, that was good. I mean, now I don't want to talk about anything else.